2008 ECPS News and Events Archive
- 2009 News and Events
- 2008 News and Events
- 2007 News and Events
- Return to current ECPS news and events
Browse by month:
New Podcasts
5 February 2008
We’ve added several audio podcasts to our site. You can now subscribe to a podcast for each section/centre of ECPS for in-depth coverage of specific interest areas - or you can subscribe to the ECPS Events Podcast, which has highlights from events held by all sections of the school.
Highlights include:
- Professor Agnes Heller delivering a series of papers and lectures.
- Five papers presented by international scholars at The Greeks conference.
- Distinguished visitor Professor Jeffrey Alexander discussing Performance and Cultural Pragmatics in Social Action at the ECPS seminar.
- John Bull presenting the keynote paper at the Music, Culture and Society conference.
Visit our feeds & podcast homepage to subscribe, and listen on your iPod, MP3 player, or computer - or go directly to a specific podcast via the following links:
- ECPS Events Podcast
- Communications & Media Studies Podcast
- Drama & Theatre Studies Podcast
- Film & Television Studies Podcast
- English Podcast
Grimm: Fractured fairy tales for young and old
7-9 February 2008
Take a walk on the wild side, with an original theatre piece celebrating the quirkier side of the Grimm Fairy Tales. From the romantic to the grotesque, Grimm offers a mixed bag of delights and thrills to enrapture a young audience. If you go into the woods tonight, you’re sure of a big surprise…
Presented by Black Apple Theatre Company and the Centre for Drama & Theatre Studies. Click here for further information.
Performances: February 7th, 8th & 9th @ 7:30pm; Matinee February 9th @ 2:00pm
Venue: The Drama Theatre, Building 68 Clayton Campus
Tickets: $10, bookings via ccad1@student.monash.edu.au or 0411 987 712
Music, Culture and Society Conference
6-8 March 2008
Recordings of this conference are now available from our podcast.
There is now widespread agreement that ‘music is more than notes’, a growing recognition that music is culturally formed and serves diverse social purposes. But the social life of music is inherently paradoxical. Music both announces social change and consolidates collective memory; it both gives expression to personal identity and connects us to others. Furthermore, in modern life, music is both a vehicle for transcending the everyday and an integral part of it. It is the soundtrack to much of our existence and that soundtrack is highly technological. Musical technologies deeply impact the musical experience and the social relations that music enters into.
This conference aims to bring together scholars from fields as diverse as musicology, communications and media studies, sociology, social history, political theory, philosophy and Asian studies, to examine the paradoxical, deeply-felt and often contradictory roles that music plays in social life and culture more broadly. Presenters will address the socio-cultural role of music through diverse genres and styles – from pop to classical, experimental to conventional - and from various disciplinary and theoretical perspectives. The conference will feature an afternoon involving presentations from students pursuing postgraduate research on the socio-cultural aspects of music.
DTS Seminar Series: Will Peterson
17 March 2008
The Bloodless Head of Longinus: Political Interventions and the Decapitation of the Moriones Tradition in Marinduque
Dr Will Peterson (Monash)
This seminar presentation maps out the political interventions and competing social interests that have altered the Moriones Festival on the island of Marinduque in the Philippines over the last forty years. The three-night sinakulo or passion play and attendant events associated with the festival are known largely for the ways in which they utilise local men donning elaborate masks and wearing costumes meant to resemble Roman centurions. This talk will examine the social forces and multiple and competing political and economic interventions that have shaped and significantly modified this multi-faceted event since the 1960s, with particular attention given to the ways in which the local elite through the power of the provincial government under Governor Carmencita Reyes has used this festival to effectively shore up the country’s existing, highly stratified social and economic order.
A Welcome to Dr Janine Burke
19 March 2008
Podcast of this event now available
The School of ECPS is delighted to welcome Dr Janine Burke as a new Monash Fellow (co-located in the Centre for Women’s Studies in the School of Political and Social Inquiry). Janine is a renowned independent scholar, and author of many books of art criticism including Dear Sun: The Letters of Joy Hester and Sunday Reed (1995) and Australian Gothic: A Life of Albert Tucker (2002). Janine recently convened the successful Inside the mind of Freud Exhibition. Her fellowship work will focus on artistic collaborations and will involve exhibitions locally and internationally.
On March 19 2008 at 5.30pm, the The Dean of Arts, Professor Rae Frances, will officially welcome Janine on behalf of the Arts Faculty at an event at the MUMA Gallery. Dr Burke will give a short presentation on her fellowship plans titled “Geniuses Together: Exploring Creative Partnerships”.
Title: Geniuses Together: Exploring Creative Partnerships: a short presentation by Dr Janine Burke
Date: 19 March 2008
Time: 5.30pm
Location: MUMA Gallery, Gallery Building, Clayton Campus, Monash University.
Food and wine will be provided.
Any queries, contact:
- Dr JaneMaree Maher 9905 2949
- Dr Ron Gallagher 9905 2146
Find out more about Dr Burke’s work.
Cosmopolitan Melbourne: Cultural Diversity and Social Cohesion
28 March 2008
Recordings of this conference are now available from our podcast.
The city has become central to the ways in which contemporary society is imagined, not only in the industrialised West but in the industrialising economies of Asia. Public bodies utilise cultural activities to promote ‘civic’ identities, and the creative representation of the city to its inhabitants through public and quasi-public events provides a sense of pride in place, tradition, and belonging. Yet as Bridge and Watson have noted: ‘As cities have become more complex, more global, and more diasporic it is harder to construct cultural markers which make for a simple image of the city with which to identify’ (Bridge and Watson, 2000).
DTS Seminar Series: Ed Creely & Amanda Burrell
31 March 2008
Time, Entimement, Temporality? Experiences of the Time in Performance
Ed Creely
This paper examines critical philosophical, practical and dramatic issues to do with understanding the nature of time for an actor in performance. How is time or temporality linked to experience in performance? How should we understand the abstraction of ‘time’ and the discourses that accompany the use of concepts about time? These, among other questions, are examined in the light of the current debate about the application of time to performance phenomena.
Fear in the Academy: an Exploration of Academic Stage Fright
Amanda Burrell
This paper reports on a pilot project exploring the effectiveness of theatre training to reduce stage fright in academics. A self-selected sample of Advertising and Marketing Communication academics were given intensive theatre training by theatre scholar/practitioners. Semi–structured depth interviews which informed the training content, preceded multiple observations. Participants’ lectures were observed (with students present) prior to and after training. Additionally participants were filmed at the start and end of training. One final measure, an electronic survey, was administered six months after training. Participants’ initial felt symptoms matched the description of stage fright from the literature. Final observations showed massive and enduring improvements in entrances, vocal and physical ease and dialogical delivery style. Theatre training can be an effective method to reduce academic stage fright and increase academic confidence and effectiveness in lecture performance.
DTS Seminar Series: Jeff Hood & Felix Nobis
14 April
Blocks to the Creative Process in Developing Theatre Performance
Jeffrey Hood
Synopsis not available yet.
