Australian Newspaper History Group Newsletter

Current findings related to the history of Australian newspapers.

Australian Newspaper History Group Newsletter

Current findings, news and announcements related to the history of Australian newspapers.

Australian Newspaper History Group Newsletter

Current findings, news and announcements related to the history of Australian newspapers.

A Critical Appraisal of Narrative in Sport History: Reading the Surf Lifesaving Debate

All debates in history—who started the Cold War, how successful were the Chartists in achieving their aims, to what extent was the recession of the American frontier culturally significant in American history— are debates between competing narrative interpretations. Moreover, because the historical imagination itself exists intertextually within our own social and political environment, the past is never discovered set aside from everyday life. History is designed and composed in the here and now.

Deconstructing sport history: The postmodern challenge

The crisis in the historical profession today is both conceptual and political, both methodological and practical. To the crises of the decline of great narrative history for the popular audience, the multiculturalist challenge to Eurocentric history, and the loss of faith in grand themes of progress and liberation that provided moral and political guidance through history’s lessons, must be added the crisis created by the implications of literary and rhetorical theory for the very practice of history itself.

Remembering sport history: Narrative, social memory and the origins of the rugby league in Australia

This study examines the historiography of the origins of rugby league in Australia. By accepting the inclusive nature of representation of the past as found in social memory theory, a wide range of sources ranging from histories written by academics to annuals, yearbooks and newspaper books are consulted. These sources reveal that there are several competing and conflicting accounts of the emergence of rugby league in Australia. These divergent accounts are used to facilitate a discussion of the role of narrative in sport history This article argues that narrative is an integral, not optional, feature of the production of history and that the historography of the origins of rugby league highlight the problematic nature of objectivity in history and the unavoidable, impositionalist role of the historian.

Clifford Geertz, 1926-2006: Meaning, method, and Indonesian economic history

Clifford Geertz was best known for his pioneering excursions into symbolic or interpretive anthropology, especially in relation to Indonesia. Less well recognised are his stimulating explorations of the modern economic history of Indonesia. His thinking on the interplay of economics and culture was most fully and vigorously expounded in Agricultural Involution. That book deployed a succinctly packaged past in order to solve a pressing contemporary puzzle, Java's enduring rural poverty and apparent social immobility. Initially greeted with acclaim, later and ironically the book stimulated the deep and multi-layered research that in fact led to the eventual rejection of Geertz's central contentions. But the veracity or otherwise of Geertz's inventive characterisation of Indonesian economic development now seems irrelevant; what is profoundly important is the extraordinary stimulus he gave to a generation of scholars to explore Indonesia's modern economic history with a depth and intensity previously unimaginable.

Subject/Object Asymmetry in the Comprehension of English Relative Clauses by Japanese Learners of English

While a number of studies have shown that object-extracted relative clauses are more difficult to understand than subject-extracted counterparts for second language (L2) English learners (e.g., Izumi, 2003), less is known about why this is the case and how they process these complex sentences. This exploratory study examines the potential applicability of Gibson's (1998, 2000) Syntactic Prediction Locality Theory (SPLT), a theory proposed to predict first language (L1) processing difficulty, to L2 processing and considers whether the theory might also account for the processing difficulties of subject- and object-extracted relative clauses encountered by L2 learners. Results of a self-paced reading time experiment from 15 Japanese learners of English are mainly consistent with the reading time profile predicted by the SPLT and thus suggest that the L1 processing theory might also be able to account for L2 processing difficulty.

How many ways can a VP split? An investigation of the structure of VP shells in Japanese Causatives

The Japanese inchoative-lexical causative pair poses an interesting problem for the Minimalist Program – how should the lexical causative and the syntactic causative be structurally represented and theoretically accounted for? The lexical causative verb and the syntactic causative verb formed by suffixing the syntactic causative morpheme sase onto the inchoative counterpart are both single causative constructions that are semantically similar. Yet, they differ in some ways, most significantly in their clausality – the lexical causative is monoclausal in nature while the syntactic causative is biclausal, comparable to English biclausal constructions formed with let or force. This paper investigates how this difference can be represented by investigating the possible VP shell structures of different Japanese sentences, and the analysis from the discussion suggests a different structure where a CP is embedded into a higher VP shell as the sister of Agro head.

Australian Newspaper History Group Newsletter

Current findings, news and announcements related to the history of Australian newspapers.

Australian Newspaper History Group Newsletter

Current findings, news and announcements related to the history of Australian newspapers.