Research Seminars

Changing the Climate: the Politics of Dystopia

Andrew Milner

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’.

Andrew Milner is Professor and Deputy Director of the Centre. His recent publications include Re-Imagining Cultural Studies (2002), Contemporary Cultural Theory (2002) and Literature, Culture and Society (2005). His Tenses of Imagination is currently in press with Peter Lang.

Eternal Feasting in the Halls of Immortality: Western Light and Ecocide

Geoff Berry

Contemporary consumerism deploys all the conceits of traditional mythology except one: it fails to prescribe sacralization of the world. Western logocentrism organises the universe according to the three banners under which world view has always been culturally constructed – origin, kinship or taxonomic system and a techne of regeneration – but it tends to do so from within a powerfully biased anthropocentrism. While material concerns form the infrastructure of our globalising way of life (one that shares a great raft of similarities with other forms of settlement civilization), there is a paradoxical heart to this world view that it cannot colonise and so demonises instead. The masque of death hangs over a mythology in refusal of its ultimate dependence upon the organic world within which it is manifest. This shadow haunts the feasting we are institutionalised to enjoy, endless gorging on the fruits of technologically advanced agriculture and industry, hidden from the harshness of the dusty threshing floor that is this world by the glowing neon lights of the shopping mall. Death is vanquished in our halls of immortality and with it goes the key to renewed life; for we will not look into the darkness from which all appears and into which all disappears in turn. The ever-living, ever-dying god-king of intertwined light and darkness is today commodified in the latest electronic gadgetry, while outside the earth arranges its own ritual of death and new life.

Geoff Berry is a PhD student in Comparative Literature, working on a thesis tentatively entitled Under the Utopian Dominion of Light: an Ecocritical Mythography. He is editor in chief of Colloquy.

‘Come Forth Into the Light of Things’: Material Spirit and Negative Ecopoetics

Kate Rigby

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.

Kate Rigby is Associate Professor in Comparative Literature. Her publications include Out of the Shadows: Contemporary German Feminist Theory (1996), Transgressions of the Feminine (1996) and Topographies of the Sacred: The Poetics of Place in European Romanticism (2004).

Certitude and Linguistic Play in Chinese Critical Inquiry

Gloria Davies

Gloria Davies is Associate Professor in Chinese. Her publications include Voicing Concerns (2001), Globalization in the Asian Region (2004), Worrying About China: The Language of Chinese Critical Inquiry _(2007) and Profiles in Courage_ (2008).

Future Narrative: Interactivity, Computer Games and the Authorship of Fantasy

Chris Worth

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?

Chris Worth is Director of the Centre. His publications include Postmodern Conditions (1990), Discourse and Difference (1990) and Literature and Opposition (1994).

Something’s Missing: John Banville’s Wary Aestheticism

Matthew Ryan

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.