School of English, Communications and Performance Studies, Monash University

Powerful nations have influential systems of higher education. The paper explores the possible pattern of geo-politics in the twenty-first century, and the competing prospects of America and its rivals in higher education and research. Pressures on both the American and non-American worlds are evaluated, along with relative economic strengths, and how factors such as these translate into intellectual prowess. The paper suggests that peak intellectual and research achievement is dependent on cultural factors, and that America remains well-positioned as an intellectual nation despite fierce competition from rivals because of unique cultural characteristics.

The last century or so has seen the kitschification of the world. This phenomenon is unprecedented in human history. It was accompanied in historical tandem by the equally unprecedented phenomenon of totalitarianism. The paper talks about what kitsch is, and what might explain its spread. While freedom, independence, and imagination have all expanded in the modern world, this has been accompanied by the amplification of regressive feeling states, sometimes in a totalitarian guise and sometimes in the guise of kitsch. In the early twenty-first century, we have seen plenty of instances of totalitarian theocratic rage. At the opposite end of the spectrum, in democratic societies kitsch is commonly exhibited in politics, education, and art. Film, for instance, was once a very promising art form. Today, for most intents and purposes, it has become a vehicle for the fantasy-like representation of drives and affects. It infantilizes at every turn, leaning either in the direction of the grotesque or the sentimental. Today sentimentality is the dominant feeling mood in democratic societies. Friedrich Schlegel defined sentimentality as ‘shallowly emotional and lachrymose’. He observed that it is ‘full of those familiar noble feelings, the consciousness of which makes people of no character feel so unutterably happy and grand’. Schlegel’s definition tells us much about the interior landscape of many of our contemporaries. They are characterless squibs in love with their own noble feelings and infatuated with the dreams of their fathers.

Tense Disgusted Laughter and ‘Cringe’ Film and Television

Lecturer in Performance Studies | Speaking | Stuart Grant Dr. Stuart Grant, Lecturer in Performance Studies Speaking Before language is a system of signs, a code, a representation, a means of communication, a mental process, a grammatical structure, it is something that a human body does. And it does it in speaking. Human bodies speak. According to Heidegger it is not humans that speak, but language that speaks, but the precondition of the existence of language, the ground, is the speaking body. Without the speaking body, language would be silent. This paper outlines some theoretical considerations which arose from a performance studies scholar's engagement with some of the anomalies of applied linguistics in the context of the use of techniques of drama and performance in the language teaching classroom. The assumptions are that language, as speaking, is embodied, expressive, affective, enculturing, gestural and performative; that the whole body speaks. The assumptions are that language, as speaking, is embodied, expressive, affective, enculturing, intersubjective, gestural and performative; that the whole body speaks. The paper outlines how each of these dimensions of speaking works, and begins to ask questions of how they might be given substance in a language teaching program.

Under Construction seminar series | Deane Williams The Films of Sean Penn | Deane Williams

Nanotechnology - the manipulation of matter on an atomic scale - is widely believed to promise a new age of molecular manufacturing whose impact could dwarf that of the industrial revolution. Around the world, governments and private enterprise are expending huge resources in an attempt to claim a leading role in the coming ‘diamond age’, led by the United States government’s National Nanotechnology Initiative, which has already received almost US$14 billion in funding. However, nanotechnology brings together researchers from different disciplines whose understanding and expectations of this new technology sometimes differ greatly. In this paper I will argue that the pursuit and popular understanding of nanotechnology marks an endpoint in a system of thought regarding the relationship between form and matter, abstract information and physical materiality. This tradition of thought has been present since Pythagoras, but began a new and powerful phase in the 1950s when information theory provided a framework of understanding foundational to the appearance of information technology and molecular biology. The attempt to develop molecular manufacturing reflects an intellectual moment in which the division between information and physical materiality seems to be breaking down, leaving a belief that even our physical environment itself is fundamentally nothing more than information.

On June 25th, 2009 Universal Studios and Twisted Pictures, circulated a press release announcing that the American horror franchise Saw bleeds off the screen into ‘live’ experience at Universal Studios Hollywoods Halloween Horror Nights. This live, large-scale Halloween attraction constituted a full sensory experience in which the film’s fans not only witnessed recreations their favourite “traps” from the series but were also invited to interact and engage with the film’s mythology in interactive set-ups taking them beyond traditional modes of cinematic spectatorship. Craig Frost travelled to Los Angeles to document this attraction as part of his research on contemporary horror film. In this paper he will present audio-visual materials gathered on site. He will attest that the attraction is indeed an imaginative and truly terrifying ‘live’ experience. But he will also argue that it is not an entirely new cultural experience, exploring how significant characteristics of this event align with the traditions and modes of spectatorship created by the French theatre of horror, The Théâtre du Grand-Guignol. Synonymous with narratives of violence and cruelty; and performances based on realistic recreations of torture and mutilation, the Grand-Guignol proved to be a popular source of live spectatorial pleasure from its opening in 1897 until the last performance in 1962. He will use this historic mode of audience engagement with the ‘real’ to discuss forms of pleasure associated with this contemporary live event. He will pay particular attention to the way in which this ‘re-spatialisation’ of the cinematic image invites audiences to become a part of the narrative itself and to actively engage with familiar characters in a new mode of spectator-text relations.

