Up up and away! Students from 3 ACU campuses (Sydney, Melbourne and Brisbane) met in Los Angeles to head together to New York to study “The Literature and Drama of New York” which James Marland and myself are teaching this year and in subsequent years if all goes to plan: We arrived after a 24…
Category: x Blogging
Message for imminent New Yorkers!
NasHI All, imminent New Yorkers. It will be really good if we could create a complete list of your WordPress URLs BEFORE we depart. Please create your WordPress Account now at https://wordpress.com/create/ Please send through your URL to Michael.griffith@acu.edu.au and I will build the list. If you need help at any time you can ring…
New York, New York
We are off to New York very soon to study the Literature and Drama of New York: 30 students + 3 staff: what a blast! We have been working all week on the poetry, fiction and drama of New York and will arrive at JFK thoroughly soaked in the language and experience of those who…
Top ePortfolios for Twentieth Century Literature 2016: Extraordinary Explorations into images of Destruction and Creation!
Click on any of these names to reveal some fabulous blogging work in Literature Lalee Manizha Caitlyn Tuckerman Melissa Fleck Daniel Mangabat Daniel Ognovski Anne-Marie Dimarco Morgan Bailey
Top ePortfolios for The Visionary Imagination in 2016: what an inspiring group of visionary bloggers!
Audrey Bowles Caitlyn Tuckerman Morgan Bailey David McGettigan
Michael Griffith: Medieval Mystics- Meditation: the Recipe for Peace
Hello All, I was privileged to be able to organize with the Al Ghazzali Centre in Sydney a Symposium on the theme of Love & Intellect: A Recipe for Peace. We had Islamic speakers Imam Afroz Ali and Ustadh Feraidoon who developed this theme. I gave a talk chiefly on the Mysticism of Hildegard of…
Love & Intellect: Recipe for Peace
Come and be stimulated by presentations and discussions on the mysticism of Rumi, St John of the Cross, Meister Eckhart, Hadewijch of Antwerp and others in this exciting interfaith presentation by the Al Ghazzali Centre, ACU and ACU’s SLA (The Sacred in Literature and the Arts Group). These mystical writers have a vitally important message for…
Brian Friel Faith Healer
This was an amazing play that really does take us into the heart of everything that the twentieth century was about. T.S. Eliot speaks about modern life as one where we are all “distracted from distraction by distraction”. We have seen how Gerard Manley Hopkins challenges the destructiveness, the distractedness of his times as, in…
BlakeanPineappleCoconutsBBsBlakesoniansBlakettes….
Our Blakean students today created some wonderful drama pieces that captured the life, times and contemporary significance of William Blake. There were dramatizations of some of his greatest poems (e.g “London”) with animations of overcrowded London streets; there were scenes of contemporary life emphasizing the fact that we spend too much time on chasing the dollar…
Nation, Race and Language: “Wherever I hang my knickers – that’s my home.”
Today we explored a range of immigrant writers who either embraced the English Language totally (such as Chinua Achebe and Wole Soyinka), or those who enjoyed flaunting the creative powers of their own appropriation of English (such as Louise Bennett and Grace Nichols), finally to those such as M.Nourbese Philip who seemed to lament the loss…
Remembering Babylon- David Malouf
Whether this is Jerusalem or Babylon we know not: William Blake The Four Zoas. With this epigraph from William Blake, David Malouf challenges us to consider whether the colonial Australian world that he evokes in this beautiful novel is a place in which harmony might evolve, or in which chaos and lamentation might descend. It is…
George Orwell: The Creation of an Orwellian Backbone as a Way towards Purifying the Human Condition.
