A Spring morning walk around Cowan brought hundreds of new colours to life: red waratahs, purple comespermum (pink matcheads), purple boronias (both the ledifolia and the pinnata, yellow hakea salicafolio, bright blue dampiera, brilliant yellow ispogon and the powerfully pink eriostomon Australiensis. Add to this the amazing sight of rare night-jar spotted just before dawn…
Category: x Blogging
Visionary Patrick White 2019: Riders in the Chariot
Patrick White: Riders in the Chariot What a wonderful world Patrick White takes us into in this remaking of the Australian social landscape in line with his own prophetic ambition to re-sacralize a spiritually desolate land. As he says in his essay “The Prodigal Son”: Because the void I had to fill was so immense, I…
William Blake’s Job Series juxtaposed against Brett Whiteley’s “Alchemy”
What an amazing morning and early afternoon was had by us all today, starting in the Print Room in the NSW Art Gallery where we saw the actual, original prints from William Blake’s The Book of Job series. In this transformation Blake tells Job’s story in order to show how religion needs to move…
Patrick White 2019
Patrick White- Australia’s only Literature Nobel Laureate. “In all directions stretched the Great Australia Emptiness, in which the mind is the least of possessions, in which the rich man is the important man… in which beautiful youths and girls stare at life through blind blue eyes… the buttocks of cars grow hourly glassier, food means cake…
African American Literature- Since The Civil War
Images from Today’s Lecture: African American Writing Recordings from today’s classes: 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.…
The Marriage of Heaven and Hell
I have also: The Bible of Hell: which the world shall have whether they will or no. For Blake The Marriage of Heaven and Hell occurs when the sanctimonious, commandment-loving Angel finally gives up his/her smug sense of superiority and happily embraces the flames of fire and joins the Devil’s party, a party which believes in the presence…
Australian Literature- Art Gallery Visit 2019
What a great turn-out for this visit! Thank you all for your keen participation. We covered a wealth of material in the allocated hour from early 19th Century through to contemporary and Indigenous Art. Hoping that this will provide lots of useful insight for your blogs and your quiz! I have attached the audio talk…
Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson
These are two of the greatest American poets of the Nineteenth Century. You are going to love their insights, their passion and their originality. Please go and read carefully the introductions to both poets in either volume of the 2 Anthologies: page 1070 and page 1246 in Volume 1 (The Norton Anthology of American Literature…
William Blake Songs of Innocence and Experience- Catch-Up-Week
Please find here the images and the wonderful audio discussions that wove around our exploration of some of Blake’s key songs, especially “London”, “The Divine Image” and “The Human Abstract”. Blog topics arising for this week include the following: CREATIVE: Use the first line of any of Blake’s poems and write your own poem, based…
Later Colonial Australian Literature – around the 1890s!
Tom Roberts Bailed Up: https://www.artgallery.nsw.gov.au/collection/works/833/ Hi All, Building on last week’s excursion into the literature of the first half of the 19th Century in Australia, here is a quick survey of some of the material I will be exploring with you this week: Colonial Literature 1890s 2019 This is the period when the Australian idiom in both…
William Blake The Songs of Innocence- 2 – With The Doors and Patti Smith…
Today we launched into The Doors‘ “Break on Through” and spoke about how this was a Blakean 20thC explosion manifesting musically Blake’s core idea of “cleansing the doors of perception” (from The Marriage of Heaven and Hell). We then plunged right on into Patti Smith’s wonderful “My Blakean Year” in which she sings about her heartfelt sense…
Early Colonial Australian Literature (2019)
Hi All, this week we begin our exploration of Nineteenth Century Literature in Colonial Australia. It begins with the voices of convicts, aboriginals, the first “native” born colonial poets (such as Charles Harpur and Henry Kendall) and some of the first women writers in the colony: Louisa Anne Meredith and Catherine Helen Spence. Browse through…
William Blake The Songs of Innocence and Experience 1
HI All, We had a fabulous morning (despite the sound system glitches) on William Blake’s “Contrary States” and then the way this idea is embedded and dramatized in The Songs of Innocence and Experience. We talked about the ways in which these ideas have been taken up by Allen Ginsberg, by the Rock Group The Doors…
Writing By and About Indigenous Australians.