Working With Dinosaurs: Narrative Techniques in the Arena Spectacular
Felix Nobis
This paper examines some unique performance challenges presented to the narrator / presenter of a 21st century arena spectacular. The paper draws on the experience of narrating the premiere production of “Walking with Dinosaurs: The Live Experience” in Australia and the United States. The paper explores the liminal territory between ‘acting’ and ‘storytelling’, as well as the relationship between single performer and mass audience.
- Full Programme on the DTS website
- A recording of Felix Nobis' paper is available from the DTS Podcast
Communications & Media Studies Seminar Series: Elizabeth Burns Coleman
April 28 2008
The Protection of Traditional Cultural Expression and the Limits of Moral Arguments from Culture and Religion
Elizabeth Burns Coleman (Monash)
This paper explore a problem in moral philosophy concerning the rights of religious and cultural groups. In theory, religion and culture are often blurred. Religion may be defined as culture, and, when discussing indigenous cultures, culture may be defined in terms of religion. This creates problems when we are considering the rights of indigenous people, as within political philosophy the limits of rights of freedom of religion are different to the limits of the rights to culture. The paper will use the World Intellectual Property Organisation’s draft protocols for the protection of Traditional Cultural Expression as a means of exploring the practical implications of this problem.
- Berwick Campus, Room 901/231, 2 to 3.30 pm
- For the full schedule of the seminar series, visit our website
DTS Seminar Series: Stuart Grant
April 28 2008
Phenomenology and Performance Studies: With Particular Reference to Group Phenomenology
Stuart Grant (Monash)
An overview of group phenomenological enquiry and its potential for application in the study of performance. How the method worked in the Audience group project. Reporting from the investigations of the third year comedy class who have turned their unit into an instance of research as pedagogy.
- Full Programme on the DTS website
- A recording of Stuart Grant's paper is available from the DTS Podcast
Film & TV Seminar Series: Dianne Daley
May 1 2008
A special Apitchapong Weerasethakul screening
Tropical Malady (Sud Pralad)
A film by internationally acclaimed experimental Thai filmmaker, Apichatpong (Joe) Weerasethakul. Cannes Festival Jury Prize winner (2004), Tropical Malady at first appears to be a relatively straightforward story of the developing, and at times tentative, gay relationship between a soldier and young villager. But the film takes an abrupt, unexpected and emotionally charged change of direction into the jungle. This highly personal, feature-length, experimental narrative, characteristically pushes boundaries and has puzzled critics. From the mundane to the mythical or supernatural and in “the space between”, the film operates on many levels, especially on the senses and heart, and can’t be easily categorised...
Communications & Media Studies Symposium
May 5
Paradox and Indirect Communication
A Symposium with Peter Murphy, Markus Locker, Justin Clemens and Dimitris Vardoulakis.
Paradox is a potent form of communication—allowing us the capacity to talk about things that otherwise are practically impossible to talk about, things that otherwise would reduce us to withering silence. This seminar explores the nature of paradox as a form of meta-communication, and the role that it plays at the core of human culture—enabling human beings to pose religious, philosophical, artistic and other central questions of existence that otherwise could not be postulated or even conceived. The paper givers will consider the role of paradox in dramaturgical acts, in the religion-science dialogue, in decision-making, and in artistic representation—and will consider the kinds of strange truths and powerful cultural enigmas that can only be represented in, through and by paradoxical forms of communicative action.
Communications & Media Studies Seminar Series: Kevin Foster
May 12
The Lands St George Forgot: Visions of the North
Kevin Foster (Monash University)
This paper will examine how, in a range of travel, literary and historical texts from the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, shifting ideas about England’s ‘essential identity’ shaped responses to and representations of its industrial regions. It will explore how the North has been employed (and unemployed) to validate a range of contentions about what constitutes authentic national identity and, in the light of these postulates, in what senses it can be considered a part of England.
- Berwick Campus, Room G87, 2 to 3.30 pm
- For the full schedule of the seminar series, visit our website
DTS Seminar Series: Peter Snow
12 May 2008
God to Christian: Playing Yahweh in OT: Chronicles of the Old Testament at Malthouse 07
Peter Snow (Monash)
This paper will discuss the development of the production, especially the generation and rehearsal of performative material, and the creation of the role of Yahweh. It will propose an empirical phenomenological approach to analysing performance practice, and consider issues such as embodying the micro-details of performance and an ethics of performing relations. Performance stills and footage of the production will be shown as part of the presentation.
Peter Snow is Associate Professor in Theatre at Monash. His research interests are in performance practice, philosophies of performance and audience research. He has been a professional theatre artist for 30 years and worked on over 60 productions as a director, writer, performer and theatre maker, in Europe, Asia and Australia. Recent productions of original work include Guilt Frame (Sydney Theatre Company 08), Thought/ Action Suites (Copenhagen, Amsterdam, Brussels, Gent, Leeds 05), Four Grand Narratives (Melbourne 04), A Silent Thread (Kolkata 03), and a version of Ovid’s Metamorphoses (Dresden 02, 03). He has also written widely on theatre and performance. Recent research projects include ‘Theatre Performs Culture’, an ARC funded investigation into artist-audience relations in conjunction with Theatre Works and Playbox, Melbourne.
Communications & Media Studies Seminar Series: Kevin Foster
May 12
The Lands St George Forgot: Visions of the North
Kevin Foster (Monash University)
This paper will examine how, in a range of travel, literary and historical texts from the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, shifting ideas about England’s ‘essential identity’ shaped responses to and representations of its industrial regions. It will explore how the North has been employed (and unemployed) to validate a range of contentions about what constitutes authentic national identity and, in the light of these postulates, in what senses it can be considered a part of England.
- Berwick Campus, Room G87, 2 to 3.30 pm
- For the full schedule of the seminar series, visit our website
Film & TV Seminar Series: Adrian Martin
15 May 2008
Social Mise-en-scene: A New Idea in Film Analysis
Adrian Martin (Monash)
The idea of mise en scène has become a classic - meaning historic and traditional – tool in film analysis. Conceived as the ‘creative gesture’ par excellence, the director’s mise en scène (the positioning and moving of actors and camera in relation to an environment) has long been imlicitly or explicitly seen as a way for cinema to give ‘form to the formlessness’ of space, time, body and place. But, more recently, particularly in various parts of Europe, a new idea has emerged: the idea that the ‘pro-filmic’ reality with which cinema frequently works is itself already (as sociology has long investigated) a complex matter of cultural or social mise en scène: a series of customs, rituals and manners that set bodies in circumscribed places and behaviours. Cinema, then, would be the interleaving or collision of two kinds or levels of mise en scène: social mise en scène and artistic mise en scène. My presentation will offer examples, from fiction films by John Ford to Roy Andersson, also taking in comedy and documentary, to demonstrate this fertile new idea in cinema analysis.
