School of English, Communications and Performance Studies, Monash University

In the twenty-first century, religious dialogue and communication strategies remain an understated yet influential factor in shaping national political elections in Australia and the United States. In the lead up to the 2004 federal election, the Australian Liberal and US Republican coalition leaders, John Howard and George Bush developed a religious agenda and political strategy to engage centre-right religious voters. This involved the government working closely with religious groups like the Evangelicals and Exclusive Brethren. From 2004 to 2007/08, the Australian Labor party and US Democrats countered the influence of the religious right in national elections, by developing a centre-left communication strategy to engage religious voters, and to win public office. This paper identifies the socio-cultural factors that led the Labor party and Democrats to view religious communication as an important political factor in the lead up to the 2007/8 national election; and the dialogue and communication strategies used to engage religious voters. These include the increased lobbying role of religious groups in the public square, the mobilization of the religious vote, and various speeches and forums targeted at specific religious groups. I conclude by summarizing the importance of religious communication in political elections and what this reveals for the representation of religious interests in Australia and the United States – two post-modern secular democracies.

Creativity and Cognition

The paper has a dual focus: a critique of the institutionalization of literary studies in departments of national literature and a re-evaluation of the role of translation in literary studies. David Roberts is Emeritus Professor in German Studies and a former Director of the Centre. His many publications include Art and Enlightenment: Aesthetic Theory after Adorno (1990), Reconstructing Theory: Gadamer, Habermas, Luhmann (1995), Canetti’s Counter-Image of Society (2004), Dialectic of Romanticism: A Critique of Modernism (2004). He is a member of the editorial board of Thesis Eleven.

One of the key schools in criticism today is the loose grouping that comes ‘out of Florida’, inspired by the work of Gregory Ulmer (Heuretics, Internet Invention, Teletheory, Electronic Monumentality, etc) at Department of English, University of Florida. Writers influenced by his open, creative, playful, anti-hermeneutic approach to criticism include the USA film scholar Robert B. Ray (How a Film Theory Got Lost, The Avant-Garde Finds Andy Hardy). In Australia, two ‘branch Floridians’ are Lisa Gye and Darren Tofts, both of whom teach in Media and Communications at Swinburne University of Technology, and gave stunning speeches at the Monash B for Bad Cinema conference earlier this year. Their work mixes passions for pop culture and avant-garde alike with an investigation into the creative possibilities of new media … plus a good, hard dose of Australian sensibility. Together, Lisa and Darren edited the e-book Illogic of Sense: The Gregory L. Ulmer Remix (2007), downloadable from

Robert Savage is a Postdoctoral Fellow in the Centre. His publications include Imagining the Future: Utopia and Dystopia (2006), Moderne Begreifen: Zur Paradoxie eines sozioästhetischen Deutungsmusters (2007) and Hölderlin after the Catastrophe: Heidegger – Adorno – Brecht (2009).

In 1998, Cinema Papers ran a goofy photo of an 18 year old Heath Ledger alongside a short blurb naming him as a talent “worth looking out for” in the future. Based principally on some local television work, the prediction was substantively and unpredictably fulfilled in the 2000s, where Ledger’s roles led to the production of a diverse star text that subverted the standard trajectory of an Australian soap star in Hollywood. Across a series of historical roles including A Knight’s Tale (2001), The Four Feathers (2002), Ned Kelly (2003) and The Brothers Grimm (2005), Ledger developed a style of ironic masculine toughness that came to epitomize the popular desire for a certain brand of “history” during this decade. This paper will discuss Ledger’s gruff stardom as an image strategically mobilised in the later films Brokeback Mountain (2005), I’m Not There (2007) and The Dark Knight (2008) and expanded by the fanatical speculation surrounding his sudden death in 2008.

Flaubert’s only historical novel, Salammbô, was published in 1862, a year before the first of Verne’s ‘Voyages Extraordinaire’, Cing semaines en ballon. For Jameson, this moment when the historical novel ceased to be ‘functional’ was the moment of the emergence of scince fiction. For Bourdieu, by contrast, the moment of Flaubert was that of the emergence of the modern ‘literary field’. This paper will analyse the place of science fiction in the genesis and structure of the modern literary field.

This presentation explores examples of various forms of monitoring, from lie detection and voice-stress analysis to neuro-monitoring as techniques for bypassing conscious strategies of manipulation or deception. It does so within the context of a broader interest in the social role and cultural portrayal of surveillance technologies in the digital era. It describes the portrayal of monitoring techniques as characteristic of an emerging genre of television programming that might be described as "securitainment" which instructs viewers in monitoring strategies and their proper uses. This genre includes fictional formats like "Lie to Me" as well as reality formats and even some forms of news programming. The presentation offers an interpretation of the role of such programming in the contemporary context of savvy reflexivity about the manipulated character of mediated representation in an era of ubiquitous risk. Mark Andrejevic is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the University of Queensland's Centre for Critical and Cultural Studies. He is also Associate Professor in the Department of Communication Studies, University of Iowa. He is the author of Reality TV: The Work of Being Watched and iSpy: Surveillance and Power in the Interactive Era as well as numerous articles and book chapters on surveillance and popular culture.

