Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

Ish: How To Write Poemish (Research) Poetry, Maria K. Lahman Ph.D., Veronica M. Richard Ph.D., Eric D. Teman J.D., Ph.D.

Eric D Teman, J.D., Ph.D.

Using Games To Make Something: Of Our Students, Our Pedagogies, Our Field. A Review Essay Of Gee & Hayes (2011), Squire (2011), Steinkuehler Et Al (2012), And Thomas & Brown (2011), Carly Finseth

Carly Finseth

If there’s one thing that writing instructors are known for it’s innovation. Compositionists, because of our connection between academia and industry, the humanistic and the technical, the creative and the practical, are often some of the first to explore and adopt new technologies. In this review essay, I introduce how games and digital technologies can help our students “make” new thing. Understanding how games can link with literary practices, multimodal composition, creativity, problem solving, critical thinking, and more can help researchers in rhetoric and composition make important contributions to our field: Make games with the knowledge of what actually works …

Taking The Drop: Surfing Memoirs, Blogging And Identity, Lynda Hawryluk

Dr Lynda Hawryluk

Surfing evokes images of sun-bronzed stoners with little more going on in their heads than the search for the next wave. Oceans of saltwater drown out any other thoughts. However, the number of memoirs and books describing surfing as a spiritual journey, using the surfing lifestyle as a metaphor for a greater search for meaning, belie these stereotypes. As a blogger, I've long struggled with the urge to reveal too much of my real identity online, preferring to hide behind Ambrose Pierce-like observations. A recent conversion to the surfing world has led me on a journey of a very different …

On Island Time: The Writing Workshop As Cultural Tourism, Lynda Hawryluk

Dr Lynda Hawryluk

This paper provides an overview of writing workshops as cultural tourism, and theincreasing preference for them to be located on islands of all kinds. It will examine thegreat diversity of workshop experiences available; narrow the focus to those workshops based on islands and finally concentrate on one particular island-based writing experience. Seemingly ‘exotic’ locations and a unique form of islomania distinct to aspiring writers are used to promote island writing workshops to potential participants. This in turn attempts to account for the popularity and growth of this form of cultural tourism. Several key questions will be raised and discussed: what …

Teaching Thesis Writing, Policy And Practice At An Australian University, Janice Skillen, Emily Purser

Emily R Purser

As an indicator of serious engagement in an academic discourse, thesis writing enjoys universal recognition. While its importance in higher education is unquestioned, the need to teach students how to write a thesis (let alone what method to use) has been less generally accepted. In Australia, explicit instruction in thesis writing was rare until quite recently, but is now widespread and becoming almost mandatory. This paper briefly explains the shift and describes how the teaching of thesis writing is approached at the University of Wollongong. UoW’s major provider of academic skills instruction – Learning Development – supports student learning across …

Academic Writing, Emily Purser

Emily R Purser

No abstract provided.

Teaching Academic Writing At The University Of Wollongong, Emily Rose Purser

Emily R Purser

Initiatives for the development of literacy at the University of Wollongong are growing within an Australian national commitment to increase overall tertiary enrollment, provide access to students from less-advantaged groups, and enroll more international students. While this essay describes successful programs within the Academic Services Division at Wollongong built to support student literacy, especially academic writing, it primarily emphasizes the work of a problemsolving task force on English language proficiency aimed at building consensus for a collaborative, cross-disciplinary paradigm of literacy growth that moves away from the traditional idea of separable services. The essay profiles a new initiative in the …

Writing White, Writing Black, And Events At Canoe Rivulet, Catherine Mckinnon

Catherine M McKinnon

How a community imagines the past contributes to the shaping of its present culture; influences that community's vision for the future. Yet much about the past can be difficult to access, as it can be lost or hidden. Therefore, when retelling first contact stories, especially when the documentary information is limited to a colonial perspective, how might a writer approach fictionalizing historical Indigenous figures? 'Will Martin' (2011), a tale written as part of my practice-led PhD, is a fictional retelling of the eighteenth century sailing trip, taken along the New South Wales coast, by explorers Matthew Flinders, George Bass, and …

Under New Management: Whiteness In Post-Apartheid South African Life Writing, Antonio Simoes Da Silva

Tony Simoes da Silva

Alfred J. Lopez begins his introduction to postcolonial Whiteness: A Critical Reader on Race and Empire by stating "Whiteness is not, yet we continue for many reasons to act as though it is" (1). He is especially interested in "what happens to whiteness after empire," and proposes that it be understood as a dynamic relation of power. Despite the critical scrutiny it has attracted from whiteness studies, the racial category retains much of its ideological force. "The concept of whiteness as a cultural hegemon," Lopez argues, is manifest in "its lingering, if somewhat latent, hegemonic influence over much of the …

Narrating Redemption: Life Writing And Whiteness In The New South Africa: Gillian Slovo's Every Secret Thing, Antonio Simoes Da Silva

Tony Simoes da Silva

No abstract provided.

