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…
Category: x Blogging
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…
Shakespeare 2019- Week 2
See Judi Dench in the full video right here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YSDQjEJTPzg Hi All, well we made it finally into A Midsummer Night’s Dream through the gateway of The Sonnets and Shakespeare’s many-sided sexuality! And we also learned about his deep and passionate belief in the power of art, of literature, of poetry to transcend the ravaging effects…
Budjwa Bay Again
Back to my old haunt the wonderful Bay just West of Cowan. This an amazing spot to experience total silence- and yet so close to the city. Spiders were all the way down the track and ducking and weaving was the only way of ensuring that their food supply mechanism was not destroyed!
Clemente Mount Druit- Week 2
We had a wonderful morning in which we explored the magic of Judith Wright’s poetry, especially in her poem “A Wattle Tree”. So many good responses to this poem from the class showed that Judith Wright really does have a way of making us see the landscape in a totally new, transformed, way. And the rhyme…
Introduction to Nineteenth Century Literature
Off to a great start with Nineteenth Century Literature! So good to sense your interest and enthusiasm in the Romantic poets. We are going to enjoy this ride through this amazing century together! Here are the recordings for this week’s lectures and tutorials and also a few blog topics to get you started: Possible…
Shakespeare Week 1 2019
Hello All: a great start! Thank you all for your keen participation in our introduction to the world of Shakespeare and to the theme of love as it played out in two of Shakespeare’s contemporaries, Christopher Marlow and Sir Walter Raleigh. Here are the recordings for our class this week: enjoy. And here a few…
Clemente OZ Lit 2019 Mount Druitt
Hello All, it was really good to start to get to know all of you yesterday: Vivian, Honeylene, Malia, Laura, Jeff, Suzanne, Heather, Jenny, Claire, Rita, Joseph, Julie, Geoffrey…. Peter…. I hope I have not left anyone out! We got off to a good start with our discussions on some poems by Indigenous poets who…
Wonderful New York Blogs from the Class of 2019: The Literature and Drama of New York.
The Best of the Bunch – those who earned a High Distinction in this assessment item are the top in the list: Emily Eicke Abbey Zito Mathilda Meader Carina Field Lauren Tribe Melody Carroll Jessica Smith Helen Citroni AND The rest were not far behind: NAOMI ZAKI: Kristen Nicola Adam Jones Darcy Lucid K’DOR: …
Culmination of New York Trip!
Click on this link to read this article on Indigenous Literature in Harlem: https://mailchi.mp/7317af3a7fc7/clemente-crosses-decades-and-distance?e=290dd1908b
Day 9: Wrap up of the course/ discussion on Book of Mormon/ Harlem/ Central Park/Group Meal out/ Carnegie Hall: Sounds of the American Century
Wow! What an amazing day! And we are still standing- because of inclement weather we had to squeeze a number of items into this, our last day in New York: First here is our wrap up discussion and our reflections o the Book Of Mormon -Go James! Then we had a number of tour stops…
Last run through Central Park with Canada geese
Tutorial Day 8: True West, Whitman, Crane and Brooklyn….
Hello all, please find the recording here for our lively discussion on True West and our reflections on the way our walk around Brooklyn and over Brooklyn Bridge enhanced our understanding of these two amazing poets- so different and yet so switched on to the underlying meaning in their experiences of place. Click on each…
Class given to African American Clemente Students In the Centre of Harlem
What a gift this was to be to share my insights on and understanding of Australian Indigenous literature with this passionate, switched-on group of Harlem Clemente students. They were so keen to hear and know about their less well -off brothers and sisters down-under. I shared with them the way that our university supports Indigenous…
Wonderful James Baldwin Exhibition in Down-Town Manhattan
Don’t miss this one if you are staying on in NY. At 533 West 19th is this commemoration of America’s greatest contemporary African American writer. Photographs, art works, videos, stories and letters give a rare, more private insight into how this man transformed his life and helped profoundly to shift fixed attitudes toward African Americans.
Moma -NY 2019
A goodly handful of us had a wonderful treat today: not only did we see and discuss some of the more controversial Post WW2 American artists, but we had hour long wanderings among the most well known 20th Century modernists: Such a happy team 🤣👍🎶 Inside we started with iconic Rothko and Picasso: It is…
Central Park Cameo: dogs and runners and snow…..
Early morning snaps on my run…. Altitudinal squirrels in the high branches bracing themselves against the cold wind…
