Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

'The Closet Of The Third Person'; Susan Sontag, Sexual Dissidence, And Celebrity, Guy R. Davidson

Faculty of Arts - Papers (Archive)

In this essay I argue that the tension between Susan Sontag's status as a postmodern celebrity and her devotion to the modernist cult of impersonality may be productively related to her sexuality. Beginning with her famous essay ‘Notes of Camp’ (1964), Sontag aligned herself (somewhat uneasily) with metropolitan gay culture. On the other hand, Sontag was one of the most famous undeclared lesbians in recent history. While she largely eschewed life writing, her fiction, essays, and interviews have often been read by critics for their autobiographical resonances. I extend this critical tendency by attending to the articulation and elision of …

Radical Uncertainty: Judith Butler And A Theory Of Character, Shady E. Cosgrove

Faculty of Creative Arts - Papers (Archive)

This paper will develop a theory of character based on Judith Butler's ideas of subjectivity and gender construction. It will summarise Butler's position and explore the practicalities of reading realist characters as performative repetitions. Then, it will discuss Butler's notion of agency and the subversive repetition, and how realist characters can demonstrate the radical uncertainty inherent in Butler's notion of agency s specifically when texts are rewritten in such a way that characters `question' their `original' depictions. The example of interest here will be Jean Rhys's Wide Sargasso Sea in relation to Charlotte Bronte's Jane Eyre, with particular attention paid …

Green Bans Art Walk Project, Lucas M. Ihlein, Jo Holder, Diego Bonetto, Pat Armstrong, Stacey Miers, Mickie Quick, Fiona Mcdonald

Faculty of Creative Arts - Papers (Archive)

On the fortieth anniversary of the Green Bans, Green Bans Art Walk captures the ideals and struggle to protect the character of the inner-city areas of Woolloomooloo, Darlinghurst and Kings Cross. These were the most brutal of the Green Ban struggles.

Green Bans Art Walk revives the old walkways across Woolloomooloo basin accessed from stairs in Victoria Street on the escarpment. The Walk symbolically re-unifies a beautiful area disconnected by rail and freeway structures, ugly site consolidations and looming high-rise. Green Bans Art Walk opens up this crucial part of Sydney’s history for a new generation.

Unreal Estate, Lucas M. Ihlein

Faculty of Creative Arts - Papers (Archive)

[extract] ZINNY: Can you tell us a bit about the real estate beauties you have advertised? What impact does it have on the city, these buildings being left empty for so long? DIEGO: SquatSpace has concerned itself with the polincs of space from the start, and in some ways the topic is what defines the group's trajectory. UnReal Estate is yet another playful look at the loop holes: buildings are left abandoned for speculation purposes, creating focus areas for urban renewals, while at the same time denying living possibilities.

Thought Policing Or The Protection Of Youth? Debate In Japan Over The "Non-Existent Youth Bill", Mark J. Mclelland

Faculty of Arts - Papers (Archive)

In early 2010 Tokyo Governor Ishihara Shintarō, supported by international child welfare organisations and a range of conservative Japanese politicians and commentators, sought to extend the range of material caught by a ‘Healthy Youth Development Ordinance’ that prohibited the sale of publications deemed ‘harmful’ to those under 18 in the Tokyo metropolitan area. Material featuring pornography or strong violence was already prohibited from sale to minors, however, the proposed extension would have included publications featuring ‘non-existent youth’ -- that is, purely fictional or imaginary characters who were, looked like or sounded like they were under the age of 18 and …

Transnational (Il)Literacies: Reading The "New Chinese Literature In Australia" In China, Wenche Ommundsen

Faculty of Arts - Papers (Archive)

THE TRANSNATIONAL "TURN" IN AUSTRALIAN LITERARY studies was the subject of lively critical debate at the time my colleagues Alison Broinowski, Paul Sharrad and I in 2008 embarked on the ARC-supported project "Globalising Australian literature: Asian Australian writing, Asian perspectives on Australian literature." Robert Dixon's 2007 essay "Australian Literature - International Contexts" charted the development of Australian literary studies from the cultural nationalist phase of the early years through to "the inter- or trans-national perspectives that have emerged in a number of humanities disciplines since the 1990s", and outlined his proposal of a research agenda for "a transnational practice of …

Contemporary Korean Cinema: Challenges And The Transformation Of ‘Planet Hallyuwood’, Brian Yecies, Ae-Gyung Shim

Faculty of Arts - Papers (Archive)

This article examines how the South Korean cinema has undergone a transformation from an ‘antiquated cottage industry’ in the 1980s into a thriving international cinema – albeit with a host of new challenges and tensions – in the ‘post-boom’ years of the 2000s right up to the present. Its analysis of film culture in the 1980s sets the stage for the Korean cinema’s transnational development over the last decade, and points to a longer historical continuum involving the ‘re-emergence’ in the 1980s of a ‘cinema of quality’ that was marked by widespread critical acclaim. Additionally, this article canvasses the key …

Fairness And Fair Shares, Keith J. Horton

Faculty of Arts - Papers (Archive)

Some moral principles require agents to do more than their fair share of a common task, if others won't do their fair share - each agent's fair share being what she would be required to do if all contributed as they should. This seems to provide a strong basis for objecting to such principles. For it seems unfair to require agents who have already done their fair share to do more, just because other agents won't do their fair share. The philosopher who has written most about this issue, however, Liam Murphy, argues that it is not unfair to do …

Australia's "Child Abuse Material' Legislation, Internet Regulation And The Juridification Of The Imagination, Mark J. Mclelland