Writers and Their World: Adib Khan
16 May 2008
The Business of Creativity: the Tension between Aesthetics and Commerce in Serious Fiction
Adib Khan is the author of five novels. His first novel, Seasonal Adjustments won the Christina Stead Prize for fiction and the Book of the Year in the 1994 New South Wales Premier’s Prize, and won the 1995 Commonwealth Writers’ Prize for First Book. His second novel, Solitude of Illusions was shortlisted for the Christina Stead Prize for fiction and the Ethnic Commission Award in the 1997 New South Wales Premier’s Prize, and won the 1997 Tilly Aston Braille Book of the Year Award. His other novels are The Storyteller and Homecoming. His latest work Spiral Road was listed among the twenty books for the 2008 State Library of Victoria’s summer reading program. Currently, Adib is a PhD (Creative Writing) Scholar, Centre for Postcolonial Writing.
Communications & Media Studies Seminar Series: John Potts
19 May 2008
The History of Charisma
John Potts (Macquarie University)
The term ‘charisma’ emerged in the early Christian church of the first century; it lay submerged for many centuries, with intermittent appearances; charisma was re-invented in Max Weber’s sociology in the early twentieth century; the word is widely used in contemporary western culture, in media, academic scholarship, and popular discourse. The analysis of the history of this term its invention, eclipse, re-appearance and transformation explores its shifting cultural role over two millennia.
- English Library (Clayton Campus, Menzies Building, W710), 2 to 3.30 pm
- For the full schedule of the seminar series, visit our website
The Vanya Project
19 May 2008
Read by Monash staff members and postgraduate students:
- Peter Snow
- Sue Tweg
- Fiona Gregory
- Felix Nobis
- Tamara Searle
- Craig Peade
Communications & Media Studies Seminar Series: Andy Bennett
May 26
Ageing rockers and die hard punks: When youth culture meets middle age
Andy Bennett (Griffith University)
In the study of popular music reception, ageing audiences have never been a major focus of attention. Occasional references to ageing audiences that do appear, both in academic and popular texts, often tend to cast such audiences in a negative light - as cultural misfits or overgrown teenagers. It could, however, be argued that such representations of ageing popular audiences are increasingly out of step with a world in which definitions of ageing and generational boundaries are radically shifting. Indeed, within this context popular music may be argued to take on a critical new significance as a form of cultural authority; just as music functions as a cultural beacon for youth, so, it could be argued it is used by ageing individuals in the framing of their identities and lifestyles. As such, ageing popular music audiences can be situated in the context of a late modern cultural territory where issues of age, identity and lifestyle are becoming increasingly complex.
- English Library (Clayton Campus, Menzies Building, W710), 2 to 3.30 pm
- For the full schedule of the seminar series, visit our website
DTS Seminar Series: Adam Powers, Tanya Barnes, and Maryrose Casey
26 May 2008
The Journey Towards a Director and Scenographer’s Successful Working RelationshipAdam Powers and Tanya Barnes (MA candidates)
Performing Indigenous Sovereignty: Indigenous Australian Theatre Entrepreneurs in the Nineteenth CenturyDr Maryrose Casey (Monash)
Under Construction: David Hanan
29 May 2008
Launch of DVD: Indonesia at the Margins
David Hanan (Monash)
In this session David Hanan will introduce and screen two films from the DVD he has recently completed, entitled Indonesia at the Margins: Political Documentaries and Essay Films by Garin Nugroho (1991-2002). The screening will be followed by a paper exploring issues pertinent to the films, including the filmmaker’s discourses on culture and multi-culturalism in an Indonesian context.
Garin Nugroho is Indonesia’s leading director of features and documentaries, having had a new film in international film festivals every two years since 1992, his most recent feature being the acclaimed Opera Jawa (2006). This new DVD, produced for distribution by the Monash Asia Institute’s ‘Between Three Worlds Video and DVD’, makes available for the first time a properly subtitled collection of four of Nugroho’s rarely seen documentary and essay films. The films to be screened are My Family, My Films and My Nation (1998), a unique 30 minute essay film, in which the film-maker reflects on five of his own films at a time of crisis in Indonesia, and Icon: A Cultural Map (2002), a 20 minute essay film about the May-June 2000 West Papuan Congress, in which Nugroho explores the significance of this opportunity—briefly provided during the Wahid era—for the West Papuans to celebrate their own culture and to openly express their views about their incorporation into Indonesia.
Film & Television Studies presents Robert Stam
5 June 2008
Robert Stam, University Professor in Cinema Studies, Tisch School of Arts. New York University, New York City.
From Revolution to Resistance: Alternative Aesthetics in Brazilian Film/Media/Music Video
Stam’s talk will consist of a taxonomy of aesthetic strategies in Brazilian media aimed at critiquing social/racial exclusion. He will present a series of brief clips (about 15 or so) drawn from fiction films/documentaries/and music videos. The talk will be followed by audience discussion.
Robert Stam’s books include: Flagging Patriotism: Crises of Narcissism and Anti-Americanism (Routledge, 2006); Francois Truffaut and Friends: Modernism, Sexuality, and Film Adaptation (Rutgers, 2006); Literature through Film: Realism, Magic and the Art of Adaptation (Blackwell, 2005); Literature and Film: A Guide to the Theory and Practice of Adaptation (Blackwell, 2005); Companion to Literature and Film (Blackwell, 2004); Film Theory: An Introduction (Blackwell, 2000); Tropical Multiculturalism: A Comparative History of Race in Brazilian Cinema and Culture (Duke, 1997); Reflexivity in Film and Literature (UMI Press, 1985); Brazilian Cinema (Associated University Presses, 1982), as well as many co-authored and co-edited books. His works are translated into and published in: French, Spanish, German, Portuguese, Italian, Greek, Farsi, Korean, Japanese, Chinese, Arabic, and Hebrew.
Refreshments will be served. This is part of Film & TV’s Under Construction seminar series. Click here for full programme details.
- Thursday 5th June 2008 @ 4pm
- Room S704, Building 11 (Menzies building), Monash University Clayton campus
A Postgraduate Seminar with Professor Harish Trivedi
11 June 2008
Postcolonial Translation: A History and Some Issues
Harish Trivedi is Professor of English at the University of Delhi, and has been visiting professor at the University of London and the University of Chicago. He is the acclaimed author of Colonial Transactions: English Literature and India. His co-edited books include Postcolonial Translation: Theory and Practice; Literature and Nation: Britain and India 1800-1990; Interrogating Post-Colonialism: Theory, Text and Context; The Nation across the World: Postcolonial Literary Representations; Tess of the d’Urbervilles; Heritage of English. Professor Trivedi is Chair of the Indian Association for Commonwealth Literature and Language Studies (IACLALS), and also Vice–President of the Comparative Literature Association of India. Professor Trivedi is the Distinguished Resident Scholar of Centre for Postcolonial Writing from 10-20 June 2008.
