What I ‘know’: Literary studies and the teaching of English

This essay unfolds through a series of juxtapositions, involving storytelling and writing of a more analytical nature. In thinking about what I ‘know’ as an English teacher, my aim has been to present my ideas in a form that might do justice to the contradictions and complexities of my professional life, including my continuing efforts to negotiate a pathway between the rich particularities of the educational settings in which I have worked and my knowledge and values as an English teacher. My primary focus is on how my literary education has shaped and been shaped by my work as an English teacher vis-à-vis a devaluing of teachers’ disciplinary knowledge that has occurred through standards-based reforms. I attempt to make the standpoint from which I am writing an object of scrutiny, thus producing an account of what I ‘know’ that arises out of my work as an English teacher and returns to it as a necessary dimension of a politically committed praxis.

Literary English and the challenge of multimodality

How to understand and argue for the nature and place of literary texts and experience in contemporary English curriculum has been and continues to be the subject of much debate. While literature as traditionally conceptualised remains an important presence in much English curriculum, the notion of what 'literature' is, or what the category of 'literary' texts and cultural forms might encompass, in a context where literacy is understood as multimodal and English and literacy curriculum addresses multimodal literacies accordingly, is less clear. This paper addresses two areas with respect to literature and literature teaching in the digital age: first, issues surrounding the ways in which national curriculum guidelines in England and Australia envisage the teaching of literature, in principle and in practice; and second, the challenges presented to print-based conceptions of literature and literature teaching within English by significantly broader conceptualisations of literature encompassing a range of aesthetic multimodal texts and forms. The kinds of insights, experience and understandings generated through the study and creation of literary and aesthetic texts in English, it is argued, are now needed more than ever. However, as literary experience becomes increasingly transmodal, how English seeks to manage media shift to encompass both print and digital forms remains a challenging issue.

Women, Authorship and Literary Culture, 1690 - 1740

Prescott, S. (2003). Women, Authorship and Literary Culture, 1690 - 1740. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. RAE2008

A definition of literary literacy: a content analysis of literature syllabuses and interviews with Portuguese lecturers of literature

The aim of this paper is to present a definition of literary literacy in the context of majors in languages, literatures and cultures, in Portugal. A definition of literary literacy was deduced from a content analysis of primary data sources and from the theoretical underpinnings of the transactional theory of reading. The primary data sources are fourteen Portuguese and English literature syllabuses from four Portuguese universities (Lisboa, Nova, Coimbra and Porto) and twelve interviews with Portuguese university lecturers of literature. Based on the findings of a content analysis of both syllabuses and interviews, from the lecturers‘ point of view, a literary literate student doing a major in languages, literatures and cultures must, above all, be able to contextualize literary texts and their authors both historically and culturally, must be able to present an interpretation as a coherent text, and must be able to do and organize bibliographical research.

The destinies of literary manuscripts: past present and future

This essay reviews the ways in which literary manuscripts may be considered to be archivally unique, as well as valuable in all senses of the word, and gives a cautious appraisal of their future in the next ten to twenty years. It reviews the essential nature of literary manuscripts, and especially the ways in which they form “split collections”. This leads to an assessment of the work of the Diasporic Literary Archives network from 2012 to 2014, and some of the key findings. The essay closes with reflections on the future of literary manuscripts in the digital age – emerging trends, research findings, uncertainties and unknowns.

Career in writing : Judah Waten and the cultural politics of a literary career

This thesis examines the literary career of Judah Waten (1911-1985) in order to focus on a series of issues in Australian cultural history and theory. The concept of the career is theorised as a means of bringing together the textual and institutional dimensions of writing and being a writer in a specific cultural economy. The guiding question of the argument which re-emerges in different ways in each chapter is: in what ways was it possible to write and to be a writer in a given time and place? Waten's career as a Russian-born, Jewish, Australian nationalist, communist and realist writer across the middle years of this century is, for the purposes of the argument, at once usefully exemplary and usefully marginal in relation to the literary establishment. His texts provide the central focus for individual chapters; at the same time each chapter considers a specific historical moment and a specific set of issues for Australian cultural history, and is to this extent self-contained. Recent work in narrative theory, literary sociology and Australian literary and cultural studies is brought together to revise accepted readings of Waten's texts and career, and to address significant absences or problems in Australian cultural history. The sequence of issues shaping Waten's career in writing is argued in terms of the following conjunctions of theoretical and historical categories: proletarianism, modernity and theories of the avant-garde; the "e;migrant"e; writer and minority literatures; realism, political purpose and narrative self-situation; communism, nationalism and literary practice in the cold war; utopianism and the "e;literary witness"e; narrative of the Soviet Union; assimilationism, multicultural theory and the "e;non-Anglo-Celtic"e; writer; theories of autobiographical writing, and autobiography in Waten's career. The purpose of the thesis is not to discover a single key to Waten's writing across the oeuvre but rather to plot the specific occasions of this writing in the context of the structure of a career and the cultural institutions within which it was formed.

