School of English, Communications and Performance Studies, Monash University

References to art and artists recur in John Banville’s writing. In structure too his novels are metafictional in that they draw attention to their own artistic texture. While Banville’s self-conscious aestheticisation of the world in the novel points to the captured evocative moment, it also plays out the failure of the ideal; its deception, its alienation from material being. In this paper I look into this wary aestheticism as it appears in The Sea. Further, I investigate it in terms that Ernst Bloch proposed for the utopian insight of literature, the “anticipatory illumination”. In The Sea we can glimpse both the liberation offered in the aesthetic and the slip towards an “ethereal and empty realm of freedom”, identified as art’s dangerous obverse. The Sea, like Banville’s other works, can be read as a cultural response to a process of social transformation – the abstraction of the social in the generalisation of the intellectual form of life – which contains its own utopian promise but which also entails particular diminutions of social being.

Despite a plethora of world encyclopedias of film and dictionaries of national cinemas, one particular history or archaeology of cinematic art remains to be told or written – that of the non-films or off-films which have literally filled filmic annals almost since the invention of the medium and make up what I propose to call ‘ghost cinema’. Films that never came to completion or fruition, films that were inherently or constitutively unfilmable, elusive films that haunt us as film enthusiasts, abortive films that go on to covertly inspire and fertilise the latter opuses of their unsuccessful originators. I will look at specific instances and possible paradigms (French and non-French, filmic and literary) in an effort to delineate this unchartered territory and examine the mythical, fetishistic aura that these mirage-films tend to acquire over time.

The success and proliferation of computer games has stimulated considerable interest among narratologists because some games appear to offer player-centred direction of stories, significant narrative interactivity and multiple alternative resolutions. Fantasy RPG games in particular promise opportunities for the construction of personalised narratives by players individually and in relation to other players. How ‘readerly’ are these? What happens to the sense of an ending? Does the interactivity mediated by computer games constitute a paradigm shift in modes of narration comparable, say, to that mediated by the development of film technologies? And will the widely distributed enablement of certain kinds of facile fantasy narrative creation alter our understanding of the significance of represented fantasy?

A Phenomenology of Ephemeral Places

“Season at Sarsparilla”: The Animated House

Writers and Their World | Rosemary Cameron Literary festivals and the publishing industry: friends or foe? Rosemary Cameron has been director of the Melbourne Writers Festival since November 2005. Before Melbourne, Rosemary directed the Brisbane Writers Festival for 3 years. For 2 years she was a judge of the Victorian Premier’s Literary Prize for Fiction and, when in Brisbane, she was a judge of One Book, Many Brisbanes for Brisbane City Council & on the selection panel for the John Oxley Fellowship at the State Library of QLD. Before being involved in literary festivals Rosemary worked mostly in performing arts management in Sydney, Brisbane and London. This included working for The Queensland Conservatorium Griffith University, Stage X Festival at QPAC, English National Opera & the Royal Opera House Covent Garden, Marrickville Festival, Oslo Early Music Festival, Performing Lines and the Australian Elizabethan Theatre Trust. She currently lives in Glen Iris with her two sons, George (15) and Daniel (12).

A Horse Throwing its Rider: Practice-led Research in Performance Studies discusses Barry Laing’s PhD, Victoria University 2002. The PhD - an enquiry into subjectivity by means of performance - involved the writing, devising and performing of three solo performance works as well as a 60,000 word written document incorporating 18,000 words of the ‘performance texts’. This presentation engages with the strategies and methodologies employed as well as questions and complexities concerning theory, practice, praxis, method and knowledge as they might figure in postgraduate research by means of performance.

A discussion of the challenges in writing a biography of notorious Australian actor Frank Thring, and dealing with the subjectivity of the subject matter in a form of writing that is considered historical and objective.

This paper deals with the language of Chinese intellectual discourse and explores its dynamism as a discourse that is radically cosmopolitan while retaining an ancient and destiny-inspired rhetoric cum rationale. In this paper, I argue in favor of translating the Chinese term for intellectual discourse (sixiang) as “critical inquiry”, as opposed to the conventional idea of “modern Chinese thought”. The latter tends to suggest a discourse of settled ideas that is quite at odds with the agonistic nature of Chinese intellectual discourse. By understanding sixiang as critical inquiry, we are more effectively reminded that this discourse bears the legacy of its earlier incarnations in China’s war-torn and violent twentieth century. As critical inquiry, sixiang is shaped and burdened by the instrumentalization of language as a nation-building tool and a revolutionary weapon. Focusing on the work of China’s best known modern writer and critic, Lu Xun, the paper examines how an enduring anticipation of collective betterment (or national perfection) predisposes the discourse of sixiang towards certitude. In this regard, it will also consider the ways in which sixiang is enriched by linguistic play that acknowledges the contingency of beliefs and values on the words used in their articulation.