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. Language for Orwell was man’s most creative as well as his most destructive tool.…
Patrick White’s Gift of Reconciliation
Patrick White had the extraordinary insight, back in 1961 to write about the amazing creativity inherent in his Aboriginal character Alf Dubbo who plays a leading role in the novel Riders in the Chariot. The novel won the Miles Franklin award in that year and then in 1965 won the Gold Medal of the Australian Literature Society. Patrick White’s…
Jerusalem Bay- Taffy’s Lookout: Spring Day
This walk begins at Cowan Station and is part of The Great North Walk for the first half. The wildflowers this season have been the best I have ever seen. The walk down to Jerusalem Bay is nothing short of miraculous. Here at the start are a stand of 2 metre high Isopogons (Anethafolius). These…
Francis Webb Seminar Series Feb 2017
Please find advance warning of a Francis Webb Poetry Seminar Series Running in Feb 2017 Click here for PDF: 2017-mg-francis-webb-gods-fool Please find advance warning of a Francis Webb Poetry Seminar Series Running in Feb 2017
Highlights from first cull of Twentieth Century Literature Blogs!
What a totally amazing collection of Blogs from students studying 20th Century Literature at ACU. There is such depth and variety in this swag of great entries. Congratulations to all of you – and to those who didn’t quite make this list. This is just to give you an idea of the riches I have…
Virginia Woolf & Katherine Mansfield
Today we explored the ways in which these two early 20th Century authors used their creative gifts to delve deep into their own consciousness into that of their characters. The two daughters in “The Daughters of the Late Colonel” suddenly find themselves freed from the patriarchal and imperialist shackles of their father and yet are unable…
Highlights from the first trawl through William Blake and the Visionary Imagination.
ACU Students in this unit have produced some awesome entries inspired by their reading of William Blake. Enjoy some of these wonderfully creative expositions of Blake’s continuing relevance to our own times: Johanna Powers description of Blake’s human qualities: https://johannapower.wordpress.com/2016/08/23/week-4-blog-post/ Caitlyn Tuckerman on Job’s Nightmares https://caitlyntuckerman.wordpress.com/2016/09/06/jobs-nightmare/#comments Jesse Ocsan– tales of Experience: the ambulance man. https://ocsanj.wordpress.com/2016/08/23/week-3-tale-of-experience/…
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…
Bush Walk to Cobah Point 11/09/2016
The Bush track to Cobah Bay starts around 10 kms north west from Arcadia: If you have not seen the spring flowers around Sydney yet this spring, then please follow me on this amazing journey: 18 kms in around 6 leisurely photo-filled hours! The spring flowers on this particular walk are spectacular. They are the…
William Blake: What Has He Meant to Me Personally?
Hi All, I plan to expand here on the many aspects of Blake’s work that have inspired me in my life and in my teaching. But if I put my ideas down here they may steal your thunder- and you have already heard so much in class about what inspires me about Blake. But I…
Manifesto & Modernism
The creator of the Video art work Manifesto Julian Rosefeldt was asked (in the last essay in the book Manifesto): … are these old manifestos relevant today? He answered: Absolutely. And not just relevant, but also visionary… We’re well advised, therefore to read artist manifestos as seismographs of their age. (seismograph= an instrument that measures and records details…
Brett Whiteley and Blake’s Job
What an amazing morning and early afternoon was had by us all today, starting in 2 Raper Street at the Brett Whiteley Studio: we saw him walking down this very street in the film viewed last week! To travel through Whiteley’s transformative imagination, through the birth canal that produced that shock of ginger hair,…
Modernism & Links with Literature
Our first gallery visit yesterday took us through the early days of modernism with Cezanne and Van Gogh through to Lucian Freud, grandson of the psychologist Sigmund Freud. Lucian while focussing on the naked human body in all its most flagrantly revealing postures is essentially concerned not so much with the body, but with what makes…
All Quiet on the Western Front & Gallery Manifestos
This coming week (for some of us this Saturday) we are visiting the Art Gallery of NSW to explore early 20th Century Modernist art and Art Manifestos. There is an amazing exhibition on at the gallery which is a video installation entitled Manifesto. It was conceived by German artist Julian Rosenfeldt and is enacted by Australia’s…
William Blake and Brett Whiteley
We had the mammoth task today of bringing together Brett Whiteley’s Alchemy and William Blake’s The Marriage of Heaven and Hell & his engravings for The Book of Job– all in a two hour session! But we have all survived! And it has to be said it is a glorious field for exploring the power of creativity in…
Poetry of the First World War
Today we broached the world of Siegfried Sassoon, Wilfred Owen, Edward Thomas 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,…
Songs of Experience & “The Human Abstract”
I was struck today by a comment by someone in class who said “I am finding so much of what Blake writes about touches aspects of my own experience”. That is perfect and beautiful. His writing is hauntingly mysterious and yet somehow touches deep into our own imperfections and our own search for what is…
William Blake: The Songs
Blog Topics for Week 3 – Based on Weeks One and Two 1/ Take the first line of any one of Blake’s poems (looked at so far in the unit) and write your own poem celebrating a new insight that you have had as a result of listening to Wiliam Blake. 2/ Present…
MidWinter Spring!
