Digital storytelling, podcasts, blogs and vlogs : exploring a range of new media texts and forms in English

Curriculum initiatives in Australia emphasise the use of technologies and new media in classrooms. Some English teachers might fear this deployment of technologies because we are not all ‘digital natives’ like our students. If we embrace new media forms such as podcasts, blogs, vodcasts, and digital stories, a whole new world of possibilities open up for literary response and recreative texts, with new audiences and publication spaces. This article encourages English teachers to embrace these new digital forms and how shows we can go about it.

From Sydney and Shanghai : Australian and Chinese women writing modernism

In the 1930s and 1940s, Australian women writers published novels, poems, and short stories that pushed the boundaries of their national literary culture. From their position in the Pacific, they entered into a dialogue with a European modernism that they reworked to invigorate their own writing and to make cross-continental connections. My interest in the work of Australian women prose writers of this period stems from an appreciation of the extent of their engagement with interwar modernism (an engagement that is generally under-acknowledged) and the realization that there are commonalities of approach with the ways in which contemporaneous Chinese authors negotiated this transnational cultural traffic. China and Australia, it has been argued, share an imaginative and literal association of many centuries, and this psychic history produces a situation in which ‘Australians feel drawn towards China: they cannot leave it alone.’1 Equally, Chinese exploration of the great southern land began in the fifteenth century, prior to European contact. In recent times, the intensity of Australia’s cultural and commercial connections with Asia has led to a repositioning of the Australian sense of regionalism in general and, in particular, has activated yet another stage in the history of its relationship with China. In this context, the association of Australian and Chinese writing is instructive because the commonalities of approach and areas of interest between certain authors indicate that Australian writers were not alone in either the content or style of their response to European modernism. This recognition, in turn, advances discussions of modernism in Australia and reveals an alternative way of looking at the world from the Pacific Rim through literature. The intent is to examine selective Australian and Chinese authors who are part of this continuous history and whose writing demonstrates common thematic and stylistic features via the vector of modernism. I focus on the 1930s and 1940s because these are the decades in which Australia and China experienced wideranging conflict in the Pacific, and it is significant that war, both forthcoming and actual, features as an ominous soundtrack in the writing of Chinese and Australian women. I argue that, given the immensity of cultural difference between Australia and China, there is an especially interesting juncture in the ways in which the authors interrogate modernist practices and the challenge of modernism. The process in which writing from the Pacific Rim jointly negotiates the twin desires of engaging with European literary form and representing one’s own culture may be seen as what Jessica Berman identifies as a geomodernism, one of the ‘new possible geographies’ of modernism.2 My discussion centres on the work of the Australian women, to which the Chinese material serves as a point of reference, albeit a critical one. The Chinese writing examined here is restricted to authors who wrote at least some material in English and whose work is available in translation.

Protecting your intellectual property and selling it

Intellectual Property - group of rights used to protect literary, artistic and industrial property. Generally separated into the categories of: • Copyright • Trade marks • Designs • Patents But also extends to specific subject matter of plant variety rights and circuit layouts and general information that is confidential such as trade secrets and protection of goodwill and reputation through the action of passing off. New information, be it a new computer program or novel device, developed by an organisation is valuable to it. So too is the organisation name and reputation. While some protection is automatic, like copyright, other protection and rights must be obtained under various legislation. When dealing with employees and third parties, ownership of existing and new rights needs to be clearly established so that rights are not lost. Obligations in relation to the use of certain property and any confidential information must also be clearly established...

Asian-Australian Children’s Literature and Publishing (AACLAP)

Led by Queensland University of Technology, the Asian-Australian Children’s Literature and Publishing (AACLAP)research project investigates and records details of Australian children’s literature that is set in Asia and/or that represents Asian-Australian cultures and experiences and literature that is published in selected Asian languages. This includes East Asia, Southeast Asia, South Asia, and the Bay of Bengal. The AACLAP dataset is a comprehensive collection of agent and work records related to ’Asia’, including, but not limited to, autobiography, fiction, criticism, poetry, drama, short stories, and picture books, published during a forty-year period from 1970 to 2010. The dataset provide valuable primary and secondary sources that are important for developing literature-focused educational programs in line with the national government’s push for Asia Literacy. AACLAP is a subset of AustLit, the virtual research environment and information resource for Australian literary, print, and narrative culture scholars, students, and the public.

