Law Commons^™

Size Matters: Class Numbers And The Creative Writing Workshop, Shady E. Cosgrove

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

With heightened funding pressures on Australian universities, academics are being placed under more pressure to increase class sizes. Creative writing workshops, where students provide feedback on each other's creative work, can be rigorous and demanding sites for teachers in ways that differ from 'traditional' classroom settings. This article surveys critical research on class sizes and the workshop model, as well as third-year University of Wollongong creative writing student perspectives, arguing that the in-person workshop model, while imperfect, remains vital to the discipline of creative writing. When successful, it can teach students the technical elements of craft as well as the …

Writing, Motivation And Your Work In Progress: Catherine Cole On Writing Motivation And Finding Discipline In A Busy World, Catherine Cole

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

No abstract provided.

Scholars And Radicals: Writing And Re-Thinking Class Structure In Australian History, Terence H. Irving, R.W. Connell

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

We wrote Class Structure in Australian History in a period of heightened social struggle. It grew out of collaborative research projects at Sydney's Free U in the late 1960s. The book was distinctive in both emphasising the socialist tradition of class analysis and trying to find new paths for it. Its first edition was ignored by mass media, and often mis-interpreted in professional journals. Nevertheless it circulated widely and has continued to be a point of reference for progressive scholarship. Its method tried to carry forward the Free U project of democratic knowledge making, linking documents with analysis and inviting …

Radical History: Thinking, Writing And Engagement, Terence H. Irving, Rowan Cahill

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

In recent years, in various places and on our blog ‘Radical Sydney/Radical History’ we have written about radical history. As radical historians we seek out, explore, and celebrate the diversities of alternatives and oppositions, arguing there is a basic tension between radical history and ‘mainstream history’, a history that is constituted to prop up both capitalism and the state. We see our history as part of the struggle against capitalism and the state. In researching the past, we do not do it nostalgically, but with utilitarian, political intent, recognising that the past has the capacity to variously inspire and inform …

Towards A Multilingual National Literature: The Tung Wah Times And The Origins Of Chinese Australian Writing, Huang Zhong, Wenche Ommundsen

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

Australian literature has over the last 50 years witnessed the gradual inclusion of writers and texts formerly considered marginal: from a predominantly white, Anglo canon it has come to incorporate more women writers, writers of popular genres, Indigenous writers, and migrant, multicultural or diasporic writers. However, one large and important body of Australian writing has remained excluded from histories and anthologies: literature in languages other than English. Is this the last literary margin? How might it be incorporated into the national canon, and how might it enhance our understanding of the cross-cultural traffic that feeds into the literature of a …

Salvador Torrents And The Birth Of Crónica Writing In Australia, Catherine H. Seaton

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

In Salvador Torrents's 1928 newspaper crónica 'Un Sueño' ('A Dream'),2 the author describes returning home from an arduous day working in the sugar cane fields of Far North Queensland, ready to welcome the sleep that awaits him.With sleep comes a dream, in which Torrents finds himself in an unnamed capital city in Europe, in the company of a large crowd of onlookers, watching handcuffed prisoners being paraded by police. He asks of a finely dressed gentleman: 'What crime have these men committed?' The reply is that these men are political prisoners, who have meddled in matters that do not concern …

El Contestador Australiano And The Transnational Flows Of Australian Writing In Spanish, Michael R. Jacklin

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

'El contestador australiano y otros cuentos' [The Australian answering machine and other stories] is the title of a collection of short stories written in Spanish by Uruguayan-born Ruben Fernández. It was published in 2008 in Montevideo by the well-regarded publishing house Del Sur Ediciones. In 2009 Fernández was interviewed by the Uruguayan newspaper 'El País' and spoke about how his stories relate to his experience of thirty years as a migrant living in Australia. Many of the stories in this collection first appeared in Australia in the 1980s and early 1990s, a number of them as prize-winning entries in literary …

Writing Across Gaps: Negotiating Places Of Uncertainty, Catherine Mckinnon

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

Humans are the only animals that attempt to make sense of their lived experiences through story. In Six Walks In The Fictional Woods, Umberto Eco says: ‘to read fiction means to play a game by which we give sense to the immensity of things that happened, are happening, or will happen in the actual world’ (1998: 87). In recent years there has been a spate of novels that attempt this negotiation through multi-narrations that surf time, genre hop and shift geographical location. In the March 8th Book Review section of the New York Times (2012: 11), critic Douglas Coupland coined …

Getting My Hands Dirty: Research And Writing, Shady E. Cosgrove

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

Biographical note:

Shady Cosgrove is a Senior Lecturer at the University of Wollongong. Her novel What the Ground Can’t Hold (Picador 2013) tells the story of a group of people stranded in the Andes, all of whom have links to Argentina’s Dirty War. Her memoir She Played Elvis (Allen and Unwin, 2009) was shortlisted for the Australian Vogel Literary Prize, and her short stories and articles have appeared in Best Australian Stories, Antipodes, Southerly, Overland, the Sydney Morning Herald and the Melbourne Age. She has also written about the ethics of representation and teaching of creative writing. For further information …

Walking, Writing And Dreaming: Rebecca Solnit’S Polyphonic Voices, Marcus O'Donnell

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

American writer Rebecca Solnit has published 17 books since 1990, ranging from biography to cultural histories and art criticism to personal essays. Because her work is not easily classified and because she sits at the intersection of a number of different fields, her work provides a particularly interesting case study of hybrid practices in contemporary non-fiction. This article argues that her work is a form of literary journalism: polyphonic open journalism. Solnit’s work demonstrates traces and practices arising from her training as a journalist that she has combined them with writerly and activist practices that produce a distinctive open form …

Gleams Of Light: Evolving Knowledge In Writing Creative Arts Doctorates, Diana Wood Conroy

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

From the mid-1980s to the present, art schools have embedded themselves within university structures in Australia. Around 35 universities now offer research degrees in creative arts (Baker and Buckley, 2009). Accompanying this development, the teaching of art practice and theory has followed the humanities in embracing philosophies of semiotics and post-structuralism from Europe and America through the lenses of feminism and postcolonialism.