This paper is presented in three parts: Firstly, it offers an exposition of Spinoza’s views on belief and faith, including the role of imagination and fiction in religious life. Secondly, it considers how Eliot’s views on belief and faith and fiction develop aspects of Spinoza’s view but also depart from that view. Thirdly, it raises the question of whether the philosophy of Spinoza can be expressed in aesthetic terms. Moira Gatens is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Sydney. Her publications include Feminism and Philosophy (1992), Imaginary Bodies: Ethics, Power and Corporeality (1996), Collective Imaginings: Spinoza, Past and Present (1999) and Feminist Interpretations of Benedict Spinoza (2009).

The French Realist manifesto of 1840, Les français peints par eux-mêmes, and its Russian copy of 1841 (Russians portrayed from nature by Russians) call for the modern writer to portray the manners and mores of the times and act as a local historian. Dostoevsky and Flaubert take up this call inflected through a more sophisticated model of history, subsequently theorized by Foucault (under impulses from Nietzsche) as genealogy or as “effective history” which focuses on “emergence, the moment of arising.” Flaubert’s Bouvard and Pécuchet (1881) and Dostoevsky’s The Adolescent (1875) will be analysed as ‘documents’ capturing a ‘moment in time’ staging themselves as ‘writing’ or as a language game of domination and interpretation. Millicent Vladiv-Glover is Associate Professor in Comparative Literature and Slavic Studies. Her publications include Narrative Principles in Dostoevsky’s Devils: A Structural Analysis, (1979), Lirska drama slovenskog modernizma (1997), Russian Postmodernism (1999) and Romani Dostojesvkog kao Diskurs Transgresije i Pozude (2001).

The writing of J.G. Ballard displays a highly developed visual ¬– indeed filmic – sensibility, and has been the subject of numerous attempts to adapt it into cinematic form. Almost all of his 18 novels have been optioned at one stage or another, and there have been four feature films made from his work as well as a substantial amount of short films. This paper will initially focus on three of these adaptations: the short film Crash! (1970), directed by Harley Cokliss; the feature film Crash (1996), directed by David Cronenberg; and Jonathan Weiss’s The Atrocity Exhibition (2000). All three draw on material from a distinct period of Ballard’s career – 1968 to 1973 – and share striking similarities, notably across sound design, mise en scène and key narrative tropes such as the symbolism of crash-test dummies and the posthumanism of the automobile. This apparent fidelity is a testimony to the precise filmic nature of the original material, yet these films also convey the nagging sense that the ultimate Ballardian work has yet to be realised.

This paper traces the points of overlap and separation whereby through the paradigm of friendship the morals and politics of Kant’s discourse can be reconsidered for its points of tension, undecidability and contradictory demands. Friendship is not discussed as an explicitly political concept in Kant or a form of relations that could be thought to found a politics. It is rather a topic that emerges by way of discussions on respect, intimacy, secrecy, public and private relations and analogically, through his discussion of social physics. Consequently, the paper will show how the question of friendship finds a place in the threshold between morality and politics, and so question the compatibility of Kant’s theory of politics with his claims on morality. In doing so it will look at two well-known discussions of Kant’s discourse on friendship, namely, the second half of Doctrine of Virtue and his “Lecture on Friendship”. Blair McDonald is a PhD student in the Centre for Comparative Literature and Cultural Studies, currently researching a thesis entitled Irreconciliations: Friendship and the Political.

Douglass’ Women: History and the Creative Imagination | Jewell Parker Rhodes

This paper will examine the origins, practices and effects of Australian military-media relations in Afghanistan. It will compare and contrast the Australian Defence Force’s (ADF) news management strategy with those of its coalition allies, the US, British, Dutch and Canadian forces. It will consider the Australian media’s marginal role in the provision of news from Afghanistan, explain why and how they have been sidelined and analyse its consequences by looking at specific examples of ADF news management practice. It will explore how Australian media coverage of the war in Afghanistan has been shaped by Anzac mythology, how ADF coverage of the the war has been directed more to the reinforcement of national myth than than the provision of a sober accounting of events in Afghanistan, and how as a consequence this has distorted the public’s understanding of just what it is we are doing in Afghanistan.

South Asian diasporic literature in English projects a rich vein of desire for spiritual restfulness in the globalised world. This paper focuses on the desire for a physical/imaginative homeland, for complete and spiritual restfulness as both the key subject for texts and as an internal dynamic creating textual power. It attempts to extend current postcolonial contextual and political analysis through attention to textual forms, strategies and values. Distinguishing itself from western reader reception theories which can mask this literature’s distinctiveness, the Theory of Rasa, the classical Indian theory of aesthetics is used to offer a more holistic, incisive and empathetic analysis, re-informing political and cultural content. The development of a new research project, this paper will read selected fiction and poetry by Michael Ondaatje, alongside the Theory of Rasa.