Arts and Humanities Commons^™

Simultaneity And Solidarity In The Time Of Permanent War, Marie Lo

English Faculty Publications and Presentations

Excerpt in lieu of abstract:

The war that is going on beneath order and peace, the war that undermines our society and divides it in a binary mode is, basically, a race war.
--Michel Foucault, Society Must Be Defended

In their defense of the Muslim travel ban, lawyers for the Trump administration invoked the plenary power doctrine to justify its legality: "The Order was well under the president's authority under Congress' delegation, particularly in an area like immigration, in which the admission to the United States of foreign aliens is subject to plenary control by the political branches." (1) By …

Instapoetry Matters, Kathi Inman Berens

English Faculty Publications and Presentations

Why do fans of Instapoetry buy printed versions of exactly the same poems they can get in the Instagram app for free? Why buy what they already have?

The answer to this question wends through immigration offices and CreateSpace automated book publishing software, through an ocean of likes, reposts, hashtags and comments, and plants a flag onto bestseller lists with such unambiguous force that almost half (47 percent) of poetry books sold in the United States in 2017 were written by Instapoets. Here’s the same awesome metric in different terms: twelve of 2017’s top twenty bestselling poetry books -- 60% …

Notes From Underground: Fugitive Ecology And The Ethics Of Place, Sarah L. Lincoln

English Faculty Publications and Presentations

In this essay, I argue for “fugitive gardening” as a form of “poaching” or “resignifying,” a radical appropriation of hegemonic spaces and practices that both deconstructs the logics of mastery and hygienic possessiveness that underpin colonial culture, and articulates what we might call a fugitive ecology: a dispossession of self in relation to the environment, a refusal to conceive of land, soil or planet in terms of property. Fugitive gardening sets itself in opposition to the prisons, camps and forts that index South African political history, restorying place, environment, and the self as grounds for community formation, dialogue and cooperation. …

Review Of Minor Characters Have Their Day: Genre And The Contemporary Literary Marketplace", Rachel Noorda

English Faculty Publications and Presentations

Review of "Minor Characters Have Their Day: Genre and the Contemporary Literary Marketplace,” by Jeremy Rosen.

Surface Reading The Upside Down Chandelier: Interface “Mastery” And Feminism, Kathi Inman Berens

English Faculty Publications and Presentations

This essay compares the literary interfaces of one artwork, The Upside Down Chandelier [UDC], in two settings: a large-scale installation taking up a gallery room, and in a browser window. UDC is a generative, multimedia artwork authored in Flash by four women electronic literature artists using four spoken languages. It uses the same code base for both settings. The installation’s embodied and site-specific context at the gallery created multiple vantages from which to “read” the work’s design and purpose. In browser, UDC’s words are the only point of access. The reader’s urge to decode the words in …

Changes In Tone, Setting, And Publisher: Indigenous Literatures Of Australia And New Zealand From The 1980s To Today, Per Henningsgaard

English Faculty Publications and Presentations

This article examines four novels written since 1980 by two Aboriginal Australian authors and two Maori authors. Two of the four novels were written near the beginning of this period and feature settings that are contemporary with their publication; The Day of the Dog by Aboriginal Australian author Archie Weller was published in 1981, while Once Were Warriors by Maori author Alan Duff was published in 1990. The other two novels (That Deadman Dance by Aboriginal Australian author Kim Scott and The Trowenna Sea by Maori author Witi Ihimaera) are works of historical fiction written in the last decade. The …

Emerging From The Rubble Of Postcolonial Studies: Book History And Australian Literary Studies, Per Henningsgaard

English Faculty Publications and Presentations

Scholars of Australian literature have engaged more frequently and enthusiastically with book history approaches than nearly any other postcolonial nation’s literary scholars. Several Australian scholars have suggested that book history has taken over where postcolonial studies let of. In their choice of subject matter, however, Australian book historians reinforce the very constructions of literary value they purport to dismantle, similar to how scholars of postcolonial studies have been critiqued for reinforcing the construction of colonial identities. hus, this article looks to the intellectual history of postcolonial studies for examples of how it has responded to similar critiques. What is revealed …

