There have been some truly fabulous Summative Blog Posts from the group of students who have just finished the third year unit Reading Australia. Such wonderful reflections that bring into focus students’ ethnicity, their appreciation of what Australian culture has to offer, but also their deep sadness at the continuing injustices, especially to indigenous people.…
The Poetry of Grace: Rilke Seminar 2: Aquinas Academy
Rilke Seminar 2 focussed on Rodin’s impact on Rilke’s poetic outlook on the world and then turned to Sonnet 3 from the Sonnets to Orpheus and from there on to the Ninth Duino Elegy. Please find slides used here: Rilke Session 2-web 2 And accompanying audio recordings here: Here are the White Board Comments from…
The Poetry of Grace: Rainer Maria Rilke 2017 – Aquinas Academy, Sydney
I began teaching a four part series on the poetry of Rilke today at the Aquinas Academy. We covered a few of Rilke’s very early poems and then moved on to the Sonnets to Orpheus and to Rilke’s Ninth Elegy. The sessions are recorded and can be listened to right here. Enjoy!
The Merchant of Venice for Clemente Students (and Blog Topics)
Hello All, this week we begin our “serious” professional rehearsals with the Bell Shakespeare Company who are going to help us prepare our scenes for performance on November 1st. Here is the PROMO for our performance- please distribute this to your friends! THE BLOG TOPIC FOR THIS WEEK IS SIMPLY A REVIEW OF YOUR ATTENDANCE…
The Beats, New York School, Postmodernism
What an amazing day we have had exploring, interrogating this group of poets and artists. Perhaps top of the list comes Patti Smith who gigantically carries forward the subversive, passionate impulse of Ginsberg, Kerouac, O’Hara and Ashberry. Here she is singing her heart out, challenging all the heartless stereotypes that infect contemporary America: https://youtu.be/LNnC8hYOmlw Blog Topics:…
The Merchant of Venice: Clemente
Today we begin our journey into Venice where Shakespeare has created a fascinating interlocking group of tales that take us into the heart of the conflict between Christianity and Judaism. But this is also a wonderful love story with an almost fairy-tale quality. So this is a complex play, romantic, comic, seriously political and almost…
William Faulkner As I Lay Dying
This week we ventured into the amazing territory of William Faulkner’s re-creation of the world from the inside. He takes us right into the centre of the consciousness of each of his characters Addie Bundren, Anse Bundren and their children (Cash, Darl, Dewey Dell, Vardaman and Jewel [fathered by Whitfield]. Each character has their own way…
David Malouf on Campus at Strathfield and at Mission Australia Surry Hills
ACU students both on and off campus had the real privilege today of interacting with David Malouf about The Conversations at Curlow Creek (Strathfield) and Remembering Babylon (Surry Hills). David was wonderfully generous both with his time and his responses and students in both locations were equally wonderful in their thoughtful preparation and deep questioning. Here are…
Patrick White’s Vision of Australian Society
“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 and steak… and the march of…
The Merchant of Venice with Bell Shakespeare and Clemente Students
Please find here the beginning of some useful resources for our study: Bell Shakespeare’s Merchant of Venice (this is what we are going to see in a few weeks): https://www.bellshakespeare.com.au/whats-on/the-merchant-of-venice/ Review of Bell Shakepeare’s production (by the Australian Book Review): https://www.australianbookreview.com.au/abr-arts/4166-the-merchant-of-venice-bell-shakespeare Wikipedia’s overview: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Merchant_of_Venice Here also is the PDF of the Introduction and Act 1 of The Merchant…
Art Gallery Visit with Clemente Students: How Can Art Inform My Understanding of Literature?