A Seminar with Professor Gordon McCall
12 June 2008
Hot Water: The Sacred and the Sonic
By Gordon McCall, Purdue University
There’s little doubt that many people today remain suspicious of abstract notions and concepts, such as Global Warming. Hot Water: The Sacred and The Sonic, hopes to contribute to the shifting of public attitudes about this issue by illuminating the beauty and necessity for preservation of precious water. Beginning with months of intensive research into the impact and nuance of sound upon our perceptions of water we will create a foundation block for our developing international theatre presentation, which is intended to include collaborators from educational institutions and professional theatres in America, Australia and Canada.
Bustin Loose: How Canadian Theatre Found its Voice
16 June 2008
Distinguished Canadian theatre director Gordon McCall will deliver a lively presentation on how Canada found its voice as a theatre nation. While providing an overview of Canadian plays and key artists, Professor McCall will point to how Canadians uncovered a collective consciousness while shedding a colonial mentality.
Gordon McCall is Currently Associate Professor of Theatre and Head of the Directing program at Purdue University, Gordon hails from Canada where he was recognized as a major contributor to the creation, development and dissemination of a Canadian theatrical voice on the national and international stage.
A Public Lecture by Professor Harish Trivedi
17 June 2008
An Alternative Postcolonial: Language, Location and Culture
Harish Trivedi is Professor of English at the University of Delhi. A former Vice-Chair of the International Association for Commonwealth Literature and Language Studies, Prof Trivedi presently holds the position of Vice–President of the Comparative Literature Association of India. He is also co-ordinating the international project in writing a History of World Literature.
Monash Prize for Poetry 2008
In 1963, the University established the Monash University Prize for Poetry, which is awarded annually for the best poem by an Undergraduate, provided it is of sufficient merit. The prize is an important part of the tradition of promoting literary creativity at Monash. Previous winners include prominent Australian poets such as John A. Scott and Laurie Duggan.
The prize is open to Undergraduates of the University and is awarded on the recommendation of the Head of School. If you are a current Monash Undergraduate student you are eligible to apply.
The author of the prize-winning poem will receive a certificate and a cheque to the value of $150.00. Prize winners’ names/nom de plumes and poems are published on the ECPS website and in the Monash Memo. Entries close 17th June.
Film & Television Studies and Communications & Media Studies Present: Eleanor Kaufman (UCLA)
3 July 2008
The Botany of Inertia
A lively discussion of the role and significance of botany in the annals of philosophy from the Ancient Greeks, and Linnaeus in 18th century France, through to Foucault, Sartre and Lacan (who once remarked that it is “infinitely painful to be a plant”) … from botanophilia to botanophobia.
Eleanor Kaufman is associate professor of Comparative Literature and French and Francophone Studies, and an affiliate in Jewish Studies. She received an A.B. in English and French from Harvard University and a Ph.D. in Literature from Duke University and has taught at Cornell University and the University of Virginia. Her primary research is on twentieth-century French philosophy, with secondary interests in Medieval Christian philosophy, literature and philosophy of the Jewish diaspora, Maghrebian literature, and modern American literature. She is the co-editor of Deleuze and Guattari: New Mappings in Politics, Philosophy and Culture (Minnesota, 1998) and the author of The Delirium of Praise: Bataille, Blanchot, Deleuze, Foucault, Klossowski (Johns Hopkins, 2001) and At Odds with Badiou: Politics, Dialectics, and Religion from Sartre and Deleuze to Lacan and Agamben (forthcoming, Columbia University Press). She is working on three additional book-length projects: “Gilles De leuze and the World without Others”; “The Incorporeal in French Phenomenology” (the subject of the Gauss Seminars that she will be delivering at Princeton in spring 2009); and “The Jewry of the Plain,” on the archives, museums, and cemeteries that commemorate Jewish settlement in remote regions of the American West at the end of the nineteenth century, and simultaneously a meditation on the work of Jacques Derrida. She has published essays in journals such as diacritics, parallax, SAQ, Postmodern Culture, The Oxford Literary Review, Criticism, Polygraph and Angelaki.
Refreshments will be served. This is part of Film & TV’s Under Construction seminar series. Click here for full programme details.
Poetry and the Trace: An International Conference
13-16 July 2008
State Library of Victoria, Melbourne
Poetry and the Trace will be the first international, broad-based poetry conference to be held in Australia in over a decade. It is hoped that this conference will inspire ongoing dialogues between poetries from different regions, and encourage debate about the role of contemporary poetries and their histories both in the context of Australian culture and beyond...
- Visit the Poetry and the Trace website for details.
Communications and Media Studies Seminar Series: Professor Douglas Kirsner
14 July 2008
Bias and Culture: Reforming the ABC
Burchill Room (Clayton Campus, Performing Arts Complex Bld.68), 2:00 to 3:30 PM
Cultural issues go to the root of what is wrong with the ABC. The major problem is the conformist culture of the institution. The fact that the one program on the ABC that challenges the orthodoxy by exploring conservative and liberal views is called ‘Counterpoint’ tells the story of the ABC’s virtual political monoculture. A cultural and value perspective sets it far apart from the major political parties and most of the Australian population. Katherine Betts has termed a ‘new class’ whose object was not old wealth but instead ‘the Australian mass, and its materialism, racism, sexism, and insularity’. The ‘knowledge-class’, which includes ABC journalists, is an important segment within the new educated class who have more distinct values that increasingly set them apart from business and the general community. Examples will be given with comparisons with the BBC. Cultural change in the ABC is essential for it to fulfill its own charter of balance, impartiality and diversity.
School of English, Communication and Performance Studies Inaugural Interdisciplinary Research Seminar
15 July 2008
“I Swear I Saw That”: A talk on the act of giving witness
Professor Michael Taussig (Columbia University)
This talk will gather together different disciplinary interests across literature, performance, visual media and communication. It concerns drawings in fieldwork notebooks (Taussig’s own), the relation of text to image, drawing, and the act of giving witness.
Michael Taussig is a distinguished anthropologist and cultural theorist, best known for his engagement with Marx´s idea of commodity fetishism, especially in terms of the work of Walter Benjamin. His highly innovative writing pays primary attention to textual construction as a form of analysis in itself, involving a mixture of ethnography, story-telling, meta-ethnography, performance and theory.
Film & Televison Colloquium
18–19 July 2008
Provisional Insight: Siegfried Kracauer in the 21st Century
Speakers include:
- Graeme Gilloch (Lancaster University)
- Lesley Stern (University of California, San Diego)
- Adrian Martin (Monash University)
- Ian Aitken (Hong Kong Baptist University)
- Helen Grace (Chinese University Hong Kong)
- Andrew Benjamin (Monash University)
- Jodi Brooks (UNSW)
ECPS Presents Tim Page
23 July 2008
Boot Camp
The famous photojournalist Tim Page will present a lecture about his career that spans over four decades. Page has worked in diverse places such as South East Asia, covering the Vietnam War, and Africa. Page will present a photo story from 1965 until the present with anecdotes and how to possibly make a freelance living.
This lecture is co-sponsored by the Faculty of Art and Design.