Hi All, this is the territory we will be travelling through next week. Please look through this file but be sure also to bring “The Mountain’s Own Meaning” with you next week to tutorials too…. The Mountain Has its Own Meaning INDIGENOUS WRITERS WEEK 2 Judith Wright’s Two Dreamtimes: N Two Dreamtimes 1Two Dreamtimes 2Two…
William Blake Visionary Imagination 1
Hi All, this is where I will be posting up a great deal about William Blake and Visionary Imagination… stay tuned: William Blake’s Death Mask: what a powerful face! In today’s lecture we looked at what is meant by “Visionary” imagination, with a special reference to Allen Ginsberg’s epiphany in reading the poem “Ah! Sunflower”. …
American Literature 2019 Session 1
Today we romped through an historical and cultural survey of American Literature, beginning with the early 17th Century and ending up with Tupak today! We also had a wonderful tutorial exploring Thoreau’s decision to live “deliberately” and not to die feeling that he hadn’t really lived. This paragraph provoked some powerful deep self-questioning by…
Australian Literature Mid-Winter Spring 2019- Week 1: The Mountain has its own Meaning.
In Australian Literature today we explored the themes that arise from the line from Judith Wright’s poem “Rockface” in which she declares “the remnant of a mountain has its own meaning”. This image from Russel Drysdale’s Desert Landscape captures similar resonances to Judith Wright’s poem: https://m.artgallery.nsw.gov.au/collection/works/OA15.1959/ Drysdale, like Judith Wright seems to honour the dignity of…
American Literature, Australian Literature, Bush Walking, Oz Lit, Visionary Imagination, William Blake, x Blogging
A Pome- from a recently discovered Manuscript of a play by W. Shakespeare
Spring is come The grass is riz Oi wonder where the flowers iz But Shakespeare was wrong this time: the flowers are blooming, exploding around Sydney now in the dead of winter!!. This is the amazing aspect of living on the 33rd parallel: the seasons cannot make up their minds: is it winter? is it…
American Literature 2019
Hello All, We will be starting our exploration of American Lit next week and this is where I will be posting my key thoughts about the reading I am doing on the subject. So please stay tuned. I hope all of you will buy the text (The Norton Shorter Anthology of American Literature 9th Edition:…
Best Shakespeare Blogs 2019
Thank you all for some wonderful Shakespeare Blogs. This has indeed been a feast. Please check out some of the wonderful contributions listed below Shakespeare in a Rainbow! Best Summative Entry- with a focus on why Shakespeare continues to be important in our own time: https://georgiahoulihan.wordpress.com/2019/05/06/summative-entry-shakespeare-and-renaissance-literature/ Thank you Georgia! Honest Summative Entry reflecting on the…
Best Blogs for Nineteenth Century Literature 2019
There have been some truly wonderful blogs from our 19th Century Literature Group this semester. Thank you all, it has been a feast! I would like to publish everyone here because everyone has made such a great effort, but it makes more sense to select a few that carry the flavour of the whole. Thank…
Clemente Mount Druitt- Grand Finalé
Thank you Heather, for creating this fabulous short “video” of our time together!! Our final day with Clemente students at Mount Druitt took us through a tour of the wonderful blogs these students have been producing as well as their presentation of scenes from Louis Nowra’s play The Golden Age. It was a very special day…
The Importance of Doing a Quiz!
For those who missed this morning’s tutorial on the quiz please listen to the attached!
Merchant of Venice Week 11
Please find attached the audio commentary on The Globe Theatre production of The Merchant of Venice- enjoy! See you all at the Parramatta Riverside Theatre at 12.30pm on Saturday 18th May, for The Merchant of Venice live!!!!
The Importance of Being E(a)rnest- and Oscar Wilde as a driving force in the Fin de Siécle….
This week we explored the world of Oscar Wilde, especially his trenchant, satiric, criticism of the Victorian Age. We had the great good fortune to watch David Suchet play the role of Lady Bracknell in this play. He transforms Lady Bracknell into the grotesque image of the upper middle class that Oscar Wilde was so…
Week 10: Shakespeare- The Merchant of Venice.