Clemente Visit to the NSW Art Gallery 2017 ENGL104 Core Question: How Can Art Deepen Our Understanding Of Literature? BLOG TOPIC FOR THIS WEEK: Chose any ONE of the paintings (or art works) studied today. Describe the painting (or art work) of your choice and say how this painting (or art work) has expanded your…
American Modernism
Hi All, today we had a saunter through the highways and byways of American Modernism, beginning with William Carlos Williams and ending with Charlie Chaplin. Chaplin’s parody of Adolf Hitler in The Great Dictator is one of the great modernist, linguistic deconstructions of political grandiosity. It is paralleled by Chaplin’s closing speech where, using an entirely different…
David Malouf Conversations at Curlow Creek- 1
Today we explored the world of this amazing novel focussing on the nature and purpose of story telling. As David Malouf has so powerfully said in a lecture to Macquarie University students: Story telling is a kind of public dreaming. But before a story can be public- be published- it has to find a place…
David Malouf – Remembering Babylon- again!
Hello All, please find in this blog ALL the recordings from the last two weeks. Here also is the white board image from yesterday’s class: Here are your instructions for getting to the NSW Art Gallery for 2.30pm NEXT WEDNESDAY: https://www.artgallery.nsw.gov.au/visit-us/plan-your-visit/getting-here/ See you there next week! Enjoy!
Clemente Blog Addresses Spring 2017
Neil Campbell https://nineteenyearsinsideout.wordpress.com Josh Heilpern https://beinginthecreativezone.wordpress.com Ray Morgan https://raymorganblog.wordpress.com Ronan Parnell https://parnellpoetryoriginals.wordpress.com Adelaide Pascoe https://portamoreweb.wordpress.com Rima Pritchard https://rima309.wordpress.com Kyungshin Song https://kaysongblog.wordpress.com Yvette Whitty https://gingercat310.wordpress.com Patricia https://ninablog548.wordpress.com/ Colin Leong https://colin10100010.wordpress.com
Early 20th Century Australian Poetry and Prose
Today we explored the worlds of John Shaw Neilson, Miles Franklin, Frederic Manning and M.Barnard Eldershaw. This clutch or writers embrace a huge range of literary and intellectual interests. Neilson is the poet who shows how the language of poetry is closest to music and art through his use of colour and sound to paint…
Remembering Babylon Week 2
Hello All, this week we are going to focus on two things in our close study of Remembering Babylon. First we are going to look at Mr Frazer’s relationship to Gemmy in Chapter 14 and especially what it is about Gemmy that Mr Frazer thinks is so valuable. Mr Frazer calls Gemmy “a forerunner” on page…
Two Roberts- Frost and Lowell
Today we explored the contrasting worlds of Robert Frost and Robert Lowell, two iconic poets of North America who have done so much to “Sing America” in the Twentieth Century. Robert Frost, inheritor of the transcendentalists and of the energy of Walt Whitman, powerfully expresses his deep love for the American landscape and of its…
Francis Webb- the most unjustly neglected poet of the 20th Century (Herbert Read)
We have just spent 2 weeks exploring a huge range of Francis Webb’s poetry, from his earliest “Images in Winter” through to his last, magnificent “Nessun Dorma”. In between we have looked at his fascination with Australian exploration in Eyre All Alone and have studied his response to inmates in the hospital in which he was…
Australian Colonialism Part 2: Republicanism, Feminism, Federation and beyond…
Today we looked at Ada Cambridge, Barbara Baynton, Dame Mary Gilmore, Henry Lawson, Banjo Paterson and on and on…. what an extraordinary cast of voices from this period that celebrated Australian independence from England both thematically and linguistically… the opening sentences of “The Drover’s Wife” show beautifully how Lawson has transitioned the language and themes…
Heading in to David Malouf’s Remembering Babylon!
This week we are heading into this amazing literary work which is in prose, but is also profoundly poetical! Go to LEO to check out some more information on David Malouf. But here (in the image above) is your blog topic for this week. Notice in the image Gemmy standing on the fence! Remember this…
African American Writing since the Civil War
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. Most powerful of all was James Baldwin in his…
Blog Topics for Week 5: Alice Walker and Henry Lawson
Class URLS. This will enable you all to easily access each other’s blogs and do your peer review comments on what you see there. Be supportive and share your thoughts on each other’s writing and on the great literature that we are exploring. Please send through to me any URLs that I have missed: Neil…
Early Australian Colonialism
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! We then dipped into Eliza Dunlop’s wonderful…
Mark Twain- Huckleberry Finn (& other things!)
