AustLit

'Inspired by ideas organising Rachel Sagner Buurma and Laura Heffernan’s The Teaching Archive: A New History for Literary Study (University of Chicago Press, 2021), this AHR forum also takes its title from one of the book’s introductory passages:

'The true history of English literary study resides in classrooms… most of the study of literature that has happened in the university has happened in classrooms. Counted not just in hours and weeks, but in numbers of people, stacks of paper, and intensity of attention, the teaching of English literature has occupied a grand scale. More poems have been close-read in classrooms than in published articles, more literary texts have been cited on syllabuses than in scholarship, more scholarship has been read in preparation for teaching than in drafting monographs. Within institutions of secondary education large and small, numberless teachers and students have gathered to read both an astonishing number and an astonishing range of texts together. If it were possible to assemble the true, impossible teaching archive—all the syllabuses, handouts, reading lists, lecture notes, student papers, and exams ever made—it would constitute a much larger and more interesting record than the famous monographs and seminal articles that usually represent the history of literary study.' (Monique Rooney : AHR Forum: ‘True, Impossible Teaching Archive’, Part One, Introduction)

'The Anthropocene has rendered the familiar strange and the strange familiar. As David Farrier suggests, ‘Surely the “sublime” is not the right way to characterise our visceral response to [the Anthropocene]. The “uncanny” might serve us better’ (np). The papers in this interdisciplinary collection consider what the era of the Anthropocene means for how we critically, artistically and affectively approach objects. In line with contemporary critical re-evaluations of the liveliness of objects (Bennett, Vibrant; Brown), this collection brings together things which are dead and/or alive, human and/or nonhuman, sensate and/or insensate, fantastical and/or historical, natural and/or cultural, spectacular and/or mundane. These objects are here re-enlivened in order to expose alternative ways of knowing the past, understanding this anthropocentric present, and imagining the role of humans in shaping environmental futures. In this way, the collection interrogates present and future problems—species mass-extinction, climate change, anthropogenic environmental impact—in relation to how the past is re-imagined, interpreted, commemorated, subverted and displayed. The collection considers human history in relation to the deep histories of nonhuman time and the more-than-human effects that a human-centred approach have often ignored or hidden. We are interested not only in objects as products of the Anthropocene, but in how the Anthropocene uncanny invites us to re-consider histories and objects in new and unexpected ways.' (Hannah Stark , Katrina Schlunke  and Penny Edmonds  : Introduction: Uncanny Objects in the Anthropocene)

'This special section of Australian Humanities Review, entitled ‘Unfinished Business: Apology Cultures in the Asia Pacific’, arose out of a Monash University Arts Faculty Interdisciplinary Research Project of the same name. This project brought together an interdisciplinary team across the fields of Literary Studies, History, Film, and Cultural Studies, encompassing aspects of law, human rights and ethics. The project sought to understand how various forms of cultural practice and narrative mediate our comprehension of the past and of ongoing human interactions within and between nation-states, in particular, of past, present and future social and cultural interactions that coalesce around the material and symbolic consequences of apology in the Asia Pacific region.' (Editorial Introduction)