Bad Cinema Screenings: Bluebeard
In the lead-up to the B for BAD Cinema inaugural conferenceFilm & Television Studies presents a series of B-movie screenings.
On July 24, Adrian Martin presents: Bluebeard (Edgar G. Ulmer, 1944, USA)
- Room S704, Menzies Building, Clayton Campus, 4:00pm
- Full schedule of screenings here
Film & Television Seminar Series: James Curnow
31 July 2008
The Third Wave of Disaster: Science Fiction Cinema and the New Era of Anxiety
Photo: Restroom Signage by Marcin Wichary
The science fiction disaster film has had sporadic success over the last 60 years, the peaks of which can be seen in three distinct waves – those of the 1950s, the 1990s and the 21st century. The wave of the 1950s has largely been seen as a kind of response to the social anxiety brought about by the nuclear threat exemplified by the cold war. The wave of the 1990s can be seen as the result of a rapid increase in special effects technologies and a decade of mild paranoia brought about by millennialism, as well as being a kind of nostalgic reinvention of the SF disaster films of the 1950s, appropriating the imagery whilst detaching it from any real social anxiety.
This paper focuses on a third wave of science fiction (SF) disaster films that has come about in the 21st century as a response to present social anxiety.
Antipodean Transformations
31 July 2008
Adaptations and Translations of Barrington’s Voyage
On Thursday 31 July 2008 at 5.45pm Nathan Garvey will present, in the McArthur Gallery off the Redmond Barry Reading Room at the State Library of Victoria, a paper on the books spuriously attributed to celebrity convict George Barrington (1755?–1804).
Barrington’s Voyage was probably the most widely read work on the early years of European settlement in Australia. First published as A Voyage to New South Wales (London, 1795), the text’s combination of plagiarised material and exciting fictional adventures revolving around its supposed author was tremendously popular, and was quickly appropriated and reprinted by numerous publishers of chapbook-style works. But the publishing history of Barrington’s Voyage was to take more unusual directions. An elaborate expanded edition was published in London in 1802–3, by which time it had been gentrified through scholarly translations into French and Russian…
Drama & Theatre Seminar Series: Danielle Wilde
4 August 2008
Swing that Thing : an investigation into how technology might be paired with the body to poeticise experience (and what this might mean)
Danielle Wilde will discuss her current doctoral research into how technology might be paired with the body to poeticise experience (and what this might mean).
Primary aims of this research include understanding how one might incite people to move and extend themselves physically; the value of a direct consideration of the body’s tendencies and affordances when creating interactive body-centric elements and systems; the value of visceral experience and full-body, or ‘beyond limb- and digit-triggered’ interaction; the idiosyncratic nature of relationships to the body and technology; and provoking, inciting or inspiring reflection about these relationships through the creation of wearable works of art, design and performance.
Related projects include highly visible, extended and extending interfaces through to “invisible”, embedded and distributed systems, which allow the wearer to actuate and control changes in sound, colour, light, shape and form. The research builds upon more than ten years of experience pairing interactive technology with the body, with a particular emphasis on performance and performativity. Outcomes include wearable artefacts, performances, performance interventions and the development of interfaces for use by the general public.
Seminar jointly organised with ECPS Communications and Media Studies.
International and Intercultural Communications in the Age of Digital Media
11-13 August 2008
- Within current understandings of globalization, it is difficult to think of any topic in the field of media and communications studies which does not consider the international and the intercultural as they function within digital media environments. Nevertheless, this diversity also raises interesting questions about what is central in the field.
- What are the most pressing questions facing media and communications scholars today, and how are they shaped by the discipline’s international, institutional contours?
- What does the desire to ‘de-westernize’ media & communications studies say about relations between the empirical and the theoretical; where we find examples of media cultures in action, and what ideas we use to make sense of them?
- Is disciplinarity still a workable idea?
- How do all of these questions work their way into studies that are not directly about any of them?
- Or are these even the right questions to ask?
We invite you to consider these questions.
Film & Television Seminar Series: Tessa Dwyer
14 August 2008
Slashing and Subtitles: Romanian Media Piracy, Censorship and Translation
Based on research undertaken in collaboration with Romanian national Ioana Uricaru, this paper focuses on media piracy in pre-1989 communist Romania involving the translation of banned foreign-language films and television programs. Noting how translation can function both in the service and subversion of censorship, and how both roles are complicated by contradictory notions of quality and authenticity, I begin by pitting Romania’s government-sanctioned translation methods against the unofficial, amateur practices that typify piracy operations. I then proceed to unpack and expand notions of media piracy to include niche, expert and online modes of engagement. It is my contention that the audiovisual translation techniques that accompany both censorship and piracy processes provide a largely unexamined angle from which to interrogate the politics of film exhibition, distribution and reception.
Negotiating the Sacred V: Governing the Family
14-15 August 2008
Registration now open
This interdisciplinary conference will explore how ideas of the sacred inform our concepts of what the family should look like, how we relate to each other as family, and how these family structures are recognised, or fail to be recognised, in law and structures of governance. It seeks answers to questions about the appropriate role of the state in the governance of family. Themes include:
- Representations of the family, marriage and gender roles in religious traditions
- Recognition of religious law
- Recognition of alternative family structures
- Social justice and the rights of women and children
- Health, reproduction and the family
Full details and registration at this link.
Communications Seminar Series: Peter Gerrand
18 August 2008
The global reach of Spain’s regional diasporas, and their modern reframing as supranational identities
The geographical reach of the Spanish diaspora is surveyed, using as data the names and locations of more than 1,000 emigrant centres registered with Spain’s governments. The names of the centres, created as grass-roots initiatives since the 1840s by groups of Spanish emigrants, reflect the prime identification of the emigrants with their ethnic home region in Spain rather than with their Spanish nationality. The historical evidence for the destinations of the emigrants from different regions of Spain is consistent with the locations of the surviving centres, populated by their descendants.
Since 1985 several regional governments of Spain – those of Andalusia, the Asturias, the Canary Islands, Catalonia, Euskadi (the Basque Community), Galicia, La Rioja and Navarra – have implemented policies to build enduring links with their diasporas. Several have put em-phasis on ‘extra-territorial’ ethnic identity such as asturianía, catalanitat, isleñidad, euskal-tasuna and galeguidade via legislation, proclaiming annual days for international celebration, organizing international conferences for their global ‘collectivities’. All have subsidised cultural programs in their emigrant centres abroad, and many have subsidised reverse emigration.
