Coetzee's haunting of Australian literature

In June 2006, the Good Weekend, the magazine supplementing Saturday’s the Age in Melbourne, ran the following cover story by Catharine Lumby: “Worried TV will turn your child into a zombie?” The cover featured a science-fiction image of a boy’s upturned face. Televisions were reflected in his pupils, giving them the effect of being square instead of round. The message, though, was ultimately non-alarmist with the subheading already instructing “Relax. It’s all good”. Stories like this appear regularly in the press, and while I am not interested in debating whether TV is good or bad for children, I am interested in the popular image of children—or, for that matter, adults—as being akin to zombies when they watch TV, if only because something similar happens when we read books. Although it is not as fashionable to talk about it, we become emptied of ourselves, possessed by something other.

In dialogue with A.D. Hope: dialogue three: politics and poetics of Australian literature

[Hope was largely responsible for the inclusion of Australian Literature as a separate subject of study in universities. Yet his role in debates on modernism in the Australian context was controversial and he remains one of the main figures who fought for a particular kind of poetry that he saw some modernist methods, experiments, and theories destroying. Dialogue Three aims to hear his side of the story as Hope has become, in many circles, the embodiment of what is euphemistically called ‘the dead white male,’ a title attributed to him long before his actual death in July 2000. Is it the case that Hope’s opposition to ‘free verse’ or his view that men and women know separate metaphysical worldviews or his poetic focus upon European philosophical and literary traditions are sexist, obsolete, or reactionary?
See Dialogue One for details of the following exchange.]

Teaching Australian literature : from classroom conversations to national imaginings

This volume brings together teachers, teacher educators, creative writers and literary scholars in a joint inquiry that takes a fresh look at what it means to teach Australian literature

Identity territory: Pamela Allen's picture books in the Australian psyche

Parsons examines the dialogic space of the picture book reading, and its co-opting of the authority of the "significant other" in relation to Pamela Allen's picture books. Mapping Australian identity theory in Allen's picture books involves recognizing Australian-ness as both formed and performed at a point of intersection between colonial, migrant, and patriarchal tropes. Each of these tropes is readable through the dynamics of theater semiotics, and each is mirrored by child maturation as embodied by a movement toward adult authority.