AustLit

'‘Human, All Too Human is the monument of a crisis ... the title means “where you see ideal things, I see what is—human, alas, all-too-human”—I know man better’ (Nietzsche 1967a: 283; emphasis in original). So writes Nietzsche, opening his remarkable self-portrait Ecce Homo (‘Behold, the man’; written 1888, first published 1908), and reflecting bleakly on the mass of humanity. It is difficult to dispute this perspective given that, over the century-plus since Nietzsche wrote this, history has recorded crisis after crisis. Human is indeed all too human, never the ideal of which individuals and populations dream.' (Introduction)

'Throughout the twentieth century, the world of higher education appeared to be stable and familiar. Universities delivered education and research under well-established discipline headings, and art schools delivered craft and field knowledge. Toward the end of that century, the relationship between the academy and the creative arts sector changed, and the role of teachers of creative practice and the expectations of tertiary creative arts courses changed with it. The past decades have been characterized by an ongoing debate about the respective value of teaching, creative practice, and research-particularly about the capacity of the arts to deliver research. This volume, from a distinguished list of academic writers and creators, offers contributions to these dialogues, as well as analyses of the international environment for the creative arts in the academy and the key government policies currently shaping the field.' (Publication summary)

'Intimacy is both a problem and a pleasure that has been a feature of narrative right across history. One very early example of intimacy and its discontents is the story of Daedalus and Icarus, remarkable not least for the way Icarus has become a trope, appearing in various guises in literary and visual art over the centuries since his early appearances in works by Ovid, Virgil, Apollodorus, Pausanias and Diodorus. The relationship between this artist father and his impressionable son is predicated on an intimacy that, like other intimacies, exploits the fragile relationship between self and other. Like so many such relationships, it ends badly, in a story that never reaches its end: Daedalus is always strapping the flawed wings onto his son, and kissing him for the last time; Icarus is always joyfully flying, and then falling.

'A contemporary version of this story-with-no-(good)-end is, we suggest, to be found in various narratives that have emerged since the start of the so-called war on terror. We propose to tease out the tensions between several ephemeral points: between individuals, between ideologies, and between patterns of signification. Foucault writes of 'the buried kinships between things' that poetry can rediscover; Lacan and Levinas in their different ways write of the ethical problems involved in attempting to reconcile self and other, attempting to suture the space between while retaining the fantasy of a discrete, though intimately known, self. Following these concepts, we will test the extent to which creative expression can invoke the intimacy between world and word, or self and other.' (Publication abstract)