Eden in the age of the fifth sun: The narrative work of Homero Aridjis

Homero Aridjis (b. 1940) is a major Mexican poet, novelist, essayist and ecological activist whose prolific body of work, ranging over forty years and including more than eleven volumes of poetry and thirteen novels, has yet to be studied as a coherent literary corpus in the context of recent Latin American fiction. The purpose of this dissertation was to analyze the narrative works of this author as both illustrative of the changes that have occurred in Latin American fiction since the 1960s when it first burst onto the world scene, as well as to study the uniqueness of this particular author's view of literature as it relates to historical discourse, apocalypticism. and social commitment. ^ Research showed that in the case of the narrative style of Aridjis, major trends in the contemporary Latin American novel were present in such a profuse and model manner as to confirm this author's importance as a prime example of what is commonly known as “Post-Boom” fiction. However, beyond the mere presence of literary elements, this study showed that the author's unique approach to narrative style has altered and expanded the aesthetic and thematic possibilities of the contemporary novel. The area where this is most clearly seen is in his experimentation with the historical genre. By manipulating the referential techniques of what has lately come to be known as the “new historical novel,” Aridjis has written both a cycle of purely historical novels and a cycle of futuristic ones that attempt to transcend the temporal limits traditionally imposed by these narrative forms, fusing them into one constant questioning of the nature of love, hate and identity. In this manner, he has developed a “simultaneist” narrative approach where distinct historical and imagined periods, places, people, things, and texts coexist and interact, widening almost to delirium the interpretative possibilities of the work. ^ This unique view of time and narrative, together with the author's political activism and millenarian view of history, make the novels of Homero Aridjis an important element in understanding the continuing development and evolution of Latin American fiction at the turn of the century. ^

Diversity and knowledge in the age of nation-building: Space and time in the thought of Yanagita Kunio

The study examines the thought of Yanagita Kunio (1875–1962), an influential Japanese nationalist thinker and a founder of an academic discipline named minzokugaku. The purpose of the study is to bring into light an unredeemed potential of his intellectual and political project as a critique of the way in which modern politics and knowledge systematically suppresses global diversity. The study reads his texts against the backdrop of the modern understanding of space and time and its political and moral implications and traces the historical evolution of his thought that culminates in the establishment of minzokugaku. My reading of Yanagita’s texts draws on three interpretive hypotheses. First, his thought can be interpreted as a critical engagement with John Stuart Mill’s philosophy of history, as he turns Mill’s defense of diversity against Mill’s justification of enlightened despotism in non-Western societies. Second, to counter Mill’s individualistic notion of progressive agency, he turns to a Marxian notion of anthropological space, in which a laboring class makes history by continuously transforming nature, and rehabilitates the common people (jomin) as progressive agents. Third, in addition to the common people, Yanagita integrates wandering people as a countervailing force to the innate parochialism and conservatism of agrarian civilization. To excavate the unrecorded history of ordinary farmers and wandering people and promote the formation of national consciousness, his minzokugaku adopts travel as an alternative method for knowledge production and political education. In light of this interpretation, the aim of Yanagita’s intellectual and political project can be understood as defense and critique of the Enlightenment tradition. Intellectually, he attempts to navigate between spurious universalism and reactionary particularism by revaluing diversity as a necessary condition for universal knowledge and human progress. Politically, his minzokugaku aims at nation-building/globalization from below by tracing back the history of a migratory process cutting across the existing boundaries. His project is opposed to nation-building from above that aims to integrate the world population into international society at the expense of global diversity.

Death Threat Letters: Allegories of American Authorship in the Age of Terrorism

This dissertation examines novels that use terrorism to allegorize the threatened position of the literary author in contemporary culture. Allegory is a term that has been differently understood over time, but which has consistently been used by writers to articulate and construct their roles as authors. In the novels I look at, the terrorist challenge to authorship results in multiple deployments of allegory, each differently illustrating the way that allegory is used and authorship constructed in the contemporary American novel. Don DeLillo’s Mao II (1991), first puts terrorists and authors in an oppositional pairing. The terrorist’s ability to traffic in spectacle is presented as indicative of the author’s fading importance in contemporary culture and it is one way that terrorism allegorizes threats to authorship. In Philip Roth’s Operation Shylock (1993), the allegorical pairing is between the text of the novel and outside texts – newspaper reports, legal cases, etc. – that the novel references and adapts in order to bolster its own narrative authority. Richard Powers’s Plowing the Dark (1999) pairs the story of an imprisoned hostage, craving a single book, with employees of a tech firm who are creating interactive, virtual reality artworks. Focusing on the reader’s experience, Powers’s novel posits a form of authorship that the reader can take into consideration, but which does not seek to control the experience of the text. Finally, I look at two of Paul Auster’s twenty-first century novels, Travels in the Scriptorium (2007) and Man in the Dark (2008), to suggest that the relationship between representations of authors and terrorists changed after 9/11. Auster’s author-figures forward an ethics of authorship whereby novels can use narrative to buffer readers against the portrayal of violent acts in a culture that is suffused with traumatizing imagery.