The differences in the perception of digital games in Germany and Australian are distinct. While their assessment in Germany is dominated by a pessimistic Kulturkritik tenor which regards them as an 'illegitimate' activity, in Australia they are enjoyed by a wide demographic as a 'legitimate' pastime. The presentation deals with the reasons behind these differences. It analyses the social history of digital gaming in both countries and relates it to their socio-cultural traditions and their effects on modes of distinction. Germany, as a European Kulturnation, has a different history and different foundational dynamics than Australia, a New-World society built on premises which consciously distanced themselves from their Old-World heritage. Foundational dynamics signify the socio-cultural and historical forces which shaped a distinct national conscience and dominant identity constructions during the countries' founding phase. Naturally, these constructions did not stay without an impact on the perception of different kinds of aesthetics. Closely related to the perception of culture was the issue of distinction, the cultural demarcation between social groups: By a conspicuous refusal of other tastes, a class tries to depict its own lifestyle as something superior. A country like Germany, whose national self-conception was closely related to groups which perpetuated an idealistic notion of Kultur and later integrated it into a rigid class system, exhibited a different form of distinction as Australia, a 'society of common men'. The presentation aims demonstrates how forms of distinction, shaped by different foundational dynamics, asserted themselves regarding the perception of mass culture to the point where digital games were the latest medium to be surrounded by established patterns of criticism and enthusiasm.

Bridging Cinema Theory and New Media Art: The Concept of the Dispositif We all know that cinema is changing in its encounter with new media forms, whether on the Internet or in the art gallery. But, just as new artworks and cultural practices of the digital age are compelling us to look back anew at cinema, so too cinema theory provides many powerful theoretical tools for understanding the mutations and expansions happening today. One such conceptual tool is that of the dispositif, which I am currently exploring as part of my Australia Research Council grant. This talk will introduce the concept and its uses, exploring it across a colourful and international range of cinematic and new media examples from the present and the past. BIO: Since 1979, Associate Professor Adrian Martin has combined work as a professional writer and film critic with a university career. He was film reviewer for The Age between 1995 and 2006. For his numerous books, essays and public lectures he has won the Byron Kennedy Award (Australian Film Institute) and the Pascall Prize for Critical Writing, and his PhD on film style won the Mollie Holman Award. He is the author of four books and hundreds of essays on film, art, television, literature, music, popular and avant-garde culture. He was recently awarded (with Professors Nicole Brenez and Meaghan Morris) an ARC grant for a large international study of intermedial cinema. Presented by Adrian Martin, Monash University.

The paper discusses some cognitive parameters of interculturality and interdependence which have become necessary for the understanding and interpretation of literatures at a time of increasing globalization. Advances in hermeneutics and rhetoric have influenced the theory and practice of comparative literary history as demonstrated in several successful comparative literary history projects of the International Comparative Literature Association. These could provide a new paradigm for the writing of a comparative history of Australian literatures. Walter Veit is Adjunct Associate Professor of German at Monash University and a former Director of the Centre for Comparative Literature and Cultural Studies. His publications include Antipodean Enlightenments (1987), The Idea of Europe (1992), Work of the Future: Global Perspectives (1997), The Struggle for Souls and Science (2004)and “Arbeiter im Weinberg” oder “Der ungebildete Missionar” (2005).

The paper begins with a sociologically triumphalist critique of philosophical aesthetics, grounded on the work of Ernest Gellner and Emile Durkheim. It proceeds to note the practical failure of this kind of sociology to become institutionalised within the wider discipline. It explores a number of possible explanations for the failure, but finally suggests that a normalised sociology of art requires a normalised conception of art itself, such as that tentatively advanced by Pierre Bourdieu and Franco Moretti. The paper also has an autobiographical subtext. Andrew Milner is Professor of Cultural Studies in the Centre. His most recent publications include Re-Imagining Cultural Studies (Sage, 2002), Contemporary Cultural Theory (Routledge, 2002, co-authored with Jeff Browitt), Literature, Culture and Society (Routledge, 2005), Postwar British Critical Thought (Sage, 2005, 4-volume edited collection) and Tenses of Imagination: Raymond Williams on Science Fiction, Utopia and Dystopia (Peter Lang, 2010).

Public Lecture - Writing, Apotropaism and Animism | Michael Taussig Public Reading Professor Michael Taussig will read from a new collection of ficto-critical writings on apotropaism and animism.

Public Lecture - Anticolonialism as Authoritarian Ideology | Frank Schulze-Engler

Public Lecture - When the Sun Goes Down – A Copernican Turn of Remembrance When the sun goes down, mythology surfaces in the rituals and anxieties of modern life – in beautiful sunsets no less than deepening shadows of despair. At night when the sun seems to travel below the earth, sleep, too, brings its tossing and turning as journey through strange continents of being. This talk addresses twilight, the witching hour when light transforms itself and the basis of the image, such that other worlds are possible.

Book Publishing, E-books, and the Production of Literatures of Social Reform