Cirrus@Austlit

'Most people with an interest in art and culture in Australia believe it is in deep crisis, and you’d be hard pressed to find someone who didn’t think the crisis predated the pandemic. COVID-19 has smashed every sector involved in live events and on-site attendance. But art and culture stand out as receiving little government sympathy and less support.' (Introduction)

'Reading has always been a contentious and political practice, but this is heightened in the contemporary moment both because of the way the environments in which we read are changing so radically. For Katherine Hayles reading is “a powerful technology for reconfiguring activity patterns in the brain”  [Hayles 2010, 193], a view representative of attempts to connect the new neuroscience of reading with age old practices of literary endeavour. For Sven Birkerts, however, “the Internet and the novel are opposites”  [Birkerts 2010], a view that suggests that a hierarchy of reading that locks digital readers out of higher order thinking and literary experience. Meanwhile, Anne Mangen finds that electronic reading environments “negatively affect emotional aspects of reading”  [Mangen 2016]. But these approaches tend to understand reading as something static that occurs in one space or another. However, in practice our reading is increasingly distributed. Reading can occur in multiple formats, across multiple platforms for the one text or reading experience. A novel begun in print can be read online in a born-digital format and concluded in a scanned digital format, for example. These journeys across platform require deeper investigation.

'If we think of the printed book as an interface between two orders of thinking, we need to consider how the experience of reading a digitized version of a formerly printed and bound book alters literary reception and student experience. How does the experience of reading across different technological platforms change the reader’s relationship to the content? As more and more electronic reading platforms take on the physical attributes of material reading experiences either by retaining material traces or by emulating them, we might question what experience How do the material traces left on digitised works impact the reading process for reading in literary studies? The lively discourse surrounding Google Books and the human breaches of the material into the immaterial, as the work crosses the borders of formats and interfaces, raises valuable questions about the future of the book, reading in the twenty-first century, and the long and formidable shadow that centuries of material text production casts over Google Books’ electronic utopia. This paper uses both book history and new media interface theory to consider the multitude of diverse experiences that is literary reading across different platforms in and out of the classroom and to consider whether distracted reading can be better understood as distributed reading. It considers critical infrastructure studies as a useful framework through which to think about reading in the digital age.' (Publication abstract)

'Too often, cultural leaders and policy makers want to chase the perfect metric for activities whose real worth lies in our own personal experience. The major problem facing Australian culture today is demonstrating its value - to governments, the business sector, and the public in general.

'When did culture become a number? When did the books, paintings, poems, plays, songs, films, games, art installations, clothes, and the objects that fill our daily lives become a matter of statistical measurement? When did experience become data?

'This book intervenes in an important debate about the public value of culture that has become stranded between the hard heads (where the arts are just another industry) and the soft hearts (for whom they are too precious to bear dispassionate analysis).

'It argues that our concept of value has been distorted and dismembered by political forces and methodological confusions, and this has a dire effect on the way we assess culture.  Proceeding via concrete examples, it explores the major tensions in contemporary evaluation strategies, and puts forward practical solutions to the current metric madness. 

'The time is ripe to find a better way to value our culture - by finding a better way to talk about it.'  (Publication summary)

'Douglas and Barnett discuss their experiences teaching life writings of trauma to undergraduate literature students, employing Helen Garner's Joe Cinque's Consolation as a case study. They consider the affect of trauma stories and explore the ethics of including trauma texts in the literature curriculum–texts that often confront and destabilize students' reading positions. Such texts require the deployment of literary methodologies including, but also beyond, close reading–for instance, paratextual, contextual, and theory-based readings. Life narratives of trauma offer a means for broad considerations of the social and political efficacy of Australian literature texts.' (Publication summary)