Civic Humanism and the Classical Tradition in the Early Republic of Chile

The first decades of the 19th century constituted a period of profound change for Chile, the principal results of which were to be seen in the consolidation of the process of independence from Spanish dominion in 1818. The consequences were not limited to a revolution of military and political nature; they also included a renovation of the cultural panorama -at least among the educated patriots who made an effort to distance themselves ideologically from the Monarchy-, with the implicit challenge of establishing a new order for Chile, based on legitimate and universally recognizable foundations. The inspirational framework for these efforts is usually associated with other revolutionary examples -France and the United States- that preceded the emancipation processes in Spanish America, as well as with the discourses of illustrated liberalism. As we will attempt to demonstrate in this study, a new reading of the texts written by the Creoles that lead the Chilean independence process may, nonetheless, also reveal the relevance of the classical tradition as a model for the configuration and legitimization of the first Republican projects that especially admired the ideals of Republicanism.

Spatial restructuring of cities in the age of knowledge economy : insights from Australian cities

In the age of knowledge economy, knowledge production, and where, how and by whom it is produced, has become one of the most important factors in determining the quality of life and competitiveness of a city. In different parts of the world, cities that are the centres of knowledge production are branded under different names, e.g. knowledge city, creative city, ubiquitous eco city, smart city. This paper focuses on the core building block of these cities: ‘knowledge precincts’ that are the catalytic magnet infrastructures impacting knowledge production. The paper discusses the increasing importance of knowledge-based urban development within the paradigm of knowledge economy, and the role of knowledge community precincts as an instrument to seed the foundation of knowledge production. This paper explores knowledge based urban development, particularly knowledge community precinct development, potentials of Sydney, Melbourne and Brisbane, and benchmarks them against Boston. The paper also draws conclusions and recommendations for other cities considering knowledge based development.

Who is a journalist? : journalism in the age of blogging

As part of the first-ever World Journalism Education Congress (WJEC), attracting 440 journalism and mass communication educators and professionals from 44 countries, and held in Singapore on June 26-28, 2007, panelists Alan Knight, Cherian George, and Alex Gerlis presented a lively debate on “Who Is a Journalist.” Knight argued that Journalism paradigms are in transition. Bloggers are providing competition through their often eye-witness reports. Quality blogs are influencing journalism practices. Knight argued that journalists must adapt to and embrace the Internet. Gerlis proposed that when we now ask “Who Is a Journalist”, the answer is no longer anyone who is employed as journalist. The answer is that potentially, anyone and everyone can be a journalist. George warns again uncritically invoking professional standards as the dividing line that separates journalists from non-journalists

Regulating corporate governance in China and Hong Kong : do Chinese values and ethics have a place in the age of globalization?

Much has been said about the convergence of corporate governance and regulations. The underlying assumptions of this phenomenon are driven by globalisation and the dominance of the Anglo-US model of corporate governance. Since the Asian crisis in 1997, Hong Kong and perhaps to a less extend Mainland China, had amended both Company laws and Stock Exchange Listing Rules obligations, arguably, mirroring provisions and rules in the UK and US. However, there has been a small amount of literature in law drawing from cross cultural management asking the question - is Western governance and regulation appropriate for the East? This paper will approach this issue from a different mindset, instead of drawing distinctions about East and West, a meta-regulatory framework will attempt to incorporate Western ‗hard‘ and ‗soft‘ laws with Asian ethical values. The aim is to combine laws and ethics thereby enhancing corporate governance and, improve compliance of those rules by adapting Chinese ethical values like Confucianism into the regulatory system. The overarching goal of this exercise is to adapt the wisdom of Chinese ethics into regulatory guidelines to suit the modern global market.