Is Adoptee Art Post-Colonial?

In a poem from 1937 addressed to future generations, Bertold Brecht famously declared that to engage in a conversation about trees was almost a crime since it meant keeping silent about the grievous socio-political ills of the day (above all, the rise of fascism). In this paper, I argue that in our own ‘dark times’ of deepening ecosocial woes, not to talk about trees would be the greater crime. The central question that I want to address here is how literature, and in particular lyric poetry, might contribute to this pressing conversation. Recalling Adorno’s comments on poetry after Auschwitz, I propose that in the era of accelerating ecocide, to write about trees (and other non-human others) poetically is both utterly necessary and profoundly problematic. As I have argued elsewhere, the kind of ecopoetics that is called for in this context necessarily has a ‘negative’ dimension. Focussing my discussion around William Wordsworth’s strange summons in “The Tables Turned” to “come forth into the light of things”, this paper elaborates the theory of negative ecopoetics as a literary practice that is radically subversive of those dualistic habits of thought which, in severing spirit from matter, mind from body, and man from nature, have both informed, and been informed by, historical patterns of relationship among humans and other others that can now be seen as intrinsically unethical and ultimately ecocidal.

Doing Phenomenology. Which Phenomenology? The trials and tribulations of phenomenological analysis in performance studies

Play texts are a form of representation. Yet they are also objects in the world. When actively engaged by the theatre-making process they take on complex crypto-agency via those who interpret and/or create them. They are a form of being. Drawing on the recent work of Alain Badiou in reviving discussions of the subject and of objective truth, this paper makes some remarks about the ontological parameters of dramaturgy, arguing that while the precise nature of a play text is hard to define, nevertheless dramaturgy is predicated on the notion that plays do have essential natures. On this ontological supposition resides the sense of a play’s structural elements, as well as its relationship to the real world ie. its relationship with truth. Dramaturgy is a way of intervening in processes of representation but it is anchored on issues of being. Questions of style, content, characterization, cultural context (both source and target) come second to the question of a play’s essential nature – its alethia. The paper further argues that while dramaturgy is both a function and a method of work it is, at present times, also a metaphor. Dramaturgy as a ‘truth-procedure’ provides a language – limited, flawed but extant – to speak of the ‘whole’ of the theatre experience rather than a specialised part of it. As theatre becomes more technological, capitalised and rationalised – its identity as a totality is eclipsed. ‘Theatrical vision’ – whether that of the director’s, the designer’s, or the playwright’s – detaches from philosophical understanding and becomes the deployment of technique only.

The publishing buzzword of recent times has undoubtedly been ‘open access’. But typically this has referred to scientific journal publishing, only recently expanding to include humanities research. This paper goes further in asking what might an open-access literary culture look like? Developments around online publishing, electronic-books, print-on-demand and digital libraries see publishers facing challenges on every side. How might publishers’ traditional role as gatekeepers of literary culture be similarly usurped in an environment characterised by networked books, wiki-novels and fictional ‘rip and burn’ practices? Outlining three exciting recent experiments in open-access literature, Simone Murray’s illustrated talk investigates what the digital future of literature might look like, and what its impact will be on writers, publishers and readers. Dr Simone Murray is Senior Lecturer in Communications and Media Studies at Monash University. Her research examines the interface of the book with other communications media, particularly via digital multiformatting of content. Her current research project focuses on the industrial substructures of book-to-screen adaptations of literary prize-winners, and how such research can combine book history, print culture and media studies perspectives. She is currently engaged in a three-year Australian Research Council Discovery project on the adaptation industry, titled ‘Books as Media: The Cultural Economy of Literary Adaptation’. The monograph arising from this research, The Adaptation Industry: The Cultural Economy of Literary Adaptation, is forthcoming from Routledge US in 2011.

This paper aims to test the adequacy of various theoretical approaches to utopian studies and science fiction studies – especially those drawn from the work of Darko Suvin, Raymond Williams and Fredric Jameson – to an understandinng of the history of Australian science-fictional dystopias. It argues that science fiction cannot readily be assimilated into either high literature (as utopia) or popular fiction (as genre) and rejects the widespread prejudice against both science fiction and dystopia in much contemporary academic literary and cultural criticism. It concludes that science fiction, whether utopian or dystopian, is as good a place as any for thought experiments about the politics of climate change, a case made with special reference to the late George Turner’s 1987 novel The Sea and Summer. Andrew Milner is Professor and Deputy Director of the Centre for Comparative Literature and Cultural Studies. His recent publications include Re-Imagining Cultural Studies (2002), Contemporary Cultural Theory (2002) and Literature, Culture and Society (2005). His Tenses of Imagination is currently in press with Peter Lang.