Live/Archive: Occupy Mla, Kathi Inman Berens

English Faculty Publications and Presentations

Stories set in Twitter and other social media platforms are live, improvisational and subject to decay as the hashtag organizing the conversation loses currency once the happening or "netprov" is over. This case study of Occupy MLA examines the real-world consequences of a netprov that invited participation from real-world participants using their personal Twitter handles by "catfishing": in this case, posing as adjuncts who gave voice to very real working conditions.

Writing About Writing And The Multimajor Professional Writing Course, Sarah Read, Michael J. Michaud

English Faculty Publications and Presentations

This article connects the pedagogy of the multimajor professional writing (MMPW) course with two important contemporary discussions in composition studies: the pedagogy called writing about writing (WAW) and the conversation about the transferability of rhetorical knowledge from school to work. The authors argued that the capaciousness of the WAW approach accommodates the best of genre-based and client-based pedagogies for the MMPW course and provides a framework for expanding the course beyond skill-based outcomes to include preparing students to be learning transformers. The article includes two iterations of what a writing about writing -- professional writing course can look like.

Teaching Australian Literature In A Class About Literatures Of Social Reform, Per Henningsgaard

English Faculty Publications and Presentations

This article presents an intriguing thesis about proximity and identification, distance and empathy based on the experience of teaching Sally Morgan’s My Place to American university students alongside Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle and Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin in a class examining literature as an agent of social change. Indeed, its response to the question, “How does the Australian production of My Place influence its American reception?” will surprise many people. Students more readily demonstrate empathy with characters and are prepared to ascribe their unenviable life circumstances to social structures that propagate oppression when reading literature about cultural groups …

Judy Malloy's Seat At The (Database) Table: A Feminist Reception History Of Early Hypertext Literature, Kathi Inman Berens

English Faculty Publications and Presentations

When Robert Coover anointed Michael Joyce the ‘granddaddy’ of hypertext literature in a 1992 New York Times article, it could scarcely have been imagined that this pronouncement would come to define the origin of electronic literature. This short article examines the human and machinic operations obscuring Judy Malloy's Uncle Roger, a hypertext that predates afternoon. Malloy's reputation was stunted because Uncle Roger was algorithmically invisible, a factor that became increasingly important as the Web's commercial capacities matured. afternoon's endurance can be traced to its ISBN, which made afternoon easy for readers to find and united disparate stewards in preserving access …

The Editing And Publishing Of Tim Winton In The United States, Per Henningsgaard

English Faculty Publications and Presentations

Per Henningsgaard presents us with a detailed analysis of 'The editing and publishing of Tim Winton in the United States', and more broadly of the work of cultural translation. Henningsgaard's essay is a fascinating excursion for readers of Winton into the pragmatic details of difference and similarity in national vocabularies and in modes of perception between the purportedly symbiotic North America and Australia. We also gain an appreciation of what the material production of literature entails for authors, editors, publishers and readers globally. We are given the chance to contemplate how ‘the literary’ exists not beyond the marketplace, but certainly …

Our Cup Runneth Over: Life-Stories From Fremantle Go National, Per Henningsgaard

English Faculty Publications and Presentations

Explores the interaction between literary culture & the public sphere in Australia in a series of informative, witty, intelligent & thought-provoking essays. Unearths the fascinating & changing role that literature has played in Australias sporting, political, civic & cultural life.

Australian Journalist Rocks New York: Lillian Roxon’S Rock Encyclopedia, Per Henningsgaard

English Faculty Publications and Presentations

Explores the interaction between literary culture & the public sphere in Australia in a series of informative, witty, intelligent & thought-provoking essays. Unearths the fascinating & changing role that literature has played in Australias sporting, political, civic & cultural life.