Drama & Theatre Seminar Series: Fiona Gregory
18 August 2008
An Alternative Ophelia: Embodying Madness on the late-Victorian Stage
In 1897, audiences warmly welcomed Johnston Forbes-Robertson’s new interpretation of Hamlet to the London stage. His sane, intelligent prince was received as a pleasing departure from tradition. Mrs Patrick Campbell’s own experiments with the role of Ophelia in this production were not so welcome. Critics described her playing as “curiously weak” and “unconvincing and unimpressive.” Campbell had rejected the conventional model of the character as emblem of prettiness and pathos and instead offered a vacant, depressive, “beaten” Ophelia. This paper examines the influences behind this choice, including the actress’s own experience of mental illness and the notorious “rest cure” treatment regime. I read the reception of this performance in terms of contemporary attitudes to Ophelia and mental illness as well as responses to Campbell and her celebrity identity. In seeking to re-cast Campbell’s achievements in this role, the paper ultimately calls for a broader perspective in determining the constitutive elements of a performance event, and affirms the importance of careful consideration of the performer’s identity (personal identity, professional identity, celebrity identity) when analyzing the reception of past performances.
B for BAD Cinema Screenings: '4'
21 August 2008
Julia Vassilieva presents: '4' (Ilya Khrzanovsky, 2004, Russia)
Since communism collapsed in the mid nineties, “4” directed by Ilya Khrzhanovsky and based on the screenplay by Vladimir Sorokin has become the first film to be censored in Russia. While the film has won a number of prestigious awards in the West, “4” has also provoked harsh criticism : “Though director Ilya Khrzhanovsky denies that his synopsis-proof first feature is a product of the Russian necrorealist movement – self-consciously inflammatory underground art, film and video that symbolises (or feasts upon) the putrefying corpse of the Soviet state – the startling “4” is nonetheless a howling orgy of decrepitude and decay.” (J.Win, Time Out London Issue 1831: September 21-28 2005) In her introductory talk “On the Political Power of Pro-filmic” Julia Vassilieva (Film and TV Studies, Monash University) examines the most controversial aspects of Khrzhanovky’s confronting footage.
- Note change of venue: now in Room S704, Menzies Building, Clayton Campus, 4:00pm
- Full schedule of screenings here
Film & Television Seminar Series: John Conomos
28 August 2008
Mutant Media: Cinema, Video Art and New Media
John Conomos is a media artist, critic, and theorist who extensively exhibits both locally and internationally. His art practice cuts across a variety of art forms - video, new media, installation, performance and radiophonic art - and deals with autobiography, identity, memory, post-colonialism, and the “in-between” links between cinema, literature and the visual arts. He is a prolific contributor to local and overseas art, film and media journals and a frequent participant in conferences, forums and seminars. In 2000 he was awarded a New Media Fellowship from the Australia Council for the Arts. His recent book Mutant Media (Artspace/Power Publications, Sydney) collects his essays from over a 20-year period.
In his presentation, John will discuss issues arising from Mutant Media, illustrated with clips.
2008 Monash Prize for Poetry Winner Announced
Congratulations to Chloe Brien for winning the 2008 Monash Prize for Poetry, with her poem Salivary.
Drama & Theatre Seminar Series: BPA Graduate Ensemble
1 September 2008
A selection of four to five short papers on a variety of subjects
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.
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.
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.
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
Communications & Media Studies Honours Information Session
16 September 2008
Communications Honours is a rewarding and challenging program of inquiry. During the year, students undertake two coursework units, and research and write their own 15,000-18,000-word thesis. The coursework provides the opportunity for you to extend your understanding of current media issues and theories in small seminar groups. For your thesis project you will work closely with a supervisor to develop your own line of research and inquiry. Through the process of drafting, revising and discussing your work in a one-on-one environment, your writing and argumentative skills will be developed well beyond undergraduate level.
The entry requirement for Honours is completion of the BA or BComn, including a Communications major with 24 credit points at an average of 70% or better in 2nd/3rd-year Communications units, of which at least 18 points must be at 3rd-year level. We are hosting information sessions for prospective Honours students on Tuesday 16 September 2008. Here, staff will discuss what Honours can do for you both professionally and personally, answer your questions, and give you the chance to chat to past and present Honours students in an informal atmosphere over free food and drinks
- 16th September 2008
- Clayton campus: 1-2 pm; Menzies Building, W710
- Berwick campus: 4-5 pm; building 902, room G69
English Honours Information Session
17 September 2008
English Honours is a rewarding and challenging program of inquiry. As well as two course work units, you will have also have the chance to write your own extended thesis. The thesis represents your first piece of independent research and the experience is enormously satisfying. Under the guidance of a supervisor, you will learn how to formulate and develop your own thesis topic, and receive detailed feedback on both your argument and writing. This process will significantly develop your analytical and rhetorical skills well beyond undergraduate level.
The entry requirement for Honours is the satisfaction of the points requirement for the pass degree, including an English major with 24 credit points of work at an average of 70% or better in 2/3 year English subjects, of which at least 18 points should be at 3rd year level. On Wednesday September 17 we are having a session for prospective Honours students. Here, we will answer your questions and tell you why we think that Honours is such an important and transforming year for the students who undertake it. We will also outline the scholarships that are available for Honours students.
- 17th September 2008, 2-3pm
- Room SG02, Menzies Building
Film & Television Studies Honours Information Session
18 September 2008
Completing your degree with BA (Honours) gives you distinct advantages in the professional world. Having an Honours degree indicates to any prospective employer that you have studied your chosen discipline in depth and that you have engaged in original research. This means that you will have demonstrated a greater capacity for independent thinking and individual motivation. Taking the Honours program in Film & Television will allow you to sharpen your knowledge of the discipline, preparing you for further research in the area.
Unlike many other disciplines in the Humanities, Film & Television Studies is connected to media industries. These are industries propelled by ideas and the ways in which they can be expressed and transmitted in audiovisual terms. These industries employ a wide range of people: they are multi-cultural and trans-national, mainstream and experimental. Students who have completed Honours (and postgraduate) programs in Film & Television at Monash University in recent years have taken up various positions in the film and television industries.
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.
Vampires, Vamps and Va Va Voom: A Critical Engagement with Paranormal Romance
19-20 September 2008
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.
Drama & Theatre Studies Honours Information Session
24 September 2008
Honours in Drama and Theatre is open to all Bachelor of Arts students with a major in Drama and Theatre Studies and to all Bachelor of Performing Arts students. Prospective students should have a Distinction average at 2nd/3rd year level in DTS units.
The information session will outline the coursework, thesis and project options on offer in the program, and discuss application procedures. There will also be extensive opportunity to ask questions of staff, and to discuss your personal research and/or practice interests and requirements.
- 24th September 2008, 12:00pm
- Room 213, Performing Arts Complex (building 68) Clayton campus
DTS Performance Season: Mother Courage
By Bertolt Brecht, Directed by Jeff Hood and James Wardlaw
First Year BPA Students
24-27 September
Written on the eve of World War II, Brecht’s modern classic reveals the true human cost of war in a world where only those who compromise their morals survive. This fresh interpretation will present this vast epic play on a wide canvas using two teams of actors and two directors.
sFilm & 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.
Drama & Theatre Seminar Series: Michael Coe
6 October 2008
A Mad Scenography!