As we learned today Mark Twain (Samuel Clemens) was quite a character, perhaps a little like a Michael Moore of the 19th Century, daring to satirize and expose everything that stood in the way of a truly humane way of being human! His story “The War Prayer” (which you can read by clicking here https://www.antiwar.com/orig/twain1.html)…
Patrick White Part 2
The focus on this week’s lecture was on the question of Patrick White’s religious outlook. His novel certainly makes many references to things that may be seen as spiritual or sacred, but he also gives conventional religion a rather scathing treatment, especially in the closing scenes of the novel where Stan Parker identifies God in…
Clemente Week 4 & 5 Prose: Tim Winton and Kate Chopin
This week our focus is the African American author Alice Walker and her story “Everyday Use” and Henry Lawson’s comic story “The Loaded Dog”. Read these before class if possible. Click on the author’s names to find out more about these two amazing writers. Last week we began to turn our attention to Prose…
Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson
The father and mother of American poetry! That is what this pair have been called; see Ginsberg, along with Sharon Olds and Galway Kinnell singing their praises: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2M5O3_FYB4A This week we have explored “Song of Myself”, “The Brooklyn Ferry” and a host of poems by Emily Dickinson. The present such an astonishing difference in life-style and…
That Dead Man Dance Week 2
Thank you Jess for that original slant on That Dead Man Dance. Connecting Bobby with the Cleverman series was a really good way of bringing Kim Scott’s approach into our contemporary discourse. Here are a bunch of Jess’s blog questions that you can add to what you had last week: 1/ Write a passage in of your…
Reading Australia Week 4
Thank you all today for your keen participation in this adventure. Reading Australia clearly has a number of connotations. Does it mean the Australian books we read, or does it mean the way that artists and writers “read” their country. In other words what attitudes, values, emotions colour the way they see the world.…
Exploring Literature -Clemente Week 3
All the details from today’s class (Week 3) are at the bottom of this page! Enjoy! Hello All, the image above is from a walk into the bush around my place yesterday. These are wax flowers (Eriostomon Australis) here they sit so beautifully against the background of a sandstone cave. The bush is full of…
Patrick White- The Tree of Man
Patrick White aimed to transform what he saw as a materialist, self-obsessed Australia into a place where something sacred could be discovered in the most ordinary of situations. Stan and Amy Parker embody this extreme ordinariness and their lives are presented as far from ordinary. How does Patrick White achieve this? He does so by…
That Dead Man Dance
Hi All, I trust you are making good headway with That Dead Man Dance! This is a wonderfully relevant novel to Australia today with its still unresolved relationship to its indigenous inhabitants. I was struck especially by an article that was written yesterday about the statue of Captain Cook by Stan Grant: I passed by Hyde…
Transcendentalism Week 3
This week Jess Brooks gave a wonderful exposition of the richness of the transcendentalists in 19th Century America. These clearly are a key to understanding later developments in American Literature, especially its spirituality and its search for authenticity in human experience. Emerson and Thoreau were the central focus of her presentation; both the lecture and…
Exploring Literature Week 2
We began this week’s session by looking at some of the amazing poetry and prose contributions that were made for the Clemente Anthology- Shifting Perspectives. Here are a few of these entries, introduced by the wonderful painting The Last Cuppa which we used on the front cover of the publication. The artist, Chris Barwick, a Mission Australia…
Awakening the Sacred in Australian Literature and Art- Keynote Address 8th July 2017
Please find in this blog the audio recording of the keynote address given by Michael Griffith at the Awakening the Sacred conference held at ACU on July 7/8 2017. You can find details about the conference here: http://www.acu.edu.au/staff/our_university/newsroom/staff_news_item/awakening_the_sacred_in_literature_and_the_arts Here is the audio of the keynote: And here are the images that accompanied the talk: Awakening the…
Exploring Literature Week 1
Welcome to all our Clemente students at Mission Australia in Surry Hills. We had a wonderful first class looking at poetry by Margaret Atwood (“You Fit Into Me”), Richard Tipping (“Mangoes”) and Judith Wright (“The Wattle Tree”). It was wonderful to see how quickly this group found ways of discussing both the beauty of the…
Reading Australia: Judith Wright
Thank you all for your searching and serious responses to all the questions posed by Judith Wright’s poetry. I really sense that her poems in their creative beauty and their imaginative power have attracted many of you. We have had such good and fruitful discussions over the last two weeks. It is almost a pity…
American Writing- Just the Beginning!
