Digital Commons Network^™

The Gay Novel And The Gay World, Guy R. Davidson

Faculty of Law, Humanities and the Arts - Papers (Archive)

In a recent review essay, J. Daniel Elam charts the emergence of “gay world literary fiction,” a subgenre of the category “world literature,” which over the last twenty years or so has become both a marketing strategy for publishers and a “disciplinary rallying point of literary criticism and the academic humanities.”1 While Elam’s essay is implicitly underpinned by the usual disciplinary understanding of world literature (fiction from potentially anywhere in the globe, translated into English, and studied comparatively), its focus is narrowed to the “gay world” within the planetary world—a putatively homogenous, transnational gay subculture enabled by digital connectivity and …

The Front Comes Home: Returned Soldiers And Psychological Trauma In Australia During And After The First World War, Jennifer M. Roberts

Faculty of Law, Humanities and the Arts - Papers (Archive)

No abstract provided.

The Nation Or The Globe?: Australian Literature And/In The World, Antonio Simoes Da Silva

Faculty of Law, Humanities and the Arts - Papers (Archive)

Although far more nuanced and complex than am I suggesting here, I want to take the central thesis in Philip Mead’s ‘Proust at Caloundra’, a review-essay of Robert Dixon and Brigid Rooney’s Scenes of Reading: Is Australian Literature a World Literature? (2013), as a reminder of the importance of the national, and indeed the local, in the transnational turn in literary studies of the last decade or so. As Mead notes, slightly tongue-in-cheek, ‘[a]ll models of the world literary system … are structured according to complex political and cultural geometries and desires, as much as by national cultural genetics. There …

Which World, And Why Do We Worry About It?, Paul Sharrad

Faculty of Law, Humanities and the Arts - Papers (Archive)

The paper looks at various meanings of ‘World Literature’ (widely read books; great works of transcultural influence; a disciplinary structure and practice), assessing Australia’s place in each and what might underlie a wish to belong to any.

In particular, it locates the last focus of scholarly discussion in French and US sites and the drive to reform Comparative Literature studies, examining possible factors leading Australian universities to engage with such debates and possible effects on local practice.

The paper notes how Postcolonial literary studies called for this kind of reform of comparative literature and pushed towards a ‘world literature’ under …

The World’S Affluent Playground: Dubai’S Architecture Of Doom And The Future Of Globalized Social Reproduction, Timothy Dimuzio

Faculty of Law, Humanities and the Arts - Papers (Archive)

During the two major oil price spikes in the 1970s, dollars earned from Middle Eastern oil were largely recycled through banks in the United States and Britain. Much of this money would go to finance a burgeoning arms trade and a number of highly dubious ‘development’ projects that eventually contributed to what was then called the ‘Third World debt crisis’. In the post-911 world, a renewed and dramatic spike in the price of oil encouraged similar activities and a similar crisis. There are, however, considerable differences worth exploring. One such difference is how the Emir of Dubai, with the knowledge …

Older Workers As Vulnerable Workers In The New World Of Work, Malcolm Sargeant, Andrew Frazer

Faculty of Law - Papers (Archive)

The paper brings focus to the consideration of one particular group of vulnerable workers who may be adversely affected by new forms of work. This group already suffers from discrimination based upon their age and this paper will consider whether this discrimination is compounded by the increasing numbers of older workers in the precarious workforce. The paper examines older workers in Australia and the United Kingdom to determine the extent of their involvement in precarious work, in particular part-time, casual or temporary work, and self-employment.

Shirley Hazzard And I: The Self, The Writer, The Nation And The World At 'Australian Literature In A Global World', Anne Collett

Faculty of Law, Humanities and the Arts - Papers (Archive)

"I don't believe that the best of this country's writers will wish to rest on 'identity': that is, to invite the risk that a work will be praised, and even over-valued, for its Australian associations - however striking their effects - rather than for its greater human truth." (Hazzard, Boyoer Lectures, 28)