Longing, Belonging And Self-Making In White Zimbabwean Life Writing: Peter Godwin's When A Crocodile Eats The Sun , Antonio Simoes Da Silva

Tony Simoes da Silva

No abstract provided.

Literature As Social Barometer In Post-Apartheid South Africa: Reading Contemprorary 'White Writing', Antonio Simoes Da Silva

Tony Simoes da Silva

Contemporary South African literature shows a renewed concern with the close bonds between land, place and people in the New South Africa. In the post-apartheid period, this is literature that reflects a close awareness of the need for an art that retains both a sense of creative integrity and the ethical and political demands of the narrative of the new, postapartheid nation. Often history is invoked not as the deterministic frame that regulates each character’s lives typical of so much of the country’s literature, but as the accumulated mesh of individual experiences encompassed by the historical narrative. More to the …

Embodied Genealogies And Gendered Violence In Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's Writing, Antonio Simoes Da Silva

Tony Simoes da Silva

This essay examines two recent novels by the Nigerian writer, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie,Purple Hibiscus ([2003] 2005) andHalf a YellowSun (2006), placing themfirst in a dialogue with each other, and more broadly with selected Nigerian writing on the Biafra conflict. Arguing with Adesanmi that Adichie belongs to a ‘third generation’ of African literary work, it traces the novels’ work of historical revisionism through gendered and embodied discourses of pain and violence. Adichie returns the reader to an aesthetics of excess firmly grounded on potently disturbing images of the ‘body in pain’, in Elaine Scarry’s memorable phrase (1983): the battered, bruised and …

Detention, Displacement And Dissent In Recent Australian Life Writing, Michael R. Jacklin

Michael Jacklin

Narratives of persecution, imprisonment, displacement and exile have been a fundamental aspect of Australian literature: from the convict narratives of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, to writing by refugees and migrants to Australia following World War II, to the narratives of those displaced by more recent conflicts. This paper will focus on two texts published in Australia in the past few years which deal with experiences of persecution and displacement from Afghanistan. Mahboba's Promise (2005) and The Rugmaker of Mazar-e- Sharif (2008) are texts that have to some extent bypassed the quarantining that Gillian Whitlock has argued works to locate …

An Open Source Composition Space: Redefining Invention For A New Technological Age, Carly Finseth

Carly Finseth

This essay integrates composition theory with pedagogical practice to redefine what is traditionally viewed as the 'writing classroom.' Specifically, it explores how we can redefine rhetorical invention through the cultural foundations of open source communities. In "An Open Source Composition Space," writing is collaborative, authorship is negated by ideals of shared intellectual property, and students and teachers can learn from each other in a safe and supportive environment.

Using Careless Speech For Careful, Well Crafted Writing--Whatever Its Style, Peter Elbow

Peter Elbow

I write here to correct a common misreading of my work. I've not been fighting all these years just to make writing easier by loosening standards; I've been fighting to make writing better. Especially in my recent *Vernacular Eloquence*, I've been trying help people use their vernacular spoken language to produce writing that is nevertheless careful and excellent--to break out of the unclear, roundabout, or mashed-potatoes prose they so often produce when they try to write right.

Reading For Peace? Literature As Activism – An Investigation Into New Literary Ethics And The Novel, Shady E. Cosgrove

Shady E Cosgrove

Literary ethicists like Dorothy J Hale and narratologists like James Phelan have argued that the reading process makes literary novels worthy of ethical investigation. That is, it’s not just a book’s content – which may debate norms and values – but the process of reading that inspires the reader to consider Other points of view. This alterity, new ethicists argue, can lead to increased empathy and thus more thoughtful decision-making within the ‘actual’ world. In fact, Hale (2007: 189) says empathetic literary training is a ‘pre-condition for positive social change’. This may work well theoretically, but what practical issues does …

Collaboration And Closure: Negotiating Indigenous Mourning Protocols In Australian Life Writing, Michael Jacklin

Michael Jacklin

Examines 'indigenous mourning protocols, as they are negotiated in life writing texts and in all manner of public discourse in Australia...' (p.190)

Making Paper Talk: Writing Indigenous Oral Life Narratives, Michael Jacklin

Michael Jacklin

How spoken words arc written is a corc concern in collaborative Indigenous life writing. Especially imporram, as Kimberly Blaeser notes in the citation above, are the efforts to present Indigenous narratives in a visual form that will facilitate their fe-speaking. Mindful of this goal, my argument will concentrate on (he panicular dilemma of presenting Indigenous narratives in paragraph form or formatting them in an arrangement resembling poetic lin es. While aware that this is bur one of many considerations in the process of transforming speech to writing, I argue that in a number of Indigenous li fe-writing publications it is …

Critical Injuries: Collaborative Indigenous Life Writing And The Ethics Of Criticism, Michael Jacklin

