Today we launched into The Marriage of Heaven and Hell and especially we began by looking at the ways in which William Blake has become a prophetic figure for the Age of Aquarius in the second half of the Twentieth Century and beyond. It was indeed William Blake who coined the phrase “the New Age” .…
Month: August 2018
Twentieth Century Literature – NSW Art Gallery Visit
At the NSW Art Gallery we explored the ways in which the early modernists began to shift their vision from trying to represent the “real world” towards capturing either the evanescent, fleeting surfaces (as in the work of Camille Pissaro) or the underlying structures, or bones, as in the work of Paul Cezanne. Then in…
Art Gallery Visit for Australian Literature Students 2018
Thank you all for your keen participation and all your answers to questions as we were going around the Australian sections of the NSW Art Gallery. I hope you all got a sense of how important it is to get a sweeping picture of the development of Australian painting from its Aboriginal origins through to…
Introductions to Innocence and Experience & The Human Abstract
Today we explored the 2 Introductions (to Innocence and Experience) and found that both these works give a clear insight into the motivation behind each of these books. The Introduction to Innocence presents the aspiration that these songs will celebrate the joy, harmony and sense of well-being that children bring with them into the world:…
Im Westen Nichts Neues: All Quiet on the Western Front – Remarque
Link for the Film Version of All Quiet on the Western Front. Today we had the fabulous experience of opening our hearts and minds to this wonderful, astonishing book by Erich Maria Remarque All Quiet on the Western Front or, in German Im Westen Nichts Neues (literarily: In the West Nothing New). This title is alluded to on the…
Bobby Wabalanginy’s challenge to Xenophobic Australia
From Lin Onus’s “Hills Hoist” – NSW Art Gallery. Kim Scott’s Bobby Wabalanginy is a character who dares to confront the hardened utilitarianism of the European invaders with dance, humour and song. The closing scenes of the novel in which Bobby does a hambone (striptease) -bar his bright red underpants- in front of a kangaroo…
Peer Review 2: Jaimie Bonsall
This is a peer review of Jaimie Bonsall’s first blog: https://jaimiebonsall.home.blog/ This is a fabulous entry Jaimie! Well done. You capture well that feeling of loss for the innocent joy of childhood that we all feel. You write beautifully with a good sense of how to bring your descriptions to life. The editing that I…
Blake’s Songs and Letters
William Blake wrote many letters to his friends and enemies. These letters give a powerful insight into his experience and his thoughts. Most importantly they invite us in to the Visionary Imagination that was his gift to humanity. A letter like the one written to his friend Thomas Butts on October 2, 1800 gives us…
Kim Scott That Deadman Dance 1
Kim Scott standing under the “skirt” of a Black Boy/ Grass Tree (Xanthorea Australis)- Courtesy of Australian Book Review. Thank you all for your participation in today’s lecture and the tutorials. It was good to see such an engagement and an interest in the plight of our Indigenous cousins. And clearly it is powerful for us…
Peer Review No 1
Alexandra’s Blog is at https://s00240376.wordpress.com/2018/07/24/the-journey-begins/ You have set this up very well Alexandra. The blog looks good and is correctly categorised as Australian Literature. The writing is also imaginative and draws the reader into the experience. However you could simplify your language and speak more directly from experience. At times you seem to be pushing for…
The Visionary Imagination: William Blake- Innocence & Experience Week 2
We had another wonderful engagement with some of the core ideas underpinning Blake’s vision of the states of the human psyche that are so powerfully dramatized through the contrast between his two books The Songs of Innocence and The Songs of Experience. We looked today especially at the two Nurse’s Songs, one presenting the state of containment and inner…
Gerard Manley Hopkins as 20th Century Poet.
Today we have the extraordinary good fortune for an excuse to be immersed in the creative, imaginative world of Gerard Manley Hopkins. His presence at the beginning of the 20th Century (his work was first published in 1918) gives us a context against which to experience some of the tragic directions in which the 20th…
Writing by and about Indigenous Australians
This week we have entered into the wonderful world of indigenous writing as a context for our study of Kim Scott’s That Dead Man Dance. And for us we are blessed that this study falls in the context of the Garma Festival [click on the link]which is taking place in Arnhem Land as we speak. This festival is…
The Visionary Imagination – Week 1!
What a great start to our exploration of William Blake’s transformative visionary imagination! Most of you seemed to grasp really well, through Ginsberg’s celebration of Blake’s poem “The Sunflower”, how Blake seems to provide a gateway to a deeper or heightened vision of reality. Cleansing the Doors of Perception, seems to be what Blake is…
Event and Experiment: The 20th Century!
Thank you all for your keen participation today. It was a good start to an amazingly interesting subject. Today we began exploring the tumultuous 20th Century, the century of violence beyond all human comprehension and the century of discovery of both technology and of the heights and depths of the human spirit. From Einstein to…
Michael Griffith: Home Page- Literature and Life Spring 2025 
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