Little Gidding I Midwinter spring is its own season Sempiternal though sodden towards sundown, Suspended in time, between pole and tropic. When the short day is brightest, with frost and fire, The brief sun flames the ice, on pond and ditches, In windless cold that is the heart’s heat, Reflecting in a watery mirror A…
Top 19th Century Lit ePortfolios ACU 2016
There were some truly outstanding ePortfolios in this group of ACU students celebrating their experience and insight into the work of Romantic poets and the fiction of Charles Dickens, George Eliot and Tolstoy among others. The focus questions underpinning these ePortfolios were Writers and artists in the 19th Century were preoccupied with trying to solve the…
Best Shakespeare Plus 2016 ePortfolios
There have been some fantastic ePortfolios from students completing their Shakespeare Unit this semester. Plays covered included Romeo and Juliet, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, King Lear and The Tempest along with the bard’s sonnets and miscellaneous poetry from around Shakespeare’s time. Students had to consider the ways in which Shakespeare’s art still speaks to our experience in the…
Best Blogs from OZ LIT 2016
Hi All, I have a fabulous bag full of wonderful OZ LIT ePortfolios for you to enjoy. These are the very best of the bunch; all earned a High Distinction for their efforts. There is some wonderful material here reflecting on the literature and art of Australia from ancient times right up to the present. Students…
Teaching has finished: Back to Bushwalking!
Two recent wonderful trips: up to the heights above Galston Gorge and down to the edge of the Hawkesbury at Bujwa Bay. Sunrise over Galston Heights Angophora in a grass tree forest Mishapen Angophora renewing its lightning-lopped limbs Magnificent Angophora specimen on the way down to the Steele Bridge Galston Gorge Two Videos from the…
Poetry and Social Change in the 1960s and 1970s — James Tulip- Writings
Poetry and Social Change in the 1960s and 1970s ‘What color are the plums on the slot machines in Paradise? Bring answer Tuesday.’ I sent Ginsberg and Corso this goof telegram a few days before they hit Chicago in January 1959 to give a great marathon reading to help raise money and get Big Table […]…
Shakespeare Performances 2016
What a wonderful collection of performances from the Shakespeare group today: scenes from Romeo and Juliet, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, King Lear and The Tempest. What a treat! So well done, with little time for rehearsal and yet so much learned about what it needs to bring Shakespeare to life on the stage. I am sure that you all see…
Tolstoy’s Short Fiction
What a wonderful treat we have had to finish off our Nineteenth Century Literature with these two masterworks, “The Death of Ivan Illych” and “Master and Man”. Both stories present with such wonderful insight the ways in which humans delude themselves into believing in the self they carry around with them all day. Ivan Illych…
David Malouf- Fly Away Peter
This is such a wonderful novel to teach because it deals with such simple matters so deeply and movingly. The scene at the end of the novel where Imogen Harcourt is grieving over Jim Saddler would have to be one of the most amazing moments in Australian literature: It was that intense focus of his…
Best ePortfolios from last semester
Please take a look here at the following sample if you want some inspiration: https://michaelgriffith1.com/2015/11/27/best-eportfolioblogs-spring-2015/
Twentieth Century Oz Lit Poetry and Prose Part 2
This week we finished our exploration of Patrick White’s amazing depiction of contemporary Australian society: its emptiness, but also its powerful potential for renewal in “Down at the Dump” and “Miss Slattery’s Demon Lover”- both in The Burnt Ones (1964). As a prelude to David Malouf‘s visit to us in a fortnight we explored “The Year of the Foxes”,…
