Cirrus@Austlit

'I count nine book bays. Seven shelves each. From floor to ceiling with not a bit of wall to spare. There are brimming boxes under a table which takes up much of the floor space; will I get to them? We’ll see. At least three other alcoves elsewhere in the building sprout volumes: one with discards in the recess near the entrance, and one in each of the two residency rooms – Connie called these the reference collections. Actually, make that four: there’s a trolley of books in one corner of the library itself; part of somebody’s work in progress, Rowena told me at my induct ion.'(Introduction)

'This paper examines the similarities and differences between the cultural tastes and practices of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders and non-Indigenous Australians as evidenced by the relationships between the main sample and an Indigenous sample recruited by a 2015 national survey. It does so in order to identify the respects in which Indigenous tastes are distinctive in relation to (i) cultural practices with an Indigenous reference, (ii) cultural practices with an Australian, but non-Indigenous reference and (iii) cultural practices with international associations. These questions are explored initially at an aggregate level and then more closely by probing those instances where significant differences in Indigenous/non-Indigenous cultural tastes and practices are registered across the six cultural fields encompassed by the survey: sport, television, heritage, music, literature and the visual arts. In the light of current debates regarding the politics of ‘Indigenous enumeration’ and the tendency to present Indigenous difference in the form of a deficit, we look instead at the positive significance of the specific Indigenous tastes that our findings identify. We also examine the effects of gender and level of education in differentiating Indigenous cultural tastes and practices and explore how these are related to emerging class differences among Indigenous Australians.'  (Publication abstract)

'This paper investigates Australians’ reading tastes and engagement with books and book culture. We examine data from the Australian Cultural Fields survey for evidence of a ‘reading class’ in contemporary Australia. The space of Australian reading as illustrated by multiple correspondence analysis shows demarcated spaces of reading engagement and disengagement, zones of consuming fiction and non-fiction and varying levels of involvement with book culture that map onto socio-economic variables of gender, age, level of education and occupational class. Using cluster analysis, we delineate five groups in Australia in relation to books and reading: non-readers/non-participants, restricted reading, young readers, popular readers and invested readers. These findings largely support the argument that there is an Australian reading class – invested readers – which is rich in cultural capital as it is defined in large part by level of education and occupational class status. There is also evidence of reading ‘interest groups’ – young readers and popular readers. The discrete tastes and practices of these sectioned-off cohorts suggest that cultural capital is not as strong a rationale for the involvement of these groups in books and reading as it is for the reading class.' (Publication abstract)

'In this essay, I show that J. M. Coetzee’s Elizabeth Costello is shaped fundamentally by an engagement with Joyce’s Ulysses. However, the relationship between the two does not reveal itself in the rewriting of Joyce’s ‘Penelope’ that Costello’s literary and feminist reputation relies on, but through a range of references to ‘Scylla and Charybdis’, the ninth episode of Ulysses set in the National Library of Ireland and populated exclusively by men. Elizabeth Costello alludes to ‘Scylla and Charybdis’, I argue, because its philosophical dialogue, its dramatic form, its preoccupation with creativity, its investment in the life and reputation of the writer, and its attentiveness to the materiality of writing, offer Coetzee a model for his literary-philosophical experiments of the period. Drawing on archival evidence and published sources, the essay explores the apparent contradiction between Costello’s avowed feminist reclamation of Molly Bloom and the consistent intertextual engagement with ‘Scylla and Charybdis’, positioning the question of gender centrally within Coetzee’s broader engagement with philosophy in this period.' (Publication abstract)