Clemente Visit to the NSW Art Gallery 2017 ENGL104 Core Question: How Can Art Deepen Our Understanding Of Literature? BLOG TOPIC FOR THIS WEEK: Chose any ONE of the paintings (or art works) studied today. Describe the painting (or art work) of your choice and say how this painting (or art work) has expanded your…
Month: September 2017
American Modernism
Hi All, today we had a saunter through the highways and byways of American Modernism, beginning with William Carlos Williams and ending with Charlie Chaplin. Chaplin’s parody of Adolf Hitler in The Great Dictator is one of the great modernist, linguistic deconstructions of political grandiosity. It is paralleled by Chaplin’s closing speech where, using an entirely different…
David Malouf Conversations at Curlow Creek- 1
Today we explored the world of this amazing novel focussing on the nature and purpose of story telling. As David Malouf has so powerfully said in a lecture to Macquarie University students: Story telling is a kind of public dreaming. But before a story can be public- be published- it has to find a place…
David Malouf – Remembering Babylon- again!
Hello All, please find in this blog ALL the recordings from the last two weeks. Here also is the white board image from yesterday’s class: Here are your instructions for getting to the NSW Art Gallery for 2.30pm NEXT WEDNESDAY: https://www.artgallery.nsw.gov.au/visit-us/plan-your-visit/getting-here/ See you there next week! Enjoy!
Clemente Blog Addresses Spring 2017
Neil Campbell https://nineteenyearsinsideout.wordpress.com Josh Heilpern https://beinginthecreativezone.wordpress.com Ray Morgan https://raymorganblog.wordpress.com Ronan Parnell https://parnellpoetryoriginals.wordpress.com Adelaide Pascoe https://portamoreweb.wordpress.com Rima Pritchard https://rima309.wordpress.com Kyungshin Song https://kaysongblog.wordpress.com Yvette Whitty https://gingercat310.wordpress.com Patricia https://ninablog548.wordpress.com/ Colin Leong https://colin10100010.wordpress.com
Early 20th Century Australian Poetry and Prose
Today we explored the worlds of John Shaw Neilson, Miles Franklin, Frederic Manning and M.Barnard Eldershaw. This clutch or writers embrace a huge range of literary and intellectual interests. Neilson is the poet who shows how the language of poetry is closest to music and art through his use of colour and sound to paint…
Remembering Babylon Week 2
Hello All, this week we are going to focus on two things in our close study of Remembering Babylon. First we are going to look at Mr Frazer’s relationship to Gemmy in Chapter 14 and especially what it is about Gemmy that Mr Frazer thinks is so valuable. Mr Frazer calls Gemmy “a forerunner” on page…
Two Roberts- Frost and Lowell
Today we explored the contrasting worlds of Robert Frost and Robert Lowell, two iconic poets of North America who have done so much to “Sing America” in the Twentieth Century. Robert Frost, inheritor of the transcendentalists and of the energy of Walt Whitman, powerfully expresses his deep love for the American landscape and of its…
Francis Webb- the most unjustly neglected poet of the 20th Century (Herbert Read)
We have just spent 2 weeks exploring a huge range of Francis Webb’s poetry, from his earliest “Images in Winter” through to his last, magnificent “Nessun Dorma”. In between we have looked at his fascination with Australian exploration in Eyre All Alone and have studied his response to inmates in the hospital in which he was…
Australian Colonialism Part 2: Republicanism, Feminism, Federation and beyond…
Today we looked at Ada Cambridge, Barbara Baynton, Dame Mary Gilmore, Henry Lawson, Banjo Paterson and on and on…. what an extraordinary cast of voices from this period that celebrated Australian independence from England both thematically and linguistically… the opening sentences of “The Drover’s Wife” show beautifully how Lawson has transitioned the language and themes…
Heading in to David Malouf’s Remembering Babylon!
This week we are heading into this amazing literary work which is in prose, but is also profoundly poetical! Go to LEO to check out some more information on David Malouf. But here (in the image above) is your blog topic for this week. Notice in the image Gemmy standing on the fence! Remember this…
African American Writing since the Civil War
Today we strode through a host of key writers, men and women, who were powerfully proclaiming the need for free expression and total acceptance as humans. Underpinned by Martin Luther King Jr, all these writers expressed passionately their sense of injustice and their need for healing. Most powerful of all was James Baldwin in his…
Blog Topics for Week 5: Alice Walker and Henry Lawson
Class URLS. This will enable you all to easily access each other’s blogs and do your peer review comments on what you see there. Be supportive and share your thoughts on each other’s writing and on the great literature that we are exploring. Please send through to me any URLs that I have missed: Neil…
Early Australian Colonialism
Today we covered a host of impressive literary and artistic figures that included the Anonymous poet of the Swan River who really “had a go” at those politically motivated tyrants who wanted to say that the taking of Western Australia from the indigenous peoples was a good thing! We then dipped into Eliza Dunlop’s wonderful…
Mark Twain- Huckleberry Finn (& other things!)
As we learned today Mark Twain (Samuel Clemens) was quite a character, perhaps a little like a Michael Moore of the 19th Century, daring to satirize and expose everything that stood in the way of a truly humane way of being human! His story “The War Prayer” (which you can read by clicking here https://www.antiwar.com/orig/twain1.html)…
Patrick White Part 2
The focus on this week’s lecture was on the question of Patrick White’s religious outlook. His novel certainly makes many references to things that may be seen as spiritual or sacred, but he also gives conventional religion a rather scathing treatment, especially in the closing scenes of the novel where Stan Parker identifies God in…
Michael Griffith: Home Page- Literature and Life Spring 2025 
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