B for BAD Cinema Screenings: Mister Lonely
9 October 2008
Claire Perkins and Alexia Kannas present: Mister Lonely
(Harmony Korine, 2007, UK/France/Ireland/USA)
DTS Performance Season: The Musical: The Musical
9-11 October 2008
Directed by Stuart Grant, Musical Direction by Matt Lockitt
Join us in a rollicking ride of riotous research, utilizing a flabbergasting panoply of stylistic, formal and performative devices from the history of musical theatre: from Opera Bouffe to Contemporary experimental off-Broadway, via Rodgers and Hammerstein, Bernstein, Sondheim, Fosse, Lloyd-Webber and beyond. A non-stop ensemble piece of singing, dancing, acting, fun scholarship.
Communications & Media Studies Seminar Series: Geoff Boucher
13 October 2008
After the Subversive Paradigm: Notes toward a Communicative Theory of Literary Discourse
In this paper, I propose that the currently dominant paradigm of literary inquiry – the subversive paradigm of, for instance, New Historicism and Cultural Materialism – is beginning to break up. This is because it originates as a subversive response to the project of state sponsorship of cultural development in the postwar era, and depends on a politics of interest that results in persistent normative deficits. But what sort of epistemology might respond today to cultural concerns raised by globalisation in a way that is able to reflexively justify its ethical stance? To respond, I turn to recent efforts to reconstruct the aesthetic theory of the second generation of the Frankfurt School, especially in the work of Habermas and Wellmer. In Habermas, aesthetics is marginalised by the predominance of theoretico-practical concerns, where the centrality of an argumentative model of communicative rationality sidelines the world-disclosing function of language. Additionally, an expressive conception of aesthetics implies that literary works make no discursive contribution to the public sphere. However, Pieter Duvenage and Lambert Zuidervaart have returned to the original Habermasian insight into the importance of the republic of letters for the public sphere. In the light of Wellmer’s criticisms of Habermas, they combine a theory of discursive language with a theory of world disclosure, to propose a reconstruction of communicative aesthetics. Yet Duvenage and Zuidervaart’s proposals do not amount to an interpretive methodology. Secondly, the promised link between aesthetics and ethics appears on the horizon of this project but remains unformulated within it. To rectify this gap I turn in the final section of the paper to explore the potential of Bakhtin’s dialogism for communicative aesthetics. I ask whether, once we take Wellmer’s reconstruction of speech act theory into account and we therefore reject Habermas’s strict separation between validity claims, a Bakhtinian approach cannot link together discursive language, world disclosure and engagement with the public sphere.
Film & Television Seminar Series: Craig Frost
October 16 2008
Re-gendering the Final Girl: Eli Roth's Hostel Films
Image: Clean Cut by Ora Pera
Described by Carol J. Clover as “abject terror personified”, the traditional Final Girl has long been a staple figure of the slasher sub-genre of the horror film. Providing audiences with both a narrative anchor and a point of identification, the virtuous Final Girl has been presented as the binary opposite of her murderous antagonist. In Hostel, writer/director Eli Roth inverts the gender of his ultimate survivor and through his Final Boy re-configures gender constructs and audience identification within the contemporary slasher-horror film.
In this paper I will address how Roth’s film reinvents genre conventions and forces audiences to shift not only their pre-existing knowledge of the genre, but also how they relate, react and judge the images presented on screen.
Craig Frost is a PhD candidate in Film and Television Studies at Monash University. He is currently researching the horror sub-genre of “Torture Porn” and its relation to notions of gender, the body, and images of torture in a post-911 cinematic landscape.
DTS Performance Season: Mother Sex Doll
16 - 18 October
Directed by Naomi Edwards, Devised by Naomi Edwards and Second Year BPA Students
Façade — an outward appearance that is maintained to conceal a less pleasant or creditable reality… Mother Sex Doll is a visceral exploration of facade through the texts of Mother Courage and her Children, Summer of the Seventeenth Doll and Sex and The City, uncovering the facade we show the world, the ideals we reach for, the soul mate we dream of, and the mother we never had.
Collaborations: Creative Partnerships in Art and Writing
22 October 2008
ECPS is pleased to present a cross-disciplinary seminar on artistic and literary collaborations focused on the work of new Monash Fellow, Janine Burke. Dr Burke’s Being Geniuses Together: Artist Couples, Communities and Collaborations interrogates the notion of the lone (male) genius, replacing it with an examination of rich and fruitful interactions between individuals, the elective affinities that make artistic breakthroughs possible. The Collaborations seminar brings together papers which explore the subtle, complex, emotional connections on which such relationships depend, and sometimes founder.
A Public Lecture by Claire Farago and Donald Preziosi
22 October 2008
Art’s Relation to the Commodity Form as a Central Problem of Modern Philosophy
The ability of art to heighten the individual’s feeling of its own cognitive powers and freedom raised art to the supreme philosophical problem in German Idealist thought. Marx made clear that although the commodity is defined by the independence or autonomy of exchange-value from use-value, this can never be complete since it is use that is ultimately exchanged, and if something ceased to be useable, it would also cease to be exchangeable. Therefore, as Stewart Martin has argued in his work on Adorno, an artwork’s affinity to a commodity doesn’t prevent it from contradicting capital, but rather enables it. Our presentation will take up the discussion from this point: Art is simultaneously produced and destroyed by capitalist culture. Martin recommends a refusal of commodification by a subversive mimesis of art. By contrast, we will suggest that the irreducibility of art to either absolute commodity or absolute autonomy demands attending to what it is that “art does” does. Only that which does not submit to the principle of heteronomy, i.e. the re-presentation of otherness or alterity (quid quo pro, the classical nature of the sign), has the potential to become free of domination.
DTS Performance Season: Widows
23 - 25 October
By Ariel Dorfman with Tony Kushner, Directed by Mark Constable
In this smoldering political allegory, the men have disappeared from a war-torn village. The women—their mothers, wives, daughters—wait by the river, hope and mourn. Their anguish is unspoken until bruised and broken bodies wash up on the banks and the women defy the military using the only form of protest left to them.
Ariel Dorfman is a Chilean citizen who was forced into exile after the September 11, 1973 coup brought down the democratically-elected government of President Salvador Allende. He is best known for his novels and for the screen adaptation of his play, Death and the Maiden.
Drama & Theatre Seminar Series: Finale
27 October 2008
End of semester discussion/meeting/drinks.
Stoning Mary
30 October to 1 November
By Debbie Tucker Green, Directed by Suzanne Chaundy
Melbourne Premiere
A husband and wife with AIDS can only afford one prescription.
A child soldier comes home.
Mary is going to be stoned.
What if this is happening here, in Melbourne? What if these people are white?
Debbie Tucker Green has been described as “one of the most assured and extraordinary new voices we’ve heard in a long while” (The Independent, UK). Stoning Mary was premiered at the Royal Court Theatre in April 2005. Disturbing, darkly funny, poetic and raw, this 3rd year production is the Melbourne premiere of an unforgettable contemporary work.
Call for Papers: Colloquy Issue 17
Colloquy is presently seeking submissions for Issue 17, due out in May 2009, which consider one of two themes.
