Evelyn on the Verandah

Fictional short story informed by an oral history, published in 'One Book Many Brisbanes 5'.

Colonising Shakespeare? : agency and authority in Gregory Rogers's Shakespearean picture books

“You need to be able to tell stories. Illustration is a literature, not a pure fine art. It’s the fine art of writing with pictures.” – Gregory Rogers. This paper reads two recent wordless picture books by Australian illustrator Gregory Rogers in order to consider how “Shakespeare” is produced as a complex object of consumption for the implied child reader: The Boy, The Bear, The Baron, The Bard (2004) and Midsummer Knight (2006). In these books other worlds are constructed via time-travel and travel to a fantasy world, and clearly presume reader competence in narrative temporality and structure, and cultural literacy (particularly in reference to Elizabethan London and William Shakespeare), even as they challenge normative concepts via use of the fantastic. Exploring both narrative sequences and individual images reveals a tension in the books between past and present, and real and imagined. Where children’s texts tend to privilege Shakespeare, the man and his works, as inherently valuable, Rogers’s work complicates any sense of cultural value. Even as these picture books depend on a lexicon of Shakespearean images for meaning and coherence, they represent William Shakespeare as both an enemy to children (The Boy), and a national traitor (Midsummer). The protagonists, a boy in the first book and the bear he rescues in the second, effect political change by defeating Shakespeare. However, where these texts might seem to be activating a postcolonial cultural critique, this is complicated both by presumed readerly competence in authorized cultural discourses and by repeated affirmation of monarchies as ideal political systems. Power, then, in these picture books is at once rewarded and withheld, in a dialectic of (possibly postcolonial) agency, and (arguably colonial) subjection, even as they challenge dominant valuations of “Shakespeare” they do not challenge understandings of the “Child”.

Anthony Browne and the cultural capital of classic fairy tales

Prolific British author/illustrator Anthony Browne both participates in the classic fairy-tale tradition and appropriates its cultural capital, ultimately undertaking a process of self-canonisation alongside the dissemination of fairy tales. In reading Browne’s Hansel and Gretel (1981), The Tunnel (1989) and Into the Forest (2004), a trajectory emerges that moves from broadly intertextual to more exclusively self-referential modes of representation which reward readers of “Anthony Browne”, rather than readers of “fairy tales”. All three books depict ‘babes in the woods’ stories wherein child characters must negotiate some form of threat outside the home in order to return home safely. Thus, they represent childhood agency. However, these visions of agency are ultimately subordinated to logics of capital, which means that child readers of Browne’s fairy-tale books are overtly invited to identify with children who act, but are interpellated as privileged if they ‘know’. Bourdieu’s model of ‘cultural capital’ offers a lens for considering Browne’s production of ‘value’ for his own works within a broader cultural landscape which privileges literary fairy tales as a register of juvenile cultural competency. If cultural capital can be formulated most simply as the symbolic exchange value of approved modes of knowing and being, it is clearly helpful when trying to unpack logics of meaning within heavily intertextual or citational texts. It is also helpful thinking about what kinds of stories we as a culture choose to disseminate, choose to privilege, or choose to suppress. Zipes notes of fairy tales that, “the genre itself becomes a kind of institute that is involved in the socialization and acculturation of readers” (22). He elaborates that, “We initiate readers and expect them to learn the fairy-tale code as part of our responsibility in the civilizing process” (Zipes 29), so it is little wonder that Tatar describes fairy tales as “a vital part of our cultural capital” (xix). Although Browne is clearly interested in literary fairy tales, the most obvious strategies of self-canonisation take place in Browne’s work not in words but in pictures: hidden in plain sight, as illustration becomes self-reflexive citation.

Lost children and imaginary mothers in Sonya Hartnett's Of A Boy

In Powers of Horror, Julia Kristeva writes about lost children. These are what she calls “dejects,” who, in the psychodrama of subject formation, fail to fully absent the body of the mother, to accept the Law of the Father and the Symbolic, and subsequently to establish “clear boundaries which constitute the object-world for normal subjects.” Dejects are “strays” looking for a place to belong, a place that is bound up with the Imaginary mother of the pre-Oedipal period. Kristeva’s sketch of the deject as one who is unable to negotiate a proper path to the Symbolicis useful to a reading of Hartnett’s Of A Boy (2002),a novel that also deals with lost children and imaginary mothers. However, in its portrayal of children who are doomed to never achieve adulthood, Of A Boy enacts a haunting retrieval of the pre-Oedipal from the dark side of phallocentric representation, privileging the semiotic (Kristeva’s concept) and the maternal as necessary disruptive checks on a patriarchal Symbolic Order.

Implementing the international : challenges and approaches

This paper documents some preliminary findings arising from our Creative Industries Faculty’s invitation to academics to submit suitable proposals for Internationalising the Curriculum, an initiative that aligns with the University’s recognition of the importance of “building international components into their teaching programs” Our research project involves revisiting the literature on internationalising the curriculum with a view to implementing pedagogic and assessment strategies that respect and encourage intercultural and international understandings and competencies. The paper addresses the problems in designing such a unit; in this case an American Literature unit which will be taught and studied in Australia at QUT in 2011. The challenges inherent in the task of internationalising the curriculum stem from the ‘traditional’ and accepted ways of structuring and delivering such units. While the content may be international, the problem remains as to how to go about teaching and assessing the unit to achieve a global approach. How can it be taught in a way that steps outside the borders of our national teaching practices and understanding of western epistemology and becomes far more inclusive of other modes of knowledge?