This week we started exploring the world of Shakespeare’s mid career play The Merchant of Venice. We also looked at episodes from the Globe Theatre’s amazing recent production: Here is the link for the play: https://globeplayer.tv/videos/the-merchant-of-venice-english and here is the audio for our lecture in Week 10. Slides for this lecture you will find in LEO!
Clemente Mt Druitt- Week 10
Wonderful Blogs + first rehearsal of The Golden Age- this was a day to be remembered! So many creative entries in response to what we are exploring in Australian Literature, then the real challenge of trying to find a way of presenting Louis Nowra’s extraordinary use of dramatic language in bringing to life this group…
Some fabulous Blogs coming out of The Clemente Mount Druitt class! Please comment on their blogs!
Hi All, I am just working my way through the blogs produced by our Mount Druitt, Clemente contingent. Many of these students are coming to study for the first time, or are returning to study from many years ago. They will love any comments you will give them, and there are some fabulous entries there.…
Tolstoy!
Please find the slides for this week posted into Leo Module 9. Here is the audio for this week. This contains vital information for your final assessment! BLOG TOPICS for WEEK 9: CREATIVE 1. Write a short paragraph describing a family conversation in which it is clear that all parties in the conversation are…
The Tempest – Take 3: Musick and Masques
Hi All, today we covered the core ideas of music (Musick!) and the Masque in The Tempest. These are the central clue to the deepest meaning of this play. In particular we explored the way that Ariel (pictured on the right) manages to persuade Prospero (on the left) to bring more empathy into his relationship to…
Clemente Week 9: Patrick White, Francis Webb, Louis Nowra….
This week we spent some time introducing Louis Nowra’s play The Golden Age which will be our performance piece over the next 3 weeks! What fun! Please read as much of the text as you can before we start rehearsals next week…. We also looked in at Patrick White, Australia’s only Nobel Prize winning novelist &…
Matthew Arnold’s Scholar Gypsy and the Victorian Context…
Today we explored the wider context of educational ideas in the Victorian era, focussing on John Stuart Mill, Cardinal Newman, Charles Dickens and finally Matthew Arnold. His poem about the student who absconded from Oxford University to find a deeper truth to life’s questions still sits with us today as a powerfully relevant poem. The…
Tempest Take 2! Shakespeare Plus
Today we surfed through some more of that amazing, wonderful production of The Tempest by the Globe Theatre. What a miracle of dramatic recreation that performance is. Highly recommended. Here is the content for today’s session. There will be no new blog topics this week as you are beginning to prepare for your major essay.…
Clemente Mount Druitt- Week 8: Lawson revisited
Dear All, we had a very useful day yesterday brainstorming all the requirements for your up-coming essay. And thank you to our learning partners for being there to amplify all the input. Here is the audio and the various links to the materials presented in class: You will find that the audio also covers some…
Hard Times Continued…..
We had great fun this morning exploring the way Thomas Gradgrind (Sir!) introduces himself in his own mind to the classroom full of little pitchers. Here he accosts Sissy Jupe for her lack of factual knowledge about horses and praises wonderful Bitzer for his “bitzy” factual knowledge of a horse. Thank you Angelina and Steph…
Shakespeare’s The Tempest 1
Today we broached Shakespeare’s last great masterpiece The Tempest, the play which presents some of his greatest poetry within a story that can stand as a model for humanity’s quest for harmony within a world of chaos. We watched the opening act of the play in The London Globe Theatre’s latest performance. The link for this performance is…
Clemente Mount Druitt- Week 7
This week we began with talking about your answers to the quiz and also spent time on going over some of the most common errors of expression. We first read out some of the best responses to questions, especially those about your recent visit to the Art Gallery. There were some wonderful insights here and…
Charles Dickens and the Victorian Age
My favourite lecture is exploring the similarities between the Victorian era and our own. There are in fact so many similarities given the amount of new technology that the Victorians had to deal with. But the questions that arise from this topic are huge: Is the world becoming a better place (as the Victorians predicted)?…
Shakespeare’s Poetry and Sonnets….