Book review: Richard Lance Keeble and John Tulloch (eds), Global literary journalism: exploring the journalistic imagination

Reviews a new book on international literary journalism and includes critical commentary on the Australian field of literary journalism.

Colonial feminism and Australian literary culture in Ethel and Lilian Turner's the Parthenon (1889–92)

The Parthenon is a unique example of a colonial Australian magazine published for girl readers by two aspirant writers, Ethel and Lilian Turner. In addition to its domestic content, typical of women's magazines, it also sought to contribute to nascent Australian literary culture. This article locates the Parthenon within the history of colonial women's publishing and literary culture, and situates its content within the context of the Woman Movement of the period. It reads the Parthenon's telling picture of young women's perceptions of colonial literary culture and of the need to balance literary aspirations with domestic responsibilities through the lens of the “expediency feminism” advocated by the Dawn, a women's magazine published by Louisa Lawson from 1888. The article argues that the Parthenon's superficially conservative opinion of women's supreme calling being in the home rather than the newspaper office or university library was in alignment with the arguments made by the Woman Movement to advocate for women's greater participation in the public sphere. The comparison of these contemporaneous monthly publications written and produced by women enables an understanding of the ways in which late nineteenth-century attempts to encourage women's careers and independence were grounded in domesticity.

Portugal e Brasil: a imprensa literária e o início da imprensa ilustrada Portugal and Brazil: from literary

Fundação de Amparo à Pesquisa do Estado de São Paulo (FAPESP)

Literary museum, an annual volume of the useful and entertaining, including the wonders of nature and art; tales of all countries and all ages; travels, adventures, etc...

Mode of access: Internet.

Essays and studies, educational and literary,

"Six hundred copies only of this edition are printed for sale in the United States."

A linguistic and semantic approach to the theory and practice of literary translation

This work explores the relevance of semantic and linguistic description to translation, theory and practice. It is aimed towards a practical model of approach to texts to translate. As literary texts [poetry mainly] are the focus of attention, so are stylistic matters. Note, however, that 'style', and, to some extent, the conclusions of the work, are not limited to so-called literary texts. The study of semantic description reveals that most translation problems do not stem from the cognitive (langue-related), but rather from the contextual (parole-related) aspects of meaning. Thus, any linguistic model that fails to account for the latter is bound to fall short. T.G.G. does, whereas Systemics, concerned with both the 'Iangue' and 'parole' (stylistic and sociolinguistic mainly) aspects of meaning, provides a useful framework of approach to texts to translate. Two essential semantic principles for translation are: that meaning is the property of a language (Firth); and the 'relativity of meaning assignments' (Tymoczko). Both imply that meaning can only be assessed, correctly, in the relevant socio-cultural background. Translation is seen as a restricted creation, and the translator's encroach as a three-dimensional critical one. To encompass the most technical to the most literary text, and account for variations in emphasis in any text, translation theory must be based on typology of function Halliday's ideational, interpersonal and textual, or, Buhler's symbol, signal, symptom, Functions3. Function Coverall and specific] will dictate aims and method, and also provide the critic with criteria to assess translation Faithfulness. Translation can never be reduced to purely objective methods, however. Intuitive procedures intervene, in textual interpretation and analysis, in the choice of equivalents, and in the reception of a translation. Ultimately, translation, theory and practice, may perhaps constitute the touchstone as regards the validity of linguistic and semantic theories.

Literary reading is a team game: exercices with Carroll and Carle.

This paper will focus on the issue of training future literary reading mediators or promoters. It will propose a practical exercise on playing with intertextuality with the aid of two children literature classics and masterpieces—The Adventures of Alice in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll (1865) and The Very Hungry Caterpillar by Eric Carle (1969). This exercise is not designed to be a pedagogical or didactic tool used with children (that could alternatively be done with the same corpora), but it is designed to focus on issues of literary studies and contemporary culture. The aim of this practical exercise with future reading promoters is to enable graduate students or trainees to be able to recognize that literary reading can be a team game. However, before arriving at the agan stage, where the rules get simplified and attainable by young readers, hard and solitary work of the mediator is required. The rules of this solitary game of preparing the reading of classical texts are not always evident. On the other hand, the reason why literary reading could be (and perhaps should be) defined as a new team game in our contemporary and globalized world derives directly from the fact that we now live in a world where mass culture is definitely installed. We should be pragmatic on evaluating the conditions of communication between people (not only young adults or children) and we should look the way people read the signs on everyday life and consequently behave in contemporary society, and then apply the same rules or procedures to introduce old players such as the classical books in the game. We are talking about adult mediators and native digital readers. In the contemporary democratic social context, cultural producers and consumers are two very important elements (as the book itself) of the literary polissystem. So, teaching literature is more than ever to be aware that the literary reader meaning of a text does not reside only in the text and in its solitary relationship with the quiet and comfortably installed reader. Meaning is produced by the reader in relation both to the text in question and to the complex network of texts invoked in the reading process and plural connections provided by the world of a new media environment.