When He is a She is a He : the pregnant man and the transgendered mother

The recent successful pregnancy of Thomas Beatie, a transgender FTM, billed by the various media as ‘the pregnant man’, has stirred up considerably diverse public opinion and debate, some supportive and indicative of changing and progressive ideas around sex, gender and sexuality; others condemnatory in their claims that Beatie’s pregnancy is an affront to the laws of Nature and/or God. Desired or derided, the pregnant male body contests the terrain of reproductive embodiment and the orthodoxy of Western systems of gender categorization. This chapter analyses a selection of media and internet responses to the case of the pregnant man, arguing that most disturbing of all it seems, is the body in-between (Kristeva 1982, p.4), the one that visibly defies socially obdurate gender oppositions of male and female, feminine and masculine in its insistence on being, to borrow from Homi Bhabha, a ‘third space of enunciation.’ Banana Yoshimoto’s novella Kitchen, also contests gender boundaries in its characterisation of Eriko, a transgendered male to female, a father, then a mother. In this narrative the in-between, the ambiguous, is not reviled but rather celebrated as a ‘horizon of possibility’ (Halperin, qtd in Jagose 1996 http://www.australianhumanitiesreview.org/archive/Issue-Dec- 1996/jagose.html).

Reflections from Senior Women Academics

The Tiddas Showin’ Up, Talkin’ Up and Puttin’ Up: Indigenous Women and Educational Leadership project was led by Flinders University in partnership with the Australian Catholic University through the Indigenous Higher Education Centres located in Adelaide (Yunggorendi First Nations Centre) and Brisbane (Weemala Indigenous Unit) (Bunda and White 2009). At the beginning of the project, two levels of governance were established: a Circle of Senior Indigenous Women from the higher education sector, and a Steering Committee of Senior Executive Women from partner universities. The Circle of Senior Indigenous Women included experts in the fields of learning and teaching, scholarship, administration and management, and community engagement. The Circle’s members were: • Professor Wendy Brady, Charles Darwin University • Dr Jackie Huggins, University of Queensland • Ms Angela Leitch, Education Queensland • Professor Aileen Moreton-Robinson, Queensland University of Technology • Dr Bronwyn Fredericks, Queensland University of Technology and Monash University The Steering Committee members were: • Professor Gabrielle McMullen, Australian Catholic University • Professor Marie Emmit, Australian Catholic University • Professor Faith Trent, Flinders University • Dr Jane Robbins, Flinders University The two levels of governance provided advice to the project leaders throughout the project. Three of these women share their reflections in this paper.

Byron's back from the dead? : revenants of Romanticism in contemporary young adult fiction

Often identified as the origin of today’s children’s literature, Romanticism offers a particular context for interrogating boundaries between child and adult. Since the turn of the nineteenth century, however, Western society has “invented” the teenager to figure and to police the boundary between childhood and adulthood. In due course, twenty-first-century young adult (YA) novels such as Susan Davis’s Mad, Bad and Totally Dangerous (2004) and Cara Lockwood’s Wuthering High: A Bard Academy Novel (2006) have combined the Romantic and the adolescent in narratives which turn on supernatural invocation of Romantic authors as “really” present in contemporary adolescent lives. These novels tell stories of adolescence in which the self comes to be known via embodied encounters with dead authors, in particular, with Byron. Where “Byron scholarship has worked hard to disassociate the poet from this kind of pop-Gothic depiction, seeing it as the inevitable but regrettable offspring of nineteenth-century Byromania” (McDayter 30), contemporary YA fiction suggests that it is precisely via pop-Gothic depictions that today’s adolescents may first come to know the Romantic in general and the Byronic in particular. This paper reads these novels in the context of current anxieties about cultural illiteracy and educational “failure” in order to consider what work is being undertaken in the name of Byron, and to shed light on the ways in which cultural education may be taking place far beyond the realms of schools or cemeteries for today’s young readers.

Even Penelope had a plan : imagining a metaphysics of wandering in the contemporary travel blogs of Australian Women Abroad

Despite the continued popularity of travel blogs and virtual travel communities, there is currently a lack of contemporary criticism surrounding the coded structures and connotations of online travel writings, especially those arising out of the Australian context. While there have been few significant studies of Australian women’s travel to date, there have been even less about female wandering. Reimagining the archetype of Penelope, this paper considers liminal accounts of wandering in contemporary travel blogs of Australian women abroad. When women travel as wanderers, they undermine normative accounts of travel and trace out alternative movements fused with gendered meaning.

Loving Anna

Short story published in The Lifted Brow, number 7.

Digital modelling for sustainability

Digital modelling tools are the next generation of computer aided design (CAD) tools for the construction industry. They allow a designer to build a virtual model of the building project before the building is constructed. This supports a whole range of analysis, and the identification and resolution of problems before they arise on-site, in ways that were previously not feasible.