ECPS News and Events

2008 Monash Prize for Poetry Winner Announced

Congratulations to Chloe Brien for winning the 2008 Monash Prize for Poetry, with her poem Salivary.

• Read her poem here

Drama & Theatre Seminar Series: BPA Graduate Ensemble

1 September 2008

A selection of four to five short papers on a variety of subjects

• Full details and schedule here

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.

• Further information here

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

• Full details and schedule here

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

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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.

• Full details here

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

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.

• For more details, visit the symposium's homepage

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.

• Performance schedule and online booking here

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 2008

A Mad Scenography!

• Full details and schedule here

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)

• Full details and series schedule here

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.

• Full details and season programme here

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.

• Details and series program here

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.

• Full details and series schedule here

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.

• Full details and season programme here

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.

• Full details and season programme here

Drama & Theatre Seminar Series: Finale

27 October 2008

End of semester discussion/meeting/drinks.

• Full details and schedule here

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.

• Full details and season programme here

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.

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.

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.

• Further details and registration here

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”.

• Details Professor Bohlman’s itinerary are here

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

Inaugural Centre for Film and Television Studies Conference

Call for Papers:

B for BAD cinema: aesthetics, politics and cultural value

Monash University, Melbourne, April 15–17, 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 seeks to negotiate some of the (aesthetic and moral) values and judgments inscribed in a B-movie culture in which films are deemed to be good-because-bad or bad-because-good.

• Full details available here