The Negotiation Of Writer Identity In Engineering Faculty - Writing Consultant Collaborations, Sarah Read

English Faculty Publications and Presentations

Negotiating faculty-writing consultant collaborations in engineering contexts can be challenging when the writing consultant originates in the humanities. The author found that one of the sites of negotiation in the formation of working relationships is that of writer identity, and disciplinary writer identity in particular. In order to confirm her experiential knowledge, the author interviewed her faculty collaborators to further investigate their attitudes and experiences about writing. Analysis of two excerpts of these interviews makes visible "clashes" between the faculty engineers' and the writing consultant's autobiographical and disciplinary writer identities. Implications of the role of writer identity in faculty-writing consultant …

Book Publishing In Western Australia: A World Elsewhere, Per Henningsgaard

English Faculty Publications and Presentations

This article examines the role of book publishing outside the cultural centres, where the lack of access to the gatekeepers of cultural production, such as literary agents, editors and publishers, has inhibited both the publishers’ and region’s reach into the public imagination. It takes Western Australia as a case study, analysing the impact of geographical regionalism on the processes of book production and publication. Western Australia is infrequently represented in the cultural record, much less in those aspects of the cultural record that are transmitted overseas. This imbalance in ‘cultural currency’ arises because regions are at least in part defined …

Model Minorities, Models Of Resistance: Native Figures In Asian Canadian Literature, Marie Lo

English Faculty Publications and Presentations

In Lieu of an abstract, here is the first paragraph of the article:

In the special Amerasia issue titled “Pacific Canada: Beyond the 49th Parallel,” editor Henry Yu notes that despite similar thematic concerns in Asian Canadian and Asian American cultural production, works by Asian Canadian artists are also “entangled in broader cultural and political formations that speak to the importance of First Nations struggles” (xviii). The centrality of First Nations struggles in the Canadian political and cultural landscape is reflected in the representation of Native culture in Asian Canadian texts. Though these representations vary, Native presence in works such …

The Teaching Of 'Book History' In English And Cultural Studies Units, Per Henningsgaard

English Faculty Publications and Presentations

Book history is a field of study concerned with 'the influence of manuscript or printed materials on the development and transmission of culture', typically concentrating on six related topics: 'authorship, book selling, printing, publishing, distribution, and reading' (West, 2003). This article evaluates the teaching of book history in English and Cultural Studies units at the University of Western Australia (UWA), which ceased offering a stand-alone unit on the subject in the late 1980s. Since then, book history is only ever addressed in English and Cultural Studies units as an ancillary to other themes and theoretical inclinations, in particular text based …

The Currency Of Visibility And The Paratext Of “Evelyn Lau”, Marie Lo

English Faculty Publications and Presentations

In lieu of an abstract, here is the first paragraph of the article:

The apparently deracinated nature of Evelyn Lau’s work has rendered her an ambivalent figure in Asian Canadian and Asian American literary studies. Lau’s characters, often racially unmarked, are instead scarred by their longing for human connection, and they drift in and out of generic spaces or cloistered back rooms that are untethered to the specificity of the world outside. Her stories of prostitution, sadomasochism, obsession, and unrequited love do not lend themselves easily to the interpretive frameworks that have characterized Asian American and Asian Canadian literary studies.

Regional Literature And ‘The Liminal’: Exploring The Spaces In-Between National And International Literatures, Per Henningsgaard

English Faculty Publications and Presentations

Regional literature, that often overlooked and much maligned cluster of writings whose origins are frequently said to be anywhere but here, has actually played an important role in the story of Australian literature. The theme of nationalism, which reigned as the master narrative of Australian literature from early in the history of white settlers in Australia until perhaps the 1970s, merged with or fragmented into (depending on your perspective) regionalism in the 1980s. In the 1990s, internationalism emerged from this transitional phase as the new master narrative of Australian literature. Regionalism seems to have acted as a liminal state in …