Despite the fire alarm and the emergency exodus we had a profitable day exploring Shakespeare’s dramatic theories as argued and exemplified in his amazing Prologue to Henry V in which he calls to the heavens for a “Muse of Fire”! Listen to the audio of this adventure below: This was followed by a tutorial on…
Nineteenth Century Literature- the Context of the Visual Arts: Enlightenment… Romanticism… Victorianism….
Art Gallery Quiz Questionnaire2019 HI All, we had an amazing experience this Wednesday, exploring the art of the Enlightenment, followed by the art of Romanticism (both in Europe and Australia) and then the art of the Victorian Era. These paintings depict many of the social and historical contexts and obsessions of the late 18th and 19th…
The Shakespeare Room and Shakespeare Resources in the Mitchell Library + Renaissance Art for Shakespeare Plus Students at ACU in 2019
Shakespearean Art in the NSW Gallery 2019 Thank you ALL for your outstanding attendance today- just about 100% – that is a record!!! The State Library with its wonderful Shakespeare statue outside (in one-time Shakespeare Place”) was a delight to be involved with- despite the life-endangering freeway that one has to cross to get there!!!!.…
Australian Art for Clemente Australian Literature Students
Hi All, we have had a wonderful experience this Monday exploring the ways in which Australian art, like Australian literature, tell the story about the Australian experience, OUR experience. We explored paintings from the earliest days of colonisation through to modern times. These paintings included works by Indigenous Aboriginal, Swiss, German, Italian and even some…
Wordsworth, The Romantics and Withering Frights!
I enjoyed very much this morning talking to you about one of my alltime favourite poems “Resolution and Independence” in which William Wordsworth celebrates the way his experience of life was profoundly challenged by meeting with a really old Leech Gatherer. This man had the “Resolution and Independence” which Wordsworth himself felt lacking in his…
Ben Jonson’s Shakespeare and More About Midsummer!
We had a wonderfully dramatic day today with hours spent on Ben Jonson’s extraordinary poem in praise of his rival William Shakespeare, followed by much hilarity watching Egeus challenging Theseus to help him tame his recalcitrant daughter into marrying the man she DOES NOT LURVE!! We then finished with a beautiful poetic rendering of the…
Australian Literature: Late Colonial- Early Federation: Gilmore, Lawson, O’Dowd etc….
So this is the period when Australian Literature and Art began to celebrate its independence from the tyranny of England: notice the fireworks over Sydney Town Hall on Federation day!!! But This was really not good enough for die-hard republicans like Henry Lawson and Mary Gilmore who saw the continuing injustices in Australia society- which…
Some Gems from the first crop of blogs
Here is a beautiful description of a / Coleridgean apprecation of nature in the Australian context: https://anthonydigges.home.blog/ – Thank you Anthony! Here is a companion piece to Anthony’s: https://julieisajunkie.home.blog/ Thank you Julie for sharing your passion for the stillness of the Australian bush! Here is a wonderful account of a Wordsworthian moment in Nepal:…
Nineteenth Century Romantics Week 3!
Today we explored William Wordsworth’s Preface to the Lyrical Ballads. This is an amazingly revolutionary document in the context of its time, daring to acknowledge the worth of ordinary human being and daring to say that the language of the uneducated contains more essential truth than the language of most academics. Powerful stuff! And his friend Coleridge…
Shakespeare 2019 Week 3: The Play within a Play- All the World’s A Stage
Today we homed into this aspect of Shakespeare’s subversive and controversial writing. Shakespeare loves to dramatize the way in which we all spend so much of our energy play acting, both to ourselves and to others. Where is the real “me” we may all well ask- and Shakespeare seems to be challenging us with this…
Clemente Mount Druitt Week 3- From Charles Harpur to D.H. Lawrence
Slides used in Week 3: Clemente Week 3 Slides We began by celebrating the work of all those students who have managed to get their first blogs up. Well done you digital technical wizz-kids!!!! It is wonderful to begin to hear how you are taking so much from the content and are willing to share…
Pandaemonium Part 2: The Romantics Contd.
“mind-forged manacles” We had some fabulous classes this morning exploring William Blake as both a mystic and a social activist in the poems “Auguries of Innocence” and “London” Click on the poems for a direct link. You can hear a wonderful class discussion on both these poems right here: And here are some of the…
