Drama & Theatre Studies - News and Events

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ECPS Seminar Series: Paul Magee

10 September 2008

‘A creature in youman form’: on poetry as subjective universality

There is clearly considerable egotism involved in putting one’s poetry out in the world to be read. I begin this paper with a case in point: the ego-maniacal Russian poet Vladimir Mayakovsky, whose first book was entitled I, and whose last At the Top of My Voice. Yet if poetry is an egotistical pursuit, this is only part of the picture. For publication simultaneously involves submitting one’s words to judgement. In this paper, which draws upon Mayakovsky’s life and writings, an archive of interviews with leading contemporary Australian poets, and W.H. Auden’s famous discussion of poetic production, ‘Making, Knowing, Judging’, I suggest that the judgement to which poets submit is first and foremost their own, in the act of editing. Mayakovsky described editing as follows: ‘It is as though for the hundredth time a crown is being unsuccessfully fitted to a tooth, and finally, after the hundredth attempt, it is pressed in and falls into place’. The violence of this image, with all the violation of bodily comfort and integrity it connotes, makes clear that Mayakovsky’s egomania was bounded by a greater force, one of his own making.

The burden of this paper is to work out how our typical pictures of the poet – as a creature of the unconscious, as an egotist, as a liberated individual - might appear, once we incorporate into them the fact that art also involves ferocious self-judgement. Looked at in this light, a figure like Mayakovsky, the futurist poet of the Russian revolution (‘from the heights of skyscrapers we look down on their insignificance’), appears curiously medieval. Only there’s no God, nor even any third person beyond the poet and his reader. To the contrary, poetry’s moral drama occurs right here, in the youman form of an ego that responds to the ‘subjective universality’ of the super-ego’s absolute judgment. Other sorts of law must seem quite tame in comparison.

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Film & Television Seminar Series: Sian Mitchell

11 September 2008

A Historiography of Psychoanalytic Film in Hollywood, 1920-1960

This seminar looks at some of the films influenced by the introduction of psychoanalysis as a therapeutic practice to the United States in the early 1900s. This was a period where psychoanalysis grew in popularity and support within mass culture before undergoing a crisis within academic and professional circles. Films that will be discussed in this seminar include Carefree (Mark Sandrich, 1938), Lady in the Dark (Mitchell Leisen, 1944), Spellbound (Alfred Hitchcock, 1945), and Freud (John Huston, 1962). Elements such as the image of the analyst and the neurotic patient within these films form an exaggerated and sometimes melodramatic (mis)representation of psychoanalytic practice, however, such insistence on therapy as a narrative device has assisted in its popularisation and ongoing love/hate relationship psychoanalysis has with American cinema.

• Full details and series schedule here

Communications & Media Studies Seminar Series: Michael Walsh

15 September 2008

Musical Listening in Context: Observations and Reflections on the Practice of Musical Listening

This paper presents some preliminarily data emerging from my doctoral research concerning the social study of musical listening in contemporary spatial environments. The paper illustrates through an analysis of interview transcripts the often essential role listening to music plays in accompanying listeners throughout a variety of social situations. The paper therefore attempts to show the varied nature of musical listening and how it is divergently practiced in relation to a number of social spaces (i.e. in the home, in transit and at work). Through considering these issues, the paper seeks to demonstrate the importance of exploring musical listening and the implications this then has for our experience of musical culture throughout everyday life.

• Details and series program here

Drama & Theatre Seminar Series: Lisa Petty & Katerina Kokkinos-Kennedy

15 September 2008

Foxtrots and Air Raids: The Role of Dance within World War II and:

The Beast's Banquet: A Theatrical Take on Romance, Vampires, Tom Cruise and Pre-Nuptial Agreements

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B for BAD Cinema Screenings: Flaming Creatures and Blonde Cobra

18 September 2008

Con Verevis presents: Flaming Creatures and Blonde Cobra

(Jack Smith, 1963, USA and Ken Jacobs, 1963, USA)

In 1963 Ken Jacobs constructed Blonde Cobra, a portrait of New York underground film-maker, actor, writer, photographer and performance artist, Jack Smith, out of abandoned footage from an earlier Smith project. A ‘ruinous remake’ of the 1940s Maria Montez vehicle Cobra Woman, Blonde Cobra invented a new film idiom — a ‘moldy’ art form devoted to spontaneous gestures and manic despair. Around the same time, Smith set to work on his aesthetic manifesto, “The Perfect Filmic Appositeness of Maria Montez,” and the notorious Flaming Creatures (both 1963).

