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…
Category: x Blogging
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…
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…
Romanticism & Victorianism: First Trawl through Blog Posts
Hi All, there have been some outstanding blogs on aspects of the 19th Century. This is a wonderful start to your blogging for this unit! I thought I would share with you a range of the creatively exciting posts by members of our group. Thank you all for your terrific efforts here. This proves to…
A Midsummer Night’s Dream Part 2
Le Painting by Henri Fuseli This week we explored many of the “languages” of the play: rustic, lovers, aristocratic, fairy… and we also focussed closely on that most mysterious speech by Bottom about Bottom’s dream. We came to no clear conclusion on this speech, but, in the context of Hypollyta’s response to Theseus at the…
Shakespeare and the Renaissance- Blogs Take 1: Some of the Highlights
HI All, THE SHAKESPEARE AND RENAISSANCE GROUP OF STUDENTS 2018 there are some outstanding bloggers amongst this group; this is a small showcase of some amazing work by creatively gifted and talented students. It has been so good to see many of you making your blog space your own, using it both to flex your…
Challenges to Utilitarian Education: Arnold & Newman…
Originally posted on Michael Griffith: Home Page- Literature and Life Spring 2025:
This week we explored the ways in which writers and artists in the Victorian Age tried to undermine the prevailing utilitarian views on education. We have seen this presented very strongly in Charles Dickens’ Hard Times with his emphasis on the importance of Wonder and…
Challenges to Utilitarian Education: Matthew Arnold & Cardinal Newman…
This week we explored the ways in which writers and artists in the Victorian Age tried to undermine the prevailing utilitarian views on education. We have seen this presented very strongly in Charles Dickens’ Hard Times with his emphasis on the importance of Wonder and Imagination as counters to a world run on facts. Matthew Arnold…
Shakespeare Week 3: Marlow, Ralegh, Shakespeare ( A Midsummer Night’s Dream/ As You Like It)
Originally posted on Michael Griffith: Home Page- Literature and Life Spring 2025:
We covered some really interesting ground in class today through exploring the Pastoral tradition as presented by Marlow (in “The Passionate Shepherd to His Love” and as knocked down by Ralegh (in “The Nymph’s Reply to the Shepherd”). So these poems are presenting critically…
Shakespeare Week 6- from Classical Tragedy to Romantic Comedy: A Midsummer Night’s Dream
Today we broached one of Shakespeare’s most loved plays, his celebratory fantasy A Midsummer Night’s Dream. We explored the ways in which Shakespeare in his opening scenes ricochets his audience from the high-sounding, poetical iambic pentameter of the Greek court through to the passionate language of the Romantic lurvers and then down into the depths of…
Moving into the Victorian Age with Dickens and others.
Blog Topics galore!!!! *Today we tapped into Dickens’ challenge to the educational systems of his day. *How effective do you think he was in pointing to the heart of the problem with contemporary education? *Have we learned anything since his day? *Write a short piece that expresses your sense of the value of Dickens’ educational…
Victorianism and Charles Dickens
Originally posted on Michael Griffith: Home Page- Literature and Life Spring 2025:
What a fabulous week to be able to jump in and explore all those amazing connections between the Victorian Age and Sydney our home city: The Queen Victoria Building, Victoria Road, Albert Road, The Palace Gardens… the list goes on. And it is important…
A Day of Shakespeare!
ACU Students had a feast of Shakespeare in Australia yesterday! As is well known one of the first plays to be produced in Australia, back in 1800, was Shakespeare’s Henry IV, with a convict cast. What an amazing historic event that was, is, and remains. To have Shakespeare’s subversive political stance, his hatred of officialdom,…
Unacknowledged Legislators!
Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the World. Shelley was clearly moved to declare that poets had a fundamentally important role in the world, reminding humans about things that really mattered, beyond the entrapments of material possessions. So what was it that Shelley was so deeply drawn towards? If we look at the opening sentences…
Shakespeare 2018 Week 3: Becoming Antony, Cleopatra and their host of followers!
Wow, what a gas! Today we plunged right in to the world of Antony and Cleopatra, workshopping some of the key scenes from the early part of the play and identified some of the complex emotional interactions that this play embodies in “living lines”! (as Ben Jonson so rightly observed.) This was a wonderful opportunity…
Romanticism Week 3
So how have I been responding to all these radical ideas developed during the Romantic period? What has caught my attention as being especially relevant to my own experience and my own period of history? Now is my chance to express something of my reaction to all I have been reading, either in the form…
Shakespeare 2018 Week 2: Heading into Egypt!
We accelerated our entry into the world of Cleopatra today by looking closely at the scene (in Act 2.2) where Enobarbus describes Cleopatra in terms that evoke her amazing attractive power: The barge she sat in, like a burnished throne Burned on the water. The poop was beaten gold, Purple the sails, and so perfumed…
Shakespeare Plus 2018!!!
This semester’s Shakespeare unit has at its focus the wonderful Antony and Cleopatra which is being presented by Bell Shakespeare later this month.And we are all off to see their production on Friday March 23rd- Yoo Hoo! Accompanying us will also be a group of around 15 students from the Clemente Program(for those experiencing multiple disadvantage)…
Proud Grandad!
It was wonderful today to be able to “shout” my granddaughter Leeara to lunch in our sunny quadrangle. Leeara has enrolled in a Bachelor of Science Psychology at ACU Strathfield, one of the very few universities in Australia who have made this particular degree available. It was great to be able to introduce Leeara to…
Welcome to Nineteenth Century Romanticism 2018
We had our first class yesterday and plunged straight into the radicalism of William Blake and William Wordsworth. William Blake dared to openly challenge the dark world of the 18th Century Church with its restrictive moralism and its fear and hatred of the human body. “The Garden of Love” is Blake’s symbolic sermon on how…
Best New York Blogs 2018!!
Here is our fabulous group of 2018 in the heart of Harlem, New York, indeed at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture. This was one of our most exciting and informative days in which the beating heart of American culture was opened to us through the oratorical powers of Cedric our African American…
The MOMA: Contemporary American Art as a context for Contemporary American Literature.
Wiliam Carlos Williams, Charles Demuth, Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac, Frank O’Hara, Jackson Pollock…. these are some of the interlocking names that bring literature and the visual arts together. Today we had a wonderfully rich tour, conducted by MOMA lecturer Sylvia into some of these interconnections. Here is the full audio lecture/ floor talk and attached…
Day 5: Brooklyn with Walt Whitman and Hart Crane and The Book of Mormon
Today was a momentous day for honouring Walt Whitman’s wonderfully Quaker imagination and Hart Crane’s spiritualisation of one of the icons that preceded modernism. Whitman was of course passionate about the Brooklyn Ferry which he travelled on regularly from his home in Brooklyn to Manhatten. But it was not just the ferry, but it was…
Michael Griffith: Home Page- Literature and Life Spring 2025 
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