We began today’s lecture trying to respond to the question about language (in the screen shot below) and about the ways in which Samuel Beckett may be trying to address these questions. There were some great responses to the question from the class and you can hear these as the first items in the recorded…
Category: x Blogging
20th Century Poets, Francis Webb and Judith Beveridge
Today we began by exploring the life and language of Francis Webb, especially his poem “Five Days Old” which gives such a deep insight into the way he uses language to transform his experience into such a momentous event. We then had the privilege of having as our guest the poet Judith Beveridge who spoke…
Alf Dubbo and Mordecai Himmelfarb
The Aboriginal and the Jew have a really important place in Patrick White’s Riders in the Chariot. They embody two outsiders who have the key to a kind of wisdom that is not available to many. What is extraordinary is the way that Patrick White locates the seminal meeting between these two central characters in a…
George Orwell & Politics & Language
Audio Lecture on George Orwell’s “Shooting an Elephant” and “Politics and the English Language”: George Orwell who experienced the horrors of imperial exploitation when working as a police officer in Burma began then to think of ways in which he could challenge corruption in politics, indeed in all human affairs, using his gift of language.…
Patrick White- Australia’s only Literature Nobel Laureate.
Please see the end of this Blog for audios “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,…
Morning Walk Down Lyre-Bird Gulley- Begins with Stone lyre-bird ends with Flesh lyre-bird.
The walk down Lyre-Bird Gulley (from Mount Kuring-gai down to Calna Creek and on to either Crosslands or Berowra Waters) now begins with this beautiful stone carving of a lyre-bird created by Noel Rosten (Australian Plant Growers’ Assocation) and his team of native plant enthusiasts from Asquith Boy’s High School. This lyre-bird and the gulley…
Some Fabulous Blogs from The Visionary Imagination.
Students completing a unit on The Visionary Imagination with a focus on William Blake, Brett Whiteley and Patrick White have produced their first batch of blogs and there are some wonderful entries. Here are some of the most compelling entries: enjoy. And thank you the creators! CREATIVE TASK- Write a letter to William Blake asking him…
Some Extraordinary 20th Century Literature Blogs
Please enjoy reading some of these amazing blog entries by students studying 20th Century Literature at ACU. Thank you all for the hard work that has gone into these entries: Thank you Helena for this wonderful re-imagining of Paul Baumer’s letter to the Frenchman’s wife: Click here. Thank you Dhwani for this amazing Hopkins imitation:…
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 wanted to try to suggest…
Samuel Beckett- Abstract Artist in Words…
Today we explored the ways in which Samuel Beckett continues the work of Modernists such as Virginia Woolf (“I want to sink deeper and deeper away from the surface” The Mark on the Wall) and T.S. Eliot (“Words after speech reach into the silence” Four Quartets) in his, Beckett’s quest to bring the art of text into alignment…
Australian Literature in the Early 20th Century!
We began today with a glance at Henry Lawson’s “Drifted Back”, a short story which encapsulated aspects of his own life story, but which also reflected back on Lawson’s impressions of what was being lost as Australia moved into the new century: Community, Mateship, The Old Bush School, the destruction of the environment with the…
Brett Whiteley & William Blake 2018
Audio Lecture in the Brett Whiteley Studio Audio Lecture 1 in the NSW Art Gallery on Blake’s Job Engravings Audio Lecture 2 in the NSW Art Gallery on Blake’s Job Engravings Brett Whiteley’s “Grain of Sand” in Surry Hills & William Blake in Sydney: Blake’s “Job” in the NSW Art Gallery; What a fabulous connection was made today …
Art Consciousness and Spirit in Times of War
Today we explored Virginia Woolf (“The Mark on the Wall”), T.S. Eliot’s “Little Gidding” and Katherine Mansfield’s “The Daughters of the Late Colonel”. These are three amazing modernist authors who, in the shadow of war (both the First and Second World Wars) were trying to find a way through to some personal or spiritual certainty.…
Australian Colonialism from 1880 on: Republicanism, Feminism, Federation, and beyond…
Firstly let me share some more Outstanding Blogs. These are all inspirational! Thank you for your creative work on these. And thank you all for such a great Blog Crop! If these are anything to go by I am really looking forward to seeing your final ePortfolios! Nicola on Copacabana Beach Angelina on Letter to…
Best OZ Lit Blogs- First Run!
Students completing Australian Literature as a first year subject at ACU have the opportunity to write a weekly blog in either a creative or critical mode. They chose from a range of topics that reflects the reading for the week and that interfaces with their own experience. The work produced in this genre is outstanding…
The Marriage of Heaven and Hell segues into The Book of Job, Whiteley’s Alchemy, Chaucer & Patrick White
Today we explore all those sections of The Marriage of Heaven and Hell that provide a real insight into Blake’s deepest creative purpose and that also help us to understand where Patrick White was coming from in Riders in the Chariot. So we looked at his subversive “Proverbs of Hell” which sanctify the unsanctifiable (in conventional religion); we…
Modernism: T.S.Eliot & Virginia Woolf.
The visit to the art gallery of NSW last week was a perfect introduction to what we entered into today. It makes so much more sense talking about Virginia Woolf’s “Stream of Consciousness” and T.S. Eliot’s fragmented narratives (“These fragments I have shored against my ruins”- The Waste Land) afterhaving seen and discussed Picasso and Kirchner…
Early Colonial Australian Literature
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! Frank the poet got a look-in with…
Patti Smith & The Doors- their celebration of William Blake’s enduring significance.
