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.]

Teachers talking difference: teacher education and the poetics of anti-racism

This paper reports on a case study which explores the experiences of two teachers of ethnic difference working in secondary schools in rural Australia. In seeking an alternative way of telling their stories, transcript poems have been constructed from data obtained through semi-structured interviews with the teachers. The poems highlight the teachers' experiences of marginalisation and racism and their responses to their positioning in mainly white Anglo-Australian school communities. The study raises particular concerns about the effects of professional and cultural isolation on young and inexperienced teachers of ethnic difference as well as the need to view teacher education as an important site for the development of greater cultural awareness in "mainstream" teacher education students.

Tradition as past is a modernist idea

As outlined in the theme of this conference, the problematisation of the notion of 'progress' relates to a questioning of the West's teleological aspirations for the future. This critique has allowed for the presence of a multiplicity of ways of perceiving the world, including those from outside the West's intellectual tradition. However, within architectural discourse, conceptual plurality has been largely limited to movements such as critical regionalism or postmodernism, which have tended to question the direction or desirability of progress, rather than its fundamental nature.

This paper looks at an example of recent architecture by an Asian diasporic community in Melbourne. This is a building that appears to be 'traditional' in style, in other words atavistic and antithetical to 'progressive' architectural ideals. However, looking at it through different philosophical understandings of duration can provide us with alternative interpretations to these assumptions.

By this I am not referring to disillusionment with progress, as expressed through postmodernist and neo-traditionalist movements in the West, but ways in which looking at the 'traditional' architectures of non-Western cultures from their own philosophical positions might provide alternative definitions pf the idea of 'progress'. The increasing presence of non-western 'traditional' architecture in the West implies that West modernity might not be the only 'tradition' that has a viable future. Consequently, the idea of 'the future' as something to aspire to, might be the outcome of a particular dominant historicity rather than a universal condition.

An architecture of rewards: a new poetics to exhibition design?

This paper argues that the influence of multimedia on exhibition practices can be felt not only by the presence of multimedia interactives in the exhibition itself but more generally by the presence of similar structural principles. The argument is conducted by borrowing from Stephen Johnson’s (2005) thesis that contemporary forms of popular culture, particularly those found in video games, television and film, are based on an ‘architecture of rewards’. In taking this term across to exhibition practices, I use it to analyse an approach to the interpretation of a heritage site, which attempts neither to reconstruct its former uses nor to insert traditional forms of ‘contextual’ displays. Instead, I argue that the curatorial attempt to find ways in which the site could become the principal object of display resulted in the conscious production of narrative gaps which become the structural armature for the encouragement of game playing in a similar process to that discussed by Johnson in relation to video games.

Poetics of the uncanny : Jean Painlevé, documentary display, and documentary theory

In Grierson's theory of documentary, films of the so-called cinema of attractions were relegated to the position of 'lower forms' in contrast to his description of documentary as a form of civic pedagogy. The modes and forms of a cinema of attractions, which form what is here referred to as the practice of documentary display, did not disappear with the ascendency of Griersonian documentary; instead such approaches continued to inform avant-garde film. This paper examines the connections between nonfiction documentations and avant-garde film- and the resultant implications of this meeting for documentary film theory- through an analysis of the film and critical writings of Jean Painlevé (1902-1989). Painlevé, whom, according to Bazin, 'occupies a singular and privileged place in French cinema', informed his understandings of documentary through contact with, among others, Buñuel, Man Ray, Bataille, Eisenstein, and Grierson. The analysis of Painlevé's surrealist documentary display and his extensive body of critical literature on documentary foregrounds overlooked documentary works and constructs, or resurrects, ignored perspectives on documentary film as a way of extending and revising documentary film theory and the documentary canon.