CCLCS Podcast Archive 2009
- Current Podcasts
- CCLCS Podcast Archive 2009
CCLCS Seminar Series: Matthew Ryan
Something’s Missing: John Banville’s Wary Aestheticism
Wednesday May 27
References to art and artists recur in John Banville’s writing. In structure too his novels are metafictional in that they draw attention to their own artistic texture. While Banville’s self-conscious aestheticisation of the world in the novel points to the captured evocative moment, it also plays out the failure of the ideal; its deception, its alienation from material being. In this paper I look into this wary aestheticism as it appears in The Sea. Further, I investigate it in terms that Ernst Bloch proposed for the utopian insight of literature, the “anticipatory illumination”. In The Sea we can glimpse both the liberation offered in the aesthetic and the slip towards an “ethereal and empty realm of freedom”, identified as art’s dangerous obverse. The Sea, like Banville’s other works, can be read as a cultural response to a process of social transformation – the abstraction of the social in the generalisation of the intellectual form of life – which contains its own utopian promise but which also entails particular diminutions of social being.
Matthew Ryan lectures in Comparative Literature and Cultural Studies. His publications include Imagining the Future (2006) and Demanding the Impossible (2008). He is an editor of Arena Magazine.
CCLCS Seminar Series: Chris Worth
Wednesday May 13, 2009
Future Narrative: Interactivity, Computer Games and the Authorship of Fantasy
The success and proliferation of computer games has stimulated considerable interest among narratologists because some games appear to offer player-centred direction of stories, significant narrative interactivity and multiple alternative resolutions. Fantasy RPG games in particular promise opportunities for the construction of personalised narratives by players individually and in relation to other players. How ‘readerly’ are these? What happens to the sense of an ending? Does the interactivity mediated by computer games constitute a paradigm shift in modes of narration comparable, say, to that mediated by the development of film technologies? And will the widely distributed enablement of certain kinds of facile fantasy narrative creation alter our understanding of the significance of represented fantasy?
CCLCS Seminar Series: Gloria Davies
Wednesday April 22, 2009
>Certitude and Linguistic Play in Chinese Critical Inquiry
This paper deals with the language of Chinese intellectual discourse and explores its dynamism as a discourse that is radically cosmopolitan while retaining an ancient and destiny-inspired rhetoric cum rationale. In this paper, I argue in favor of translating the Chinese term for intellectual discourse (sixiang) as “critical inquiry”, as opposed to the conventional idea of “modern Chinese thought”. The latter tends to suggest a discourse of settled ideas that is quite at odds with the agonistic nature of Chinese intellectual discourse. By understanding sixiang as critical inquiry, we are more effectively reminded that this discourse bears the legacy of its earlier incarnations in China’s war-torn and violent twentieth century. As critical inquiry, sixiang is shaped and burdened by the instrumentalization of language as a nation-building tool and a revolutionary weapon. Focusing on the work of China’s best known modern writer and critic, Lu Xun, the paper examines how an enduring anticipation of collective betterment (or national perfection) predisposes the discourse of sixiang towards certitude. In this regard, it will also consider the ways in which sixiang is enriched by linguistic play that acknowledges the contingency of beliefs and values on the words used in their articulation.
CCLCS Seminar Series: Kate Rigby
Wednesday April 8 2009
‘Come Forth Into the Light of Things’: Material Spirit and Negative Ecopoetics
In a poem from 1937 addressed to future generations, Bertold Brecht famously declared that to engage in a conversation about trees was almost a crime since it meant keeping silent about the grievous socio-political ills of the day (above all, the rise of fascism). In this paper, I argue that in our own ‘dark times’ of deepening ecosocial woes, not to talk about trees would be the greater crime. The central question that I want to address here is how literature, and in particular lyric poetry, might contribute to this pressing conversation. Recalling Adorno’s comments on poetry after Auschwitz, I propose that in the era of accelerating ecocide, to write about trees (and other non-human others) poetically is both utterly necessary and profoundly problematic. As I have argued elsewhere, the kind of ecopoetics that is called for in this context necessarily has a ‘negative’ dimension. Focussing my discussion around William Wordsworth’s strange summons in “The Tables Turned” to “come forth into the light of things”, this paper elaborates the theory of negative ecopoetics as a literary practice that is radically subversive of those dualistic habits of thought which, in severing spirit from matter, mind from body, and man from nature, have both informed, and been informed by, historical patterns of relationship among humans and other others that can now be seen as intrinsically unethical and ultimately ecocidal.
CCLCS Seminar Series: Andrew Milner
Wednesday March 4 2009
Changing the Climate: the Politics of Dystopia
This paper aims to test the adequacy of various theoretical approaches to utopian studies and science fiction studies - especially those drawn from the work of Darko Suvin, Raymond Williams and Fredric Jameson - to an understandinng of the history of Australian science-fictional dystopias. It argues that science fiction (SF) cannot readily be assimilated into either high literature (as utopia) or popular fiction (as genre) and rejects the widespread prejudice against both SF and dystopia in much contemporary academic literary and cultural criticism. It concludes that SF, whether utopian or dystopian, is as good a place as any for thought experiments about the politics of climate change, a case made with special reference to the late George Turner’s 1987 novel ‘The Sea and Summer’.
Subscribe to this feed