Visions and values : the Children’s Book Council of Australia’s prizing of picture books in the twenty-first century

The Children’s Book Council of Australia (CBCA) administers the oldest national prize for children’s literature in Australia. Each year, the CBCA confers “Book of the Year” awards to literature for young people in five categories. In 2001, the establishment of an “Early Childhood” category opened up the venerable “Picture Book” category (first awarded in 1955) to books with an implied readership up to 18 years of age. As a result, this category has emerged in recent years as a highly visible space within which the CBCA can contest discourses of cultural marginalisation insofar as Australian (“colonial”) literature is constructed as inferior or adjunct to the major Anglophone literary traditions, and the consistent identification of children’s literature (and, indeed, of children) as lesser than its ‘adult’ counterparts. The CBCA is engaged in defining, evaluating, and legitimising a tradition of Australian children’s literature which is underpinned by a canonical impulse, and is a reflexive practice of self-definition, self-evaluation and self-legitimisation for the CBCA itself. While it is obviously problematic to identify award winners as a canon, it is equally obvious that literary prizing is a cultural practice derived from the logic of canonicity. In his discussion of the United States’s Newbery Medal, Kenneth Kidd notes that “Medal books are instant classics, the selection process an ostensible simulation of the test of time” (169) and that “the Medal is part of the canonical architecture of children's literature” (169). Thus, it is instructive to consider the visions and values of the national, of the social, and of the literary-aesthetic, in the picture books chosen by the Children’s Book Council of Australia (CBCA) as the “best” of the early twenty-first century. These books not only constitute a kind of canon for contemporary Australian children’s literature, but may well come to define what contemporary Australian children’s literature means in the wider literary field. The Book of the Year: Picture Book awards given by the CBCA since 2001 demonstrate that it is not only true of the Booker Prize that, “The choices of winning books reflect not only on the books themselves, then, but also back on the Prize, affecting its reputation and creating journalistic capital which is vital for the Prize to achieve its prominence and impact.” (81). Many of the twenty-first century CBCA award-winning picture books complicate traditional or comfortable understanding of Australianness, children’s literature, or “appropriate” modes of form and content, reminding us that “moments when texts resist or complicate recuperation into national discourses offer fruitful points for exploring the relationships between text and celebratory context” (Roberts 6). The CBCA has taken the opportunities offered by the liberation of the Picture Book category from an implied readership to challenge dominant constructions of children’s literature in Australia, and in so doing, are engaged in overt practices of canonicity with potentially long-lasting effects. Works Cited: Kidd, Kenneth. “Prizing Children’s Literature: The Case of Newbery Gold.” Children's Literature 35 (2007): 166-190. Roberts, Gillian. Prizing Literature: The Celebration and Circulation of National Culture. Toronto: U Toronto P, 2011. Squires, Claire. “Book Marketing and the Booker Prize.” Judging a Book by Its Cover: Fans, Publishers, Designers, and the Marketing of Fiction. Eds. Nicole Matthews and Nickianne Moody. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007. 71-82.

Practices of literary tourism : an Australian case study

Purpose To present the results of tests for the development of literary trails for domestic visitors and tourists in Brisbane, Queensland, and to situate these findings in the context of recent state government policy changes in relation to culture, community engagement and the environment. Design Broadly cultural studies: the article analyses changes in international and national cultural tourism and Queensland based issues before presenting the research findings. Findings a gap in tourist and cultural development models exists for the implementation of a network of sustainable literary trails in Brisbane--this model can be extended to regions around the state to meet the demands of the new tourist. Limitations Queensland weather and Australian distance which will require a regional approach that networks with transport and community hubs. Practical implications the research has produced new software for the use of self-guided walks; the locations for two specific area trails; and the involvement of the State Library of Queensland as a “hub” for the trails. Substantial support exists for further development in advanced locative media and gaming. Social implications the research demonstrates the importance of developing a sense of place that relates to culture, literary history and community for tourists, as well as the potential for community engagement.