The Tempest Part 2
Shakespeare’s The Tempest is a play about many things; in one way it is as the large as The Globe itself! However, at its heart it is concerned with the power of art, of drama, of poetry, of music as transformative agents in a crazy, greedy world full of conflict and opposition. If Shakespeare’s message could…
George Eliot and Leo Tolstoy
Two nineteenth century masters of creative prose, both these amazing authors focussed on the inner lives of their characters and tried to show what it takes to become more fully human. Their interest was psychological and spiritual. They sought to document what it is that closes the soul up and inhibits the growth of the…
The Tempest Part 1
Shakespeare’s The Tempest is his crowning masterpiece. This play contains so much about the nature and purpose of creation itself; it is a work that embodies so much of what he as an artist hoped to achieve and simultaneously crowns that achievement with a wonderfully humble stepping off the dramatic stage: Now my charms are all…
George Eliot, Elizabeth Barrett Browning & Matthew Arnold:Responses to the Condition of England.
All art, at its heart tries to rectify the destructive conditions of existence on this planet. In the words of the Australian poet A.D. Hope: Arguably, the writers and artists of the 19th Century were all, in their own way, attempting to maintain “the frame and order of the world”, trying to resolve the huge…
Australian Poetry and Prose in the Early 20th Century
We had fun today exploring a range of authors: John Shaw Neilson, Miles Franklin, Frederic Manning, M.Barnard Eldershaw, Judith Wright, Rosemary Dobson, Francis Webb and Gwen Harwood. What an amazing cross-section of talent! The one strongest idea that came to me during the lecture was a question that arose after we pondered the meaning of A.D.Hope’s…
King Lear and Sonnet 146
King Lear is a play that exposes the ways in which human beings are deeply alienated from themselves when they are totally identified with the demands of their egos. King Lear himself is such a character. It is only through the intense suffering imposed on him by rejection, amplified by his exposure to the elements…
The 1890s in Australian Literature
We had a wild ride through all the amazing characters who made up Australian Literature at the end of the 19th Century. Despite the dominance of mateship and a proud masculine ethos there were in fact many fine women writers who challenged the stereotypes imposed by the men of the time: Each of these authors…
King Lear & Cordelia
How can we understand Cordelia’s confrontation with her father King Lear? In the Edwin Sherin directed version with James Earl Jones as Lear, staged in Central Park New York, King Lear’s violence seems to provoke a response in Cordelia which is a mirror of her father. Like father like daughter? Is there any grace in this Cordelia,…
Education of the inner self: Dickens, Mill, Arnold, Newman
The Nineteenth Century was as “distracted from distraction by distraction“as we all are in the early years of the Twenty First Century. The messages sent to us by the “poets” of the inner-self in Victorian England (Dickens, Arnold, Newman … and others) are as relevant to us now as they were then. Matthew Arnold had…
Mid 19th Century Australian Poetry
What a wonderful contrast is made by Charles Harpur’s “A Mid-Summer Noon in the Australian Forest” (1851) and Henry Kendall’s “Bell-Birds” (1869). Kendall as a protegé of Harpur invested his picture of the Australian forest – “Bell Birds“- with meaning and magic, but his purpose was entirely opposite to that of his master (Harpur). This…
Michael Griffith: Home Page- Literature and Life Spring 2025 
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