Faculty of Arts - Papers (Archive)

This article investigates the implications of Australia’s prohibition of ‘child-abuse material’ (including cartoons, animation, drawings and text) for Australian fan communities of animation, comics and gaming (ACG) and slash fiction. It is argued that current legislation is out of synch with the new communicative environment brought about by the internet since a large portion of the fans producing and trading in these images are themselves minors and young people. Habermas’s analysis of the conflict between instrumental and communicative rationality is deployed to demonstrate that legislators have misrecognized the nature of the communicative practices that take place within the ‘lifeworlds’ of …

The Crisis Of Petro-Market Civilization: The Past As Prologue?, Timothy Dimuzio

Faculty of Arts - Papers (Archive)

Summary Current patterns of high-energy intensive development are not sustainable on account of two major challenges that threaten the social reproduction of this civilization: peak oil and global warming. This chapter seeks to probe the dimensions of this looming crisis at the heart of 'petro-market civilization' by foregrounding the links between energy and social reproduction. In doing so, the chapter makes two interrelated arguments. First, I argue not only that the age of fossil fuels is an exceptional one but also that the discovery and use of fossil fuels have been crucial to the deepening and extension of an incipient …

Indigenous Australian-Indonesian Intermarriage: Negotiating Citizenship Rights In Twentieth-Century Australia, Julia T. Martinez

Faculty of Arts - Papers (Archive)

This story of Indigenous Australian-Indonesian intermarriage is one that shedslight on the changes to citizenship entitlement in Australia and the struggles ofAboriginal, Torres Strait Islander and Asian peoples to lead their lives free fromgovernment intervention. Indonesian-Australian contacts remain relativelyunknown in Australian history. Early Macassan relations with the peoples ofNorthern Australia, brought to light by Campbell Macknight, stands out inAustralian history as a significant first contact with Asia. More recently ReginaGanter has continued the Macassan story into the twentieth century exploringencounters with northern communities across Australia. But the story ofwartime disruption faced by the families of Indonesian men and Aboriginal andTorres …

"Almost A Sense Of Property": Henry James's The Turn Of The Screw, Modernism, And Commodity Culture, Guy R. Davidson

Faculty of Arts - Papers (Archive)

[extract] Metaphorical, if not literal, homelessness has seemed to many to be a defining condition of the life and work of Henry James. His friend Edmund Gosse, for instance, wrote that James was a "homeless man in a peculiar sense," one who was never truly settled either in England, his adopted country, or the United States, his country of origin.More recently, John Carlos Rowe has related James's deracination to cosmopolitanism, outlining how the concerns of his fiction foreshadow recent efforts within the humanities to renovate the cosmopolitan ideal of respect for international and intranational differences.And John Landau has argued that …

Embodied Memories, Emotional Geographies: Nakamoto Takako's Diary Of The Anpo Struggle, Vera Mackie

Faculty of Arts - Papers (Archive)

In this article I carry out a close reading of Nakamoto Takako's book, My Diary of the Anpo Struggle (1963). Nakamoto was a writer and activist who was active in leftwing politics, the labour movement and the proletarian literature movement in the 1920s and 1930s and returned to the movement after 1945. Her published diary recounts her participation in the struggle against the renewal of the US-Japan Security Treaty and her other political activities. The book is a mixture of personal memory and political history and provides us with a distinctive ‘map’ of one person's emotional geography of Tokyo.

Halliday's Model Of Register Revisited And Explored, Annabelle Lukin, Alison R. Moore, Maria Herke, Rebekah Wegener, Canzhong Wu

Faculty of Arts - Papers (Archive)

Halliday’s description of register as ‘a variety of language, corresponding to a variety of situation’, with situation interpreted ‘by means of a conceptual framework using the terms “field”, “tenor” and “mode”’ (Halliday, 1985/89: 29, 38) is revisited to reflect on the theoretical work the term ‘register’ does within the SFL paradigm. In doing so, we recognize that the concepts of a linguistic theory are ‘ineffable’ (Halliday, 2002 [1988]); i.e. that ‘providing definitions of a theoretical term ... requires that it be posi- tioned vis-à-vis other concepts in the theory’ (Hasan, 2004: 16). It follows that chang- ing the position of …

The Gift That Time Gave: Myth And History In The Western Desert Painting Movement, Ian A. Mclean

Faculty of Creative Arts - Papers (Archive)

The most fabulous moment in Australian art history occurred in the autumn of 1971 when an art teacher named Geoffrey Bardon supplied about a dozen Western Desert men with brushes and acrylic paint. Asmall and innocent gesture, it sparked a bushfire so intense that the cultural landscape was radically upturned, locally at first and then at a more universal level.

From rock art to Australian modernism, from bark paintings to the Heidelberg School, The Cambridge Companion to Australian Art provides a wide-ranging overview of the movements, themes and media found in Australian art. This Companion features essays that explore the …

Reverse Perspective: Bernard Smith's Worldview And The Cosmopolitan Imagination, Ian A. Mclean

Faculty of Creative Arts - Papers (Archive)

Living and working in Australia, and being the first Australian-born professional art historian to work in the academy, is probably enough of an explanation for why Bernard Smith developed a global perspective on European art and an acute awareness of its relationship to imperialism. However Bernard Smith’s world-consciousness is grounded in an earlier era that has little relevance to the current intensification of globalization and the challenges it poses to the discipline. This essay discusses Smith’s approach to globalization within the context of the discipline’s changing world-consciousness since its emergence in the eighteenth century.