More Than An Overture: A Program Teaching Music By Creating, Writing, Producing And Performing Tenminute Opera, Steven John Capaldo, Lotte Latukefu

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

The project More Than An Overture enabled unversity academics, an established and respected Australian music composer and an emerging artist to teach pre-service generalist primary education and creative arts (performance) students at the University of Wollongong how to create and produce children's operas. The university students, academics and artists then worked with local primary school students and their teachers in creating children's operas that culminated in a performance for the school and their community. This paper explores the creation of the project, the motivations behind its development and the results from the project.

Book Review: The Self-Made Map: Cartographic Writing In Early Modern France; And, The Face Of The Earth: Natural Landscapes, Science And Culture, Michael G. Leggett

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

Politics, and (therefore) national and personal identity, are at the core of these two publications. The analysis of the remarkable period of European (and therefore world) history during the early modern period of the 15th and 16th centuries is discussed in the first book and provides the call for the kind of topographic descriptions compiled during the early part of the 21st Century, the topic of the second book. Then as now, proliferation of technology and political change provide the background to these accounts—overtly in the first, occluded in the second.

Introduction: Nationalism And Transnationalism In Australian Historical Writing, Sharon Crozier-De Rosa, David Lowe

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

One of the strongest trends in Australian historical writing over the last two decades has been a drive to emphasise the nation’s connectedness with the rest of the world. Across a range of historical genres and topics, we have seen a new enthusiasm to explore entanglements between Australian history and that of other places and peoples. The history of travel has been an important contributor to this line of inquiry, but it is at the more intellectual, imaginative and emotional levels that the greatest gains are sometimes claimed for the study of what has become known as ‘transnationalism’. This trend …

Transnational Imaginaries: Reading Asian Australian Writing, Wenche Ommundsen

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

When did ‘Asian Australian writing’ come into existence? Answering this question is almost as difficult as deciding when people from the regions now known as Asia first arrived in Australia. We know, for example, that Chinese settlers filed petitions protesting their treatment by colonial governments as early as 1855 (Broinowski 11), and that autobiographical writing appeared in the 1920s (Shen 2001). Creative writers started publishing in the 1950s (Mena Abdullah), 60s (Chitra Fernando) and 70s (Ee Tiang Hong, Brian Castro) – and when we know more about publications in languages other than English, these dates are likely to be pushed …

'Integration', Vietnamese Australian Writing, And An Unfinished Boat Story, Michael R. Jacklin

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

This article contributes to the critical commentary on boat narratives through a reading of an early and little-known example of a Vietnamese Australian boat story: ‘The Whitish-Grey Dove on the Disorientated Boat’, a serialised novella which was published in Integration: The Magazine for Multicultural and Vietnamese Issues from 1994 to 1998. Focusing on this novella and the magazine in which it appeared serves two objectives: the first is to make the argument that Vietnamese Australian writing has a longer and more active history than may be commonly recognized or acknowledged and that ‘the boat’ is a significant figure in this …

Diasporic Art: Writing/Visualising Back And Writing/Visualising Into Being, Sukhmani Khorana

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

The recent critical and popular acclaim won by films like Danny Boyle's Slumdog Millionaire and Deepa Mehta's Water is putting the creative works of diasporic artists in general, and South Asian diasporic artists in particular on the world map. This interest in creativity that is inspired by the homeland, but not necessarily produced in the culture of origin is of pressing significance in an era torn between globalisation and regionalism. Does the diasporic hyphen, through its cultural processes and products, bridge the gap between cosmopolitan and vernacular identities? This paper, which is an introduction to a larger project on diasporic …

A Cappella And Diva: A Collaborative Process For Individual Academic Writing, Wendy Beck, Kerry Dunne, Josie Fisher, Jane O'Sullivan, Alison Sheridan

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

Picture this: Five academic women are sitting at a round table in an elegant nineteenth century room located in a rural landscape in regional NSW. Sometimes with coffee, sometimes over lunch, the conversation ranges broadly across the spectrum of the personal, policy and university politics. Having traversed the terrain in which they work-workload, juggling the responsibilities that traditionally fall to women-the talk comes round to the business of the day: writing for publication. Here is how a typical meeting unfolds: they provide updates on their research successes, and then proceed to the discussion and critical response to a current piece …

To The Smell Of Pineapples: Writing A Queensland Auto-Bio-Graphie, Francesca T. Rendle-Short

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

I grew up eating pineapples in everything; well, nearly everything (let's not exaggerate). They were a sweetener, made things juicy. Pineapple jam, pineapple breadcrumbs stuffed in the chicken roast for Sunday lunch after church, pineapple on the barbeque for the Christian folk my parents (MotherJoy and Onward) invited home, crushed pineapple in the punch, pineapple in the boiled fruitcake, pineapple in sandwiches as a treat through the summer holidays, pineapple in the curried rice salad for days my mother felt adventurous. We ate from pineapples too. Imagine then refined white sugar being spooned out of a fancy pineapple canister with …