Text and Intensification of Its Impact in Chishti Samā`

In my master’s thesis I analyse mystical Islamic poetry in ritualistic performance context, samā` , focusing on the poetry used by the Chishti Sufis. The work is based on both literary sources and ethnographic material collected in India. The central textual source is Surūd-i Rūhānī, a compilation of mystical poetry. Textual sources, however, can be understood properly only in relation to the living performance context and therefore I also utilise interviews of Sufis and performers of mystical music and recordings of samā` assemblies along with texts. First part of the thesis concentrates on thematic overview of the poems and the process of selecting a suitable text for performance. The poems are written in three languages, viz. in Persian, Urdu and Hindi. Among the authors are both Sufis and non-Sufis. The poems, mystical and non-mystical alike, share the same poetic images and they acquire a mystical meaning when they are set to qawwali music and performed in samā` assemblies. My work includes several translations of verses not previously translated. Latter part of the thesis analyses the musical idiom of qawwali and the ways in which the impact of text on listeners is intensified in performance. Typically the intensification is accomplished in the level of a single poem through three different techniques: using introductory verses, inserting verses between the verses of the main poem and repeating individual units of text. The former two techniques are tied to creating a mystical state in the listeners while the latter aims at sustaining it. It is customary that a listener enraptured by mystical experience offers a monetary contribution to the performers. Thus, intensification of the text’s impact aims at enabling the listeners to experience mystical states.

Reading the Texture of Reality : Chaos Theory, Literature and the Humanist Perspective

Tutkimuksessa analysoidaan kaaosteorian vaikutusta kaunokirjallisuudessa ja kirjallisuudentutkimuksessa ja esitetään, että kaaosteorian roolia kirjallisuuden kentällä voidaan parhaiten ymmärtää sen avaamien käsitteiden kautta. Suoran soveltamisen sijaan kaaosteorian avulla on käyty uudenlaisia keskusteluja vanhoista aiheista ja luonnontieteestä ammennetut käsitteet ovat johtaneet aiemmin tukkeutuneiden argumenttien avaamiseen uudesta näkökulmasta käsin. Väitöskirjassa keskitytään kolmeen osa-alueeseen: kaunokirjallisen teoksen rakenteen teoretisointiin, ihmisen (erityisesti tekijän) identiteetin hahmottamiseen ja kuvailemiseen sekä fiktion ja todellisuuden suhteen pohdintaan. Tutkimuksen tarkoituksena on osoittaa, kuinka kaaosteorian kautta näitä aiheita on lähestytty niin kirjallisuustieteessä kuin kaunokirjallisissa teoksissakin. Väitöskirjan keskiössä ovat romaanikirjailija John Barthin, dramatisti Tom Stoppardin ja runoilija Jorie Grahamin teosten analyysit. Nämä kirjailijat ammentavat kaaosteoriasta keinoja käsitteellistää rakenteita, jotka ovat yhtä aikaa dynaamisia prosesseja ja hahmotettavia muotoja. Kaunokirjallisina teemoina nousevat esiin myös ihmisen paradoksaalisesti tunnistettava ja aina muuttuva identiteetti sekä lopullista haltuunottoa pakeneva, mutta silti kiehtova ja tavoiteltava todellisuus. Näiden kirjailijoiden teosten analyysin sekä teoreettisen keskustelun kautta väitöskirjassa tuodaan esiin aiemmassa tutkimuksessa varjoon jäänyt, koherenssia, ymmärrettävyyttä ja realismia painottava humanistinen näkökulma kaaosteorian merkityksestä kirjallisuudessa.

The Art of Sympathy : Forms of Moral and Emotional Persuasion in Fiction

"The Art of Sympathy: Forms of Moral and Emotional Persuasion" in Fiction is an interdisciplinary study that looks closely at the ways that stories evoke sympathy, and the significance of this emotion for the development of moral attitudes and awareness. By linking readers' emotional responses to fiction with the potential impact of such responses on "the moral imagination," the study builds on empirical research conducted by literary scholars and psychologists into the emotional effects of reading fiction, as well as social psychological research into the connections between empathy/sympathy and moral development. I first investigate the dynamics of readers beliefs regarding characters in fictional narratives, and the nature of the emotions that they may experience as a result of those beliefs. The analysis demonstrates that there are important similarities between real emotions and emotions generated by fiction. Recognizing these similarities, I claim, can help us to conceptualize the nature of sympathetic responses to fictional characters. Building on these assertions, I then draw on research from social psychology and philosophy to develop a comprehensive definition of sympathy and to clarify the ways in which sympathy operates, both in people s daily lives and in readers sympathetic responses to fictional characters. Having established this definition and delineated its practical implications, I then examine how particular stories, through a variety of narrative techniques, persuade readers to feel sympathy for characters who are unsympathetic in certain ways. In order to verify my claims about the impact of these stories on readers emotions, I also review the results of tests that I conducted with nearly 200 adolescent readers. Through these tests, which were constructed and scored according to methods prevalent in social psychological research, it was determined that a majority of readers felt sympathy for the protagonists in two of the stories included in the study. These results were combined with data from an additional test, a standard measure of empathy and sympathy in the field of social psychology. The cross-tabulation of these results suggests that there was not a strong connection between readers responses and their general tendencies to feel sympathy for others. This finding would appear to support my hypotheses regarding the sympathetic persuasiveness of the stories in question. In light of these results, finally, I consider the potential contribution that fiction can make to adolescent emotional and moral development and the implications of that potential for future language arts curricula in the schools. In particular, I suggest the pedagogical importance of providing adolescents with opportunities to engage with the lives of fictional characters, and especially to experience feelings of sympathy for individuals towards whom they ordinarily might feel aversion.

