AustLit

'In this paper, I report on the new capstone course for the English major at Western Sydney University. The course was delivered against the backdrop of the former federal government’s Job-ready Graduates package, which misrepresented the employment outcomes of humanities graduates, as well as their contributions to the economic, cultural and political health of the country. As the Morrison Government’s higher educational reforms inadvertently demonstrated, the value of literature is difficult to quantify, not least because literature turns the idea of use value on its head. In a political climate hostile to the teaching of university English, the reframing of literary study at university in terms of the value of literature presents pedagogical opportunities I discuss with reference to the choices and approaches adopted in LANG3094: The Value of Literature during the pandemic in 2020–2022.' (Introduction)          

'On the first of December 2022, the Australian University Heads of English (AUHE) hosted a short conference at the University of Melbourne as part of the inaugural Congress for the Humanities, Arts and Social Sciences. Academics and postgraduates from across the country gathered to reflect on the value of literature and its various embodiments in their professional activities of research, teaching, governance, and public engagement. From the bar table benches at The Curtain on Lygon Street, the day was hailed a great success, and a similar event reprising the conference theme promised – or wassailed – for 2023. It is the intention of AUHE to convene a small annual conference exploring the challenges we face as literary studies academics seeking to realise the core tasks of humanities education and research. Plans will go ahead while there is human capital to sustain them, though hopes remain high that an annual AUHE short conference on the state of literary studies in Australia will soon be a fixture on the academic calendar. The 2023 conference, ‘The Future of Literary Studies’, will be held at the University of Sydney, with plans for the 2024 conference at the University of Western Australia underway. A commitment to publish papers from annual proceedings is a goal of the current conference committee (Anthony Uhlmann, Ann Vickery, and myself), though one that remains contingent, like the proceedings themselves, on the availability of key individuals. On behalf of the committee, I’d like to express my sincere gratitude to colleagues from across the country, whose peer review of submissions on a tight schedule made this year’s special issue possible. The collegial response to our call out was a further expression of the scholarly consensus regarding the urgent need to meet the decline of the humanities in Australia by professing the value of literature across the range of its social, political, pedagogical, and private benefits.' (Introduction)          

'Joan Lindsay’s Picnic at Hanging Rock, which turns fifty this year, owes a share of its longevity to the modern folklore of vanished white women that has swirled around sites like Hanging Rock in Victoria’s Macedon Ranges since the nineteenth century. Lindsay’s Gothic legend still clings to this unique rock formation. The tale’s enduring appeal and unsettling allure arises from a mist of fact and fiction, casting a magic unspoiled even by the kitsch tourist injunction at Hanging Rock Reserve to ‘Experience the Mystery.’ No matter how often the story is demystified, its ghost lives on in urban legend, with all the appearance of an actual unsolved crime. The mystery lives on in the inescapable question: did it really happen?'  (Introduction)

The actor who can't leave the stage - like the sales rep who lives in transit, the stenographer who throws himself on the mercy of the court, the chess master who fakes his own funeral, the judge who swears in witnesses to his dream of auto-execution or the student who steals the identities of excursionists to the Veste Oberhaus in Passau - is at the end of his rope. The personal catastrophes catalogued in the reports, notices, anecdotes, aphorisms and parables that make up Proofs, as in those of its model, Thomas Bernhard's The Voice Imitator, arose in the nature of things, as the final entry 'pseudonym' remarks in a tribute to Bernhard.

'This collection of essays takes an interdisciplinary approach to the ecological, social, economic and, in particular, the cultural dimensions of the Australia-India relationship. The essays provide many levels of focus on environment, place and culture. Some evoke appreciation of particular "places," either in India or Australia. Many explore how literature has treated "landscape," while some are comparative studies of cultural, historical and political development. The essays arise from a particular gathering of scholars: The East India chapter of the Indian Association for the Study of Australia (IASA) held its inaugural international conference in Kolkata on 22-23 January 2009. Much of the work is comparative, exploring common Indian and Australian themes of colonial and postcolonial experience, implications of migration and diaspora, and shared language and literature. The work also explores shared environmental crisis, manifest in landscapes such as the Mouths of the Ganges and Australia's Murray Darling Basin. Such comparisons indicate our shared experience of the "crisis" of ecological, social, economic and cultural sustainability. As human future is colonized through environmental degradation, and determined by human migration and shared culture and values, our relationship to "place" is revitalized and reassessed. We seek simultaneously a reconciliation between humans and a realignment of the human-nature relationship. This is the most basic meaning of social and ecological sustainability' (publisher website).