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” .…
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…
creativity in time of war
Today we broached the world of Siegfried Sassoon, Wilfred Owen and Rupert Brooke. The focus was on the way the English language became transformed during this period with the direct impact of the horrors of the First World War. The jingoistic idealism of Rupert Brooke was kicked out by the hard hitting, grating, consonantal…
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…
Week 1: The Mountain Has Its Own Meaning
Today we explored the meaning of this wonderfully suggestive line from Judith Wright’s poem “Rockface”. Judith Wright’s line picks up a core theme in Australian Literature from the earliest days of colonization through to our own times: what is our attitude to the Australian landscape? Is it utilitarian and appropriative? Or is it open to…
Literature in Spring 2018
Hi All, this semester I am teaching Australian Literature to first years (with long-time colleague Elaine Lindsay): You can listen to Elaine in an interview she had on ABC radio recently with novelist Tom Keneally: http://www.abc.net.au/sundaynights/stories/s4432426.htm I am also teaching Twentieth Century Literature to second years and The Visionary Imagination (William Blake, Patrick White and Brett…
Shakespeare Blogs 2018
Hello All, I have had a wonderful day trawling through the ePortfolio/ Blogs produced by the Shakespeare Class of 2018. Such talent and inspiration is hard to find anywhere else. The top 6 ePortfolio/Blogs (all scoring High Distinctions) were as follows. I would encourage you all to scroll through these as powerful examples of what…
Top Blogs for Nineteenth Century Literature 2018
Well done to this fabulous group of bloggers who all scored a High Distinction for their wonderful blogs on the literature of the Romantic and Victorian periods. These are all model ePortfolios that will serve these students very well when they go for job interviews in a year or so. Thank you all for your…
Clemente Campbelltown 2018! Final Session: thank you!
Thank you all for being such a wonderful responsive group during the last 12 weeks. Our work together bringing Antony and Cleopatra to life with all your diverse talents will live with me for a long time- and the comments by Bell Shakespeare Company: “a privilege to be invited to come”- will also live with…
The Importance of Being Earnest Part 2
Today we almost finished watching the whole of the Suchet version of this amazing play and then had a wonderful tutorial in which we drilled down deeply into how Wilde’s language parodies the late Victorians. He is such an amazingly clever artist. Listen to the tutorial below to see how clever our students are in…
Shakespeare’s The Tempest Week 2- Summary and Blog Topics
Today we focussed attention on the Globe Theatre’s recent production of The Tempest. What a wonderfully powerful production this is! In Tutorials we concentrated on a couple of poems by George Herbert which provided a nice balance to the intensity of dramatic confrontation in the early scenes of The Tempest. Here is a useful link to…
Clemente Campbelltown – Prose 2: Tim Winton, George Orwell, Henry Lawson…
Please find here a reading of Tim Winton’s “Sand” together with a class discussion on this amazingly virtuosic prose writer who seems to be able to bend language to the shape of whatever takes his fancy! Enjoy this wonderful class interaction with the students at Campbelltown! Click on each of these images to enlarge them:…
Oscar Wilde and the End of the 19th Century
David Suchet in the role of Lady Bracknell brings Oscar Wilde’s satire of the British upper classes into a powerful focus. She is so much of the age of surfaces that anything she says or does is a complete parody of who she might think she is. Take a look at this interview with Suchet on his role in…
Tolstoy: The Death of Ivan Illych & Master and Man
Tolstoy brings us to one of the high points of 19th Century Literature. He explores with such uncompromising depth, issues of profound human concern. What we have explored in Austen, Dickens, George Eliot, Matthew Arnold and others here comes into focus with a white heat. Life and death and the ultimate meaning of all our lives…
Shakespeare’s The Tempest 2018
This is Shakespeare’s most imaginative and meaningful piece of theatre. Today we began watching the Globe Theatre’s amazing recent production starring Roger Allam. This production takes you into the heart of the Globe Theatre and presents the play as close as one can imagine to how it would have appeared in Shakespeare’s own time. See…
Clemente Campbelltown: Prose 1
Hello All – this is where you can hear last Wednesday’s talk about prose and the requirements for your up and coming take- home exam. Firstly find here a recording of our 2 hour session! Enjoy:
A Midsummer Night’s Dream- performance rehearsal & Shakespeare Sonnets 18, 65 & 73
Hi All, Scroll to the bottom of this blog for audio files for today’s tutorials and lecture (which was mainly a workshop). But before you go there, please listen to this amazing discussion about the nature of BEAUTY- a topic so close to Shakespeare’s heart- here spoken about by the late Irish poet John O’Donoghue.…
New York: Literature & Drama 2019 – Information Session.
Hi All, prospective New York (Literature and Drama) Students 2019. Please find below both the slides that were used during the information session (with James Marland and Michael Griffith) AND a recording of what we presented – and some of your questions- please be in touch with either James (James.marland@acu.edu.au) or myself (Michael.griffith@acu.edu.au) if there…
Art Gallery Visit for Clemente Campbelltown Students
A fabulous morning was had by all as we explored the ways in which the techniques and subject matter of paintings mirror the ways in which writers produce their poetry, drama and fiction. Much discussion ensued about the ways in which painters produced textures through their brush strokes, colour contrasts and thickness of paint. This…
George Eliot- Silas Marner: Lecture & Tutorial
This is one of those amazing books that you cannot put down until you reach the end. And why? Because it deals so deeply, persuasively with the essence of what it is to be human: to have a deep abiding need for wholeness, for inner certainty, no matter what the deflections on this path. Silas…