From Iron Horse to Rauta-airot - a Semiotic View on the Domestication of Metaphors in Literary Translation

The thesis concentrates on two questions: the translation of metaphors in literary texts, and the use of semiotic models and tools in translation studies. The aim of the thesis is to present a semiotic, text based model designed to ease the translation of metaphors and to analyze translated metaphors. In the translation of metaphors I will concentrate on the central problem of metaphor translations: in addition to its denotation and connotation, a single metaphor may contain numerous culture or genre specific meanings. How can a translator ensure the translation of all meanings relevant to the text as a whole? I will approach the question from two directions. Umberto Eco's holistic text analysis model provides an opportunity to concentrate on the problematic nature of metaphor translation from the level of a text as a specific entity, while George Lakoff's and Mark Johnson's metaphor research makes it possible to approach the question from the level of individual metaphors. On the semiotic side, the model utilizes Eero Tarasti's existential semiotics supported by Algirdas Greimas' actant model and Yuri Lotman's theory of cultural semiotics. In the model introduced in the thesis, individual texts are deconstructed through Eco's model into elements. The textual roles and features of these elements are distilled further through Tarasti's model into their coexistent meaning levels. The priorization and analysis of these meaning levels provide an opportunity to consider the contents and significance of specific metaphors in relation to the needs of the text as a whole. As example texts, I will use Motörhead's hard rock classic Iron Horse/Born to Lose and its translation into Rauta-airot by Viikate. I will use the introduced model to analyze the metaphors in the source and target texts, and to consider the transfer of culture specific elements between the languages and cultural borders. In addition, I will use the analysis process to examine the validity of the model introduced in the thesis.

Poetics of Subjectivity : Existence and Expressivity in Simone de Beauvoir's Philosophy

In the last thirty years, primarily feminist scholars have drawn attention to and re-evaluated the philosophy of Simone de Beauvoir (1908 1986). Her philosophical practice has been described as non-systematic, and her literary writing has been viewed as part of her non-systematic mode of philosophising. This dissertation radically deepens the question concerning Beauvoir s philosophical motivations for turning to literature as a mode to express subjectivity. It explicates the central concepts of Beauvoir s philosophy of existence, which are subjectivity, ambiguity, paradox and temporality, and their background in the modern traditions of existential philosophy and phenomenology. It also clarifies Beauvoir s main reason to turn to literature in order to express subjectivity as both singular and universal: as a specific mode of communication, literature is able to make the universality of existence manifest in the concrete, singular and temporal texture of life. In addition, the thesis gives examples of how Beauvoir s literary works contribute to an understanding of the complexity of subjectivity. I use the expression poetics of subjectivity to refer to the systematic relation between Beauvoir s existential and phenomenological notion of subjectivity and her literary works, and to her articulations of a creative mode of using language, especially in the novel. The thesis is divided into five chapters, of which the first three investigate Beauvoir s philosophy of existence at the intersection of the modern traditions of thought that began with René Descartes and Søren Kierkegaard s intuitions about subjectivity. Chapter 1 interprets Beauvoir s notion of ambiguity, as compared to paradox, and argues that both determine her notion of existence. Chapters 2 and 3 investigate the phenomenological side of Beauvoir s philosophy through a study of her response to early French interpretations of transcendental subjectivity, especially in the works of Jean-Paul Sartre and Maurice Merleau-Ponty. My analysis shows that Edmund Husserl s distinction between different levels of subjective experience is central to Beauvoir s understanding of subjectivity and to the different ego concepts she uses. Chapter 4 is a study of Beauvoir s reflections on the expression of subjective thought, and, more specifically, her philosophical conceptions of the metaphysical novel and the autobiography as two modes of indirect communication. Chapter 5, finally, compares two modes of investigating concrete subjectivity; Beauvoir s conceptual study of femininity in Le deuxième sexe and her literary expression of subjectivity in the novel L Invitée. My analysis reveals and explicates Beauvoir s original contribution to a comprehensive understanding of the becoming and paradox of human existence: the fundamental insight that these phenomena are sexed, historically as well as imaginatively.

