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…
When to the sessions of sweet silent thought
We had a remarkable conversation about this sonnet (no 30) today in which we discovered that the “sessions of sweet silent thought” were those rare meditative moments of complete freedom from automatic, associative thinking that give space to the soul to BREATHE. But what Shakespeare describes in this sonnet is what happens when we give…
Shakespeare/ Victorianism & Charles Dickens – Week 6
Thomas Carlyle the great Victorian historian, close friend of Charles Dickens wrote these wonderful words which have been carved in stone in the foyer to the Mitchell ( State Library) in Sydney. This is where many of us visited the Shakespeare Room this week. But for those of studying Charles Dickens and Victorianism, these words…
NSW Art Gallery Visits 2016
This week is the week all my literature units visit the Art Gallery of NSW. What a wonderful storehouse it is of aesthetic wonders and inspirational ideas. A visit to the gallery provides a total wrap-around, hands-on experience of what was going on in a particular literary period. For all prospective teachers I cannot recommend…
Oscar Wilde and Victorianism
It has been so good to look back at all the features of Victorianism from the end of the century perspective provided by Oscar Wilde! I wonder how the Wilde of 2090 will review the shenanigans of the first decades of the 21st century? An interesting speculation! At all events, with Wilde’s hindsight one can…
Romeo & Juliet- Bell Shakespeare
This would have to be one of the liveliest, most powerful productions of Romeo and Juliet! Congratulations to the director, Peter Evans and the whole cast who brought the inner significance of this play so vividly, so entertainingly alive. In his pre-performance interview Peter Evans had spoken about the vitality of Juliet as a character. And Kelly…
End of Week 3: The Importance of Being Earnest: A Backward Glance at the Nineteenth Century.
What a buzz for us all to see The Importance of Being Earnest performed by an utterly world-class production by the National Theatre of London. David Suchet as Lady Bracknell would have to be one of the most GROTESQUE stage presences we have seen in a long time And this hard angular, masculine, pompous, utterly self-important…
End of Week 3: Shakespeare’s Madness
Is Shakespeare really as pessimistic as he seems to be when describing the nature of “love”? When Lysander says (1.1.142) about true love -if and when it is eventually found- that “War, death, or sickness did lay seige to it/ Making it momentary as a sound”, I really did have some students clawing up…
End of Week 3 & Autumn begins?
Hi All, so we have reached the end of the third week and summer is still here today, but the weekend – I have heard- will finally bring Autumn with it! So what has been cooking in Oz Lit, in 19th C. Lit & in Shakespeare & the Renaissance? In Oz Lit we are about…
Week Two Summer/ Autumn: Tintern Abbey
Wordsworth in his poem “Lines Composed a Few Miles above Tintern Abbey” (Norton 288) offers a powerful insight into the state of mind that meditating on and in nature produced in him. Clearly what he describes in the following lines is the substance of what he tries to tell his friend in the poem “Expostulation…
Week Two Summer/Autumn: A Muse of Fire
At the start of our tutorials this week we looked long and hard at that amazing speech written as the Prologue or Chorus to Henry V. This speech is like the key that unlocks so much of Shakespeare’s purpose and magic and puts his audience (and us as readers) in the hot-seat: in order to follow him…
Week 2 Summer/Autumn Semester
Another fabulous week of literature and life! I thoroughly enjoyed my time exploring Kim Scott’s That Dead Man Dance with Oz Lit students today. This is an amazing work that really brings to life an indigenous experience of life in relation to landscape and everything in it. It does this so powerfully through the sharp contrast…
Great Start to Semester One
Hi All, I am not sure whether to call this autumn or summer semester! We are having the best summer for a long time and we are well into Autumn! Global warming??? At all events we have had a fabulous start to the semester in all literature units. The one blog topic for this week…
How to Create a New Category in WordPress
Hi All, those of you doing Nineteenth Century Literature or Shakespeare this semester who already have a WordPress site set up from last year have been asking me: “How do I set up a new category so that all my 19thC Lit OR Shakespeare Blogs appear under these new categories”. Easy Peasy!!! Please follow these…
Welcome to Literature & Life 2016
This semester I am running four units: Australian Literature (on Campus & at Mount Druitt with a group of Clemente students); Shakespeare and Renaissance Literature and Nineteenth Century Literature (Revolutions in Writing). I will be posting regular blogs into this WordPress site in each of these units under the category names that you can see…
BEST ePortfolio/Blogs SPRING 2015
Hello All, I want to share with you this amazing list of the best ePortfolio/blogs produced by ACU students during the second half of 2015. For their ePortfolios they had to showcase their best Creative and Critical Blogs, their Peer Reviews of others in the group, and they had to answer a broad question on…
Michael Griffith: Home Page- Literature and Life Spring 2025 
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