Michael Jacklin

The publication of collaborative Indigenous life writing places both the text and its production under public scrutiny. The same is true for the criticism of life writing. For each, publication has consequences. Taking as its starting point the recent critical concern for harm occasioned in life writing, this article argues that in the reading of collaborative Indigenous life writing, injury may eventuate from the commentary itself .... With particular regard to the collaborative texts Ingelba and the Five Black Matriarchs and [the Canadian work] Stolen Life: The Journey of a Cree Woman, this article argues that literary criticism can benefit …

Collaboration And Resistance In Indigenous Life Writing, Michael Jacklin

Michael Jacklin

Collaboration is marked by indeterminacy. It is, by nature, intermediary, interposing, intervening. In Australia, collaboration between Aboriginal and invader/settler subjects in the unfolding of colonial engagement is a topic that has received limited scholarly attention. Some studies have dealt with native police and Black trackers; others have examined local negotiations of power and discourse; but the only broad survey of collaboration is Henry Reynolds's With the White People (1990). In this work Reynolds traces the varied modes of collaboration existing between the Aborigines and the European colonists of Australia from first contact and early settlement through ro the First World …

Southeast Asian Writing In Australia: The Case Of Vietnamese Writing, Michael Jacklin

Michael Jacklin

Literatures in languages other than English produced by migrant or diasporic communities pose intriguing questions for both matters of cultural sustainability and national literatures. Dan Duffy, in his article on Vietnamese-Canadian author Thuong Vuong-Riddick’s Two Shores / Deux Rives, begins by describing a visit to the Boston Public Library where he chances upon a surprisingly substantial collection of Vietnamese-language publications. Among the twenty shelves of books, he finds not only fiction published in Vietnam before 1975, American editions of post-1975 Vietnamese literature and translations of American novels into Vietnamese, but also a large number of creative works in Vietnamese both …

Spitting The Dummy: Collaborative Life Writing And Ventriloquism, Michael Jacklin

Michael Jacklin

This article sets out to 'trace the deployment of the metaphor of ventriloquism in collaborative life writing, highlight the frequency with which it is utilised, and to suggest that its application in critical reading may have outrun its usefulness' (p69). It engages with life writing theorists including G. Thomas Couser and Paul John Eakin, and includes comment on Tim Rowse's reading of the Australian Aboriginal life writing text, I, the Aboriginal.

"Desde Australia Para Todo El Mundo Hispano": Australia’S Spanish-Language Magazines And Latin American/Australian Writing, Michael Jacklin

Michael Jacklin

Migrants from Latin America have had a literary presence in Australia since the 1970s and their work forms an important part of Australia's multilingual literature. From their participation in literary competitions organized through cultural groups such as the Spanish Club in Sydney or the Uruguayan Club in Melbourne, to anthologies of community writing produced through the 1980s and '90s, to the publication of numerous volumes of poetry and short stories, to their novels, plays, biographies and autobiographies, Latin American writers in Australia have developed and sustained a significant body of literature over more than three decades. The majority of this …

Writing As Cultural Negotiation: Suneeta Peres Da Costa And Alice Pung, Wenche Ommundsen

Wenche Ommundsen

Mina Pereira, the narrator of Suneeta Peres da Costa's novel Homework, is born with feelers on top of her head:small protuberances, or antennae, which grow bogger at times of emotional stress. 'She might be a little bit sensitive, thats all' (Peres da Costa, 1999:5), her parents explain, defending their daughter against insensitive strangers accusing her of being an alien, and extraterrestrial, a mutant. Mina is sensitive, as is the young protagonist of Alice Pung's autobiographical narrative Unpolished Gem, sensitive to their difference as reflected in the eyes and behaviour of schoolmates and friends, sensitive, in particular, to cultural …

Auslit: Resource For Australian Literature - Australian Multicultural Writers, Wenche Ommundsen

Wenche Ommundsen

No abstract provided.

Writing As Migration: Brian Castro, Multiculturalism And The Politics Of Identity, Wenche Ommundsen

Wenche Ommundsen

No abstract provided.

Work In Progress: Multicultural Writing In Australia, Wenche Ommundsen

Wenche Ommundsen

Multiculturalism, write Pnina Werbner, is 'an important rhetoric and an impossible practice'. My morning news paper on Australia Day 2006 reminded me of just how important, and how impossible, Australian multiculturalism remains three decades after its inception. 'PM claims victory wars', read the front-page headline. The article, a report on John Howard's address to the National Press Club, details the Prime Minister's retreat from the 'excesses of multiculturalism' and the 'black armband' view of history associated with the Keating Labor government (1991-96), and his conviction that the 'divisive, phoney debate about national identity' has come to an end, replaced by …

Bastard Moon: Essays On Chinese-Australian Writing, Wenche Ommundsen

Wenche Ommundsen

No abstract provided.

From "Hello Freedom" To "Fuck You Australia": Recent Chinese-Australian Writing, Wenche Ommundsen

Wenche Ommundsen

No abstract provided.