Thank you all for your keen participation in this new unit. We are off to a great start with a survey of the Soul of America (text is now in the library -Close Reserve) and today American Indian Writing. Both topics are closely tied together. The spiritual emptiness of contemporary American culture seems to be…
Australian Literature an Introduction: Blog Topics
Thank you all for your enthusiastic start to the semester. It is always good to be talking about the literature and experience of our own country. A few decades ago you couldn’t study Australian Literature at University- it was not seen academically respectable! How times have changed. So far we have looked at the broad…
Bush Walk to Collingridge Point August 6th 2017
Collingridge Point is in the Marramarra National Park in the western flank of Berowra Waters, the side that used to be inhabited by the Darug tribe. The opposite shore was inhabited by the Guringai. This walk is one of the most wonderful wildflower walks in the region and to cap it, when you come to…
Spring Semester 2017: Wild flowers are OUT in the bush around Sydney.
Hello and welcome to all students in my Australian Literature (ENGL102), Reading Australia (ENGL328), American Literature (ENGL204) and Exploring Literature- Clemente (ENGL104). A special welcome to this last group who will be studying literature for the first time at Mission Australia in Surry Hills. These are students who are completing a Diploma in Liberal Arts…
Best Nineteenth Century Literature ePortfolio/ Blogs
Hi All, the top four ePortfolios were produced by the following students. Click on their name to see their amazing contributions to the topic of how the literature of the Nineteenth Century (Romanticism and Victorianism) still contributes to our lives in the 21st Century. A round of applause for: Felicity McManus Joey O’Reilly Jessica Welford…
Shakespeare Annual Blog Time!
Again we have some marvellous entries from our Shakespearean cohort of bloggers. This year I am going to share with you all some individual blogs, what they have to illustrate about the creative power of blogging as part of literature studies. Here is one of the best commentaries on what blogging can lead to. Take…
“Awakening the Sacred: through Literature, the Arts and the Arts of Meditation” Conference July 7/8 2017
Please click on this link to read the latest article on this amazing conference with Laurence Freeman OSB and Miriam-Rose Ungenmerr and a link to the registration page: http://www.eremos.org.au/events/27_May/awakening-the-sacred-conference
Shakespeare’s The Tempest
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…
The Importance of Being Earnest – Oscar Wilde
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…
The Benefits of Blogging in University Education.
Just thought I would share with you what has underpinned my passion for Blogging with my students for decades! PDF version: Blogging Poster JPG Version:
This fellow is wise enough to play the fool
These are Viola’s words about Feste the fool in 12th Night a play which strangely mirrors the insanity of our own world today. To Viola prior to this wonderful summation of Feste’s talents, he says to her: “Foolery, sir, does walk about the orb like the sun; it shines everywhere”. And almost in the same…
Awakening the Sacred
Don’t miss out on this amazing conference coming to Sydney on July 7/ 8. This is the fifth in the series of conferences that bring Literature and the Arts together with a focus on the Sacred. This particular conference is VERY SPECIAL because it includes a 3 hour conversation between indigenous elder Miriam-Rose Ungenmerr from…
Michael Griffith: Home Page- Literature and Life Spring 2025 
You must be logged in to post a comment.