Join Constantine Verevis (Film and TV Studies, Monash University) for an introduction to, and screening of, the surrealist ethnography of these underground classics: Blonde Cobra and Flaming Creatures.

• Full details and series schedule here

Vampires, Vamps and Va Va Voom: A Critical Engagement with Paranormal Romance

A call for papers from Staff, Postgraduates, Honours Students and Undergraduates.

A two-day symposium organised by the Sìdhe Literary Collective, Monash University, 19 & 20 September 2008.

Despite the rise of academic interest in vampires in popular culture, vampire romance has been largely ignored. From Dracula (1897) to Buffy the Vampire Slayer (1997–2003), romance themes have been inextricably linked to vampire narratives and the image of the vampire more broadly. Due to the commercial success of the emerging sub-genre ‘Paranormal Romance’, there has been increasing utilisation of vampire romance and related themes in other genres (such as contemporary fiction, young adult fiction and horror). Contemporary feminist scholars have not reflected upon this recent phenomenon despite the pioneering studies of Tania Modleski (1982), Janice Radway (1987) and Linda Christian-Smith (1990). The two-day symposium is an opportunity for scholars to discuss and critically examine the impact of the Undead upon the romance genre and the burgeoning industry created in its wake.

• For more details, visit the symposium's homepage

Film & Television Seminar Series: Dr Melissa Gregg

September 25

Work on TV

Moving beyond the established benchmarks of crime, law and medicine, the past ten years has seen an expansion in the number of workplaces depicted as prime time television entertainment. Not only have these shows created new opportunities for empathy with employees at the front line of the service industry (airlines, beauty, and border security, for example) they have positioned the viewer as a knowing insider to an ever greater range of jobs beyond their own training and expertise – an extension of what John Hartley calls television’s ‘cross-demographic’ function.

From the White House to the underworld, the kitchen to the office park, work on TV has been one of the most successful of recent television genres, reaching its zenith in a suite of programs that have dramatised the art of TV production itself. Curb Your Enthusiasm, Entourage, 30 Rock, Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip and Extras all base their appeal on familiarity with the routines of the cultural industries and the vicissitudes of portfolio careers, providing fresh possibilities for TV content in the process. Coming at a time of increased union activity with the 2007 writers’ strike and its associated publicity, these programs deliberately confused insider/outsider status: viewers were invited to identify not only with the fate of creative talent but also the challenges they posed to management.

This paper suggests that on the surface these shows can be read as evidence of a new style of labour politics befitting the creative economy, where narcissistic self-representations are used to articulate and justify a devalued work ethic. Yet in a post-broadcast era, they might also be regarded as a last-ditch attempt on behalf of a vulnerable industry to gain the support of an audience with little compulsion to remain loyal to its offerings.

• Full details and series schedule here

• Drama & Theatre Seminar Series: Michael Coe
  6 October - A Mad Scenography!

• B for BAD Cinema Screenings: Mister Lonely
  9 October - Claire Perkins and Alexia Kannas present: Mister Lonely…

• Communications & Media Studies Seminar Series: Geoff Boucher
  13 October - After the Subversive Paradigm: Notes toward a Communicative Theory of Literary Discourse…

• Film & Television Seminar Series: Craig Frost
  16 October - Re-gendering the Final Girl: Eli Roth's 'Hostel' Films…

• Drama & Theatre Seminar Series: Finale
  27 October - End of semester discussion/meeting/drinks…

• Art and the Political
  Throughout 2008 - This is a series of six graduate seminars and two public lectures…

• Call for Papers: B for BAD cinema: aesthetics, politics and cultural value
  The Inaugural Centre for Film and Television Studies Conference, April 15–17, 2009…