Cirrus@Austlit

'Wilson examines Auster's poem, which he considered as a lucid example of the way in which the Aboriginal population was imagined by some nineteenth-century observers to be in a state of irreversible decline. Moreover, what this poem demonstrates most strongly is the correspondence that the discourse of Aboriginal extinction has with both the colonizing process in Tasmania and the representation of Aboriginality in Tasmanian literature.' (Publication abstract)

'Moore examines W. S. Calvert's wood engravings "The Morning After the Fire" and "The Track of the Bushfire", which appeared in the Illustrated Australian News and Musical Times. She also explores how the old associations between fire and domesticity were challenged and re-fashioned by life in the bush. Finally, she demonstrates how fire offered writers from settler communities a means of considering their relations to and cultural distance from the land they had left behind, while also compelling them to re-evaluate narrative conventions that placed the hearth at the center of the house, and of the story.' (Publication summary)

'Corbett examines the concept of cartography in Do You Love Me?, a short story written by Peter Carey in 1975. She contends that the way the story uses science fiction elements is central to its suggestive exploration of Australian identity and history, especially perhaps for non-Indigenous people. She hopes to show some aspects of how extraordinarily compressed this story is and what a complex emulsion of genres is used for effect.' (Publication summary)

'True History of the Kelly Gang, a novel by Peter Carey, has been both a commercial and critical success, and its impact on Australian culture has been far greater than most literary novels. The fact that the novel has been a popular as well as critically acclaimed contemporary historical novel enables valuable examinations of the role of historical novels and the reasons why contemporary Australian novelists choose to examine and rewrite historical narratives. Here, O'Reilly offers variety of pedagogical purposes and approaches in teaching True History of the Kelly Gang in courses from first-year introductory classes to graduate seminars.' (Publication abstract)

'In the late 1970s and early 1980s, when the Australian government was striving to enhance its international standing in the arts, it chose to focus on film. Many films were produced to global acclaim. After watching Bruce Beresford's "Breaker" Morant (1980), Gillian Armstrong's My Brilliant Career (1979), or Peter Weir's Gallipoli (1981), many in academic contexts outside Australia were drawn to examine Australian writing. Since then, film has not lost its prominence among those who study Australian literature. Here, Sheckels discusses the use of Australian film in teaching Australian literature and the ways that enhance that undertaking. He explores three directions that teachers might pursue in integrating film into Australian literature courses.' (Publication abstract)

'Using The Collected Poems (1981), Schetrumpf investigates Sylvia Plath's use of lyric address and her confrontation with patriarchal oppression, post-Holocaust existence, depression, and suicide. She also examines two of the recurring symbols that lead to the primal core of her poetry. She then compare Plath's content and methods with Bruce Beaver's experiments with various forms of lyric address, confrontation with mental illness, politicized war, and postmodern violence, and experiences of aging and death in Letters to Live Poets (1969). Finally, she examines two of the encoded symbols of the many that litter Beaver's landscapes of Manly.' (Publication abstract)

'Guanglin explores Walter Benjamin's The Task of the Translator, wherein the German critic famously shifts the problem of translation against the Western mimetic tradition. Instead of a concern with the original being reproduced, Benjamin posits an event between languages. Moreover, Benjamin's Passagenwerk or Arcades Project demonstrates the mode of assembling and disassembling networked fragments. Elsewhere in Benjamin, the "cities" acquire the significance of palimpsest to be read. The Arcades Project, which would be posthumously edited and was never given a completed form, takes nineteenth-century Paris as a testing ground and site of emergence of modern techno-history. Among other things, Guanglin examines Shanghai Dancing, which serves this role in Brian Castro's writing.' (Publication summary)