Double-Edged Imitation : Theories and Practices of Pastiche in Literature

This study concentrates on the contested concept of pastiche in literary studies. It offers the first detailed examination of the history of the concept from its origins in the seventeenth century to the present, showing how pastiche emerged as a critical concept in interaction with the emerging conception of authorial originality and the copyright laws protecting it. One of the key results of this investigation is the contextualisation of the postmodern debate on pastiche. Even though postmodern critics often emphasise the radical novelty of pastiche, they in fact resuscitate older positions and arguments without necessarily reflecting on their historical conditions. This historical background is then used to analyse the distinction between the primarily French conception of pastiche as the imitation of style and the postmodern notion of it as the compilation of different elements. The latter s vagueness and inclusiveness detracts from its value as a critical concept. The study thus concentrates on the notion of stylistic pastiche, challenging the widespread prejudice that it is merely an indication of lack of talent. Because it is multiply based on repetition, pastiche is in fact a highly ambiguous or double-edged practice that calls into question the distinction between repetition and original, thereby undermining the received notion of individual unique authorship as a fundamental aesthetic value. Pastiche does not, however, constitute a radical upheaval of the basic assumptions on which the present institution of literature relies, since, in order to mark its difference, pastiche always refers to a source outside itself against which its difference is measured. Finally, the theoretical analysis of pastiche is applied to literary works. The pastiches written by Marcel Proust demonstrate how it can become an integral part of a writer s poetics: imitation of style is shown to provide Proust with a way of exploring the role of style as a connecting point between inner vision and reality. The pastiches of the Sherlock Holmes stories by Michael Dibdin, Nicholas Meyer and the duo Adrian Conan Doyle and John Dickson Carr illustrate the functions of pastiche within a genre detective fiction that is itself fundamentally repetitive. A.S. Byatt s Possession and D.M. Thomas s Charlotte use Victorian pastiches to investigate the conditions of literary creation in the age of postmodern suspicion of creativity and individuality. The study thus argues that the concept of pastiche has valuable insights to offer to literary criticism and theory, and that literary pastiches, though often dismissed in reviews and criticism, are a particularly interesting object of study precisely because of their characteristic ambiguity.

Sources of contention and the emerging reality concerning Qohelet's Carpe Diem advice

Abstract: When Qohelet declares “there is nothing new under the sun,” his own words are no exception. It has been known for a century now that not all of Qohelet’s material is original to his own genius, and the idea that Qohelet is directly dependent on a literary source(s) is standard fare. The hallmark example continues to be Siduri the alewife’s advice to Gilgamesh which displays remarkable correspondence with Ecclesiastes 9: 7-9. However, what may have been construed as an instance of clear literary dependency a century ago cannot be maintained in light of the data that continues to emerge from the ancient Near East. New sources have risen that contend with the Gilgamesh Epic, and there has yet to emerge a definitive victor. This paper calls into question the very idea that Qohelet was directly dependent on a literary precursor and joins with a few select voices both past and present in suggesting an alternate interpretation of the data.

Detecting Digital Forgeries Using Bispectral Analysis

With the rapid increase in low-cost and sophisticated digital technology the need for techniques to authenticate digital material will become more urgent. In this paper we address the problem of authenticating digital signals assuming no explicit prior knowledge of the original. The basic approach that we take is to assume that in the frequency domain a "natural" signal has weak higher-order statistical correlations. We then show that "un-natural" correlations are introduced if this signal is passed through a non-linearity (which would almost surely occur in the creation of a forgery). Techniques from polyspectral analysis are then used to detect the presence of these correlations. We review the basics of polyspectral analysis, show how and why these tools can be used in detecting forgeries and show their effectiveness in analyzing human speech.

James Joyce and the Problem of Psychoanalysis

Thurston, L. (2004). James Joyce and the Problem of Psychoanalysis. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. RAE2008