The silk road project : dance and embodiment in the age of motion capture

The Silk Road Project was a practice-based research project investigating the potential of motion capture technology to inform perceptions of embodiment in dance performance. The project created a multi-disciplinary collaborative performance event using dance performance and real-time motion capture at Deakin University’s Deakin Motion Lab. Several new technological advances in producing real-time motion capture performance were produced, along with a performance event that examined the aesthetic interplay between a dancer’s movement and the precise mappings of its trajectories created by motion capture and real-time motion graphic visualisations.

Narratives for novices : is there a place for edgy texts in edgy NAPLAN communities?

The genre of narratives has become the genre of choice in many classrooms since the introduction of NAPLAN into Australian schools. Yet, Knapp and Watkins (2005) argue that narratives are the least understood of all the genres. Despite wide-spread acceptance that narratives serve the social purpose of entertaining, they can also be more edgy, offering a powerful social or information role. This paper considers the effects of exposing novices to less standard realms of social discourse and disciplinary knowledge vis-a-vis a more clinical treatment focused on ‘standard’ narratives. I argue that we should not shy away from the challenges of edgy narratives just because our students are novice readers. The same holds true for our work in communities on the edge, that is where poverty, multiculturalism or multilingualism and systemic failure are the norm. I am part of an Australian Research Council (ARC) Linkage Grant (LP 0990289) working in such a community. Like many such situations, teachers in these communities are caught in the fray of establishing a dialogue between the culture of federally mandated performance orientated reforms and the cultures and discourses of the lives and future needs of their students (see Exley & Singh, in press).

Correlates of sitting time in working age Australian women : who should be targeted with interventions to decrease sitting time?

Background: While there is emerging evidence that sedentary behavior is negatively associated with health risk, research on the correlates of sitting time in adults is scarce. Methods: Self-report data from 7,724 women born between 1973-1978 and 8,198 women born between 1946-1951 were collected as part of the Australian Longitudinal Study on Women’s Health. Linear regression models were computed to examine whether demographic, family and caring duties, time use, health and health behavior variables were associated with weekday sitting time. Results: Mean sitting time (SD) was 6.60 (3.32) hours/day for the 1973-1978 cohort and 5.70 (3.04) hours/day for the 1946-1951 cohort. Indicators of socio-economic advantage, such as full11 time work and skilled occupations in both cohorts and university education in the mid-age cohort, were associated with high sitting time. A cluster of ‘healthy behaviours’ was associated with lower sitting time in the mid-aged women (moderate/high physical activity levels, non-smoking, non-drinking). For both cohorts, sitting time was highest in women in full-time work, in skilled occupations and in those who spent the most time in passive leisure. Conclusions: The results suggest that, in young and mid-aged women, interventions for reducing sitting time should focus on both occupational and leisure-time sitting.

“Now I know their secrets” : Kineikonic texts in the literacy classroom

Kineikonic texts – sites of the moving image – are increasingly prevalent with the rise of digital television, Web 2.0 tools, broadband Internet, and sophisticated mobile technologies. Digital practices are changing the shape of the literacy curriculum, calling for new metalanguages to describe digital and multimodal texts. This paper combines multiliteracies and functional approaches to map conventional and new textual features of a popular kineikonic text – the claymation movie. Enlivened with data from an ethnically diverse, Year 6 classroom, the author outlines filmic conventions to enable teachers and students to analyse and design movies

Nation-state or country-state : how do we discuss belonging in an age of fluidity?

This is the opening article of a two-part exchange between Jean-Paul Gagnon and Michael Gardiner on the nation-state.

Media as creative industries : conglomeration and globalization as accumulation strategies in an age of digital media

This chapter will begin by considering some of the distinctive features of media as creative industries, including their assessment of risk and return on investment, team-based production, the management of creativity, the value chain of production, distribution and circulation, and the significance of intellectual property in their revenue strategies. It will then critically appraise three strategies to capture new markets and revenue streams in the context of the rise of the Internet, digital media and globally networked distribution. The three strategies to be considered are conglomeration, networking and globalization, and the focus will be on the media giants such as News Corporation, Disney and Time-Warner. It will be argued that all three present considerable challenges in their application, and digital media technologies are weakening rather than strengthening their capacity to control the global media environment. The chapter will conclude with consideration of some implications of this analysis for questions of media power.