One is “Alternative visions: philosophies of freedom in South Asian Diasporic Writing”. Students of postcolonial studies should find this area of particular interest, although as always Colloquy remains open to researchers from all areas of the humanities with a focus on critical inquiry and creative responses. This issue will be guest edited by Elin-Maria Evangelista, Isabella Ofner and Pooja Mittal.
The other considers current understandings of globalization and the most pressing questions facing media and communications scholars today, including relations between the empirical and the theoretical in media cultures in action, what ideas we use to make sense of them, and whether or not disciplinarity is even still a workable idea. This theme will be taken up in a special postgraduate event to be held in conjunction with the Communications and Media Studies conference, to be held in August 2008, on International and Intercultural Communications in the Age of Digital Media. Select postgraduate papers from the conference will be featured.
In line with colloquy’s mandate to make postgraduate publishing openly available, other unsolicited academic articles and review articles of a general nature, along with book reviews, translations, opinion essays and creative writing, will also be considered. We encourage postgraduate students, postdoctoral researchers, and research fellows to submit scholarly articles in line with the style guide available at the Colloquy website.
The submission deadline for Issue 17 is November 15, 2008.
Articles of an unrelated nature will be considered alongside the themed section (both refereed in a double-blind process), and creative writing or opinion pieces are also welcome for the unrefereed section of the electronic journal.
Book Launch: Travels in Atomic Sunshine
13 November 2008
Robin Gerster’s Travels in Atomic Sunshine will be launched in Melbourne at the Shrine of Remembrance by Professor Bruce Scates.
In February 1946, the Australians of the British Commonwealth Occupation Force (BCOF) moved into western Japan to ‘demilitarise and democratise’ the atom-bombed backwater of Hiroshima Prefecture. For over six years, up to 20,000 Australian servicemen, including their wives and children, participated in an historic experiment in nation-rebuilding dominated by the United States and the occupation’s supreme commander, General MacArthur.
It was to be a watershed in Australian military history and international relations. BCOF was the last collective armed gesture of a moribund empire. The Chifley government wanted to make Australia’s independent presence felt in post-war Asia-Pacific affairs, yet the venture heralded the nation’s enmeshment in American geopolitics. This was the forerunner of the today’s peacekeeping missions and engagements in contentious US-led military occupations.
Yet the occupation of Japan was also a compelling human experience. It was a cultural reconnaissance — the first time a large number of Australians were able to explore in depth an Asian society and country. It was an unprecedented domestic encounter between peoples with apparently incompatible traditions and temperaments. Many relished exercising power over a despised former enemy, and basked in the ‘atomic sunshine’ of American Japan. Yet numerous Australians developed an intimacy with the old enemy, which put them at odds with the ‘Jap’ haters back home, and became the trailblazers of a new era of bilateral friendship.
Travels in Atomic Sunshine is a salutary study of the neocolonialism of foreign occupation, and of Australia’s characteristic ambivalence about the Asian region.
Military Media Relations and the War in Afghanistan: The Australian Experience
Saturday 22 November
This one day symposium, bringing together journalists who have reported from the front lines in Afghanistan, ADF PR personnel, academics and media commentators, will explore how, by whom, and with what effects the Australian military's current deployment has been reported. Specific issues to be examined will include:
- the management of media access to the Australian troops
- the ADF’s media management practices in Afghanistan
- the media’s role in reporting events in Afghanistan
- the role of independent media coverage of Australian forces in Afghanistan
- public relations and reporting
- military-media relations: how did we get here and where to now?
- are the public well-served by the current reporting arrangements?
The symposium will provide a unique opportunity to examine and debate the ADF's use of its own public affairs and imagery specialists, the media's present and future role in the representation of conflict, and what this will mean for Australian media-military relations.
B for BAD cinema: aesthetics, politics and cultural value
Inaugural Centre for Film and Television Studies Conference, Monash University, Melbourne, April 15–17, 2009
Call for Papers: Second Round
Due to high levels of interest in B for Bad Cinema, the Conference conveners have extended the call for papers to a second round, with a new closing date of January 30, 2009.
Over the past decade, paracinema – a movement that has grown up around sleazy, excessive, or poorly executed B-movies – has seen a counter-cultural valorisation of all forms of cinematic trash or ‘badfilm.’ In many internet and print sources devoted to the celebration of paracinema, the term B-movie has (in contrast to its earlier studio-era sense) come to mean almost anything: disreputable and unworthy movies, low-budget exploitation movies, straight to TV or video movies, and even big-budget studio movies.
B for BAD cinema invites international film scholars, critics and practitioners to present their thoughts on badfilm. The conveners additionally extend the scope of the second round to include papers devoted to television and new media.
Distinguished American Musicologist Philip Bohlman Visits Monash
December 2008
Sponsored by Monash University’s School of Music-Conservatorium, School of English, Communications and Performance Studies, and Australian Centre for Jewish Civilisation, and the Musicological Society of Australia.
Professor Philip Bohlman, the Mary Werkman Distinguished Service Professor of the Humanities and of Music at the University of Chicago will be an Honorary Fellow of the School of Music-Conservatorium, Monash University in December, 2008. He will also be a guest of Monash University’s Centre for Jewish Civilisation and School of English, Communication and Performance Studies in the Faculty of Arts.
In addition, during his visit he will present the keynote address at the National Conference of the Musicological Society of Australia entitled “Music before the Nation, Music after Nationalism”.
Symposium on Traditional Cultural Expression and International Law
15 December 2008
Intellectual property law was initially developed on the basis of a simple binary between ‘creative’ art and ‘copies’. Folk art and indigenous art became part of the ‘public domain’. Hybrid art forms such as world music, advertising, tourism and new age religions have all made use of traditional cultural expression for financial gain, without recognising protocols for use, or even acknowledging the originators of this material. In recent years there has been increasing recognition of the need to protect indigenous symbols, music, stories and performances from exploitation. This symposium brings together international copyright experts, Aboriginal artists, and humanities and social science researchers to discuss the World Intellectual Property Organisation draft protocols for the protection of traditional cultural expression. This protocol has the potential to change the shape of the public domain, and to secure indigenous rights against the appropriation of their art. Yet, it is unclear what rights should be acknowledged, and the extent of these rights.
Speakers include:
- Professor Rosemary J. Coombe
- Professor Johanna Gibson
- Richard J. Frankland
- Vicki Couzens
- Dr Maryrose Casey
- Dr John Bradley
- Dr Luigi Palombo
- Professor Peter Drahos
Professor Christoph Antons
Art and the Political
Throughout 2008
‘Art and the Political’ Graduate Seminar and Public Lecture Series
This is a series of six graduate seminars (3 per semester during 2008) and two public lectures organised by the Centre for Ideas at the Victorian College of the Arts and co-sponsored by ECPS. Visiting international professors will run these seminars, which will generate high quality critical discussion and foster cross-institutional relations with the University of Melbourne.
- For further details visit VCA’s page
- For further information please contact Dimitrios Vardoulakis