Tag: Literature

Anna Guttman, Lakehead University, Ontario Global Others, Global Selves: Jewish-Muslim intimacy in the literature of Ayad Akhtar While Ayad Akhtar, a Muslim-American writer of Pakistani descent, is best known for his critical examination of the place and identity of the American Muslim in the post-9/11world, I argue that Jewish-Muslim intimacy is the key to Akhtar’s …

Evelyn Corr, University of Sydney Land Rights/Rites: Aboriginal Responses to the Post-Mabo Turn By charting the discursive conflict between settler literary aestheticisation of Native Title as simultaneously a triumphalist moment of bicentennial unity, and a haunting realisation of the crimes of dispossession, this paper seeks to interrogate a range of Aboriginal problematisations of what Kieran …

Melinda Cooper, University of Sydney Middlebrow Modernism: Eleanor Dark’s Interwar Fiction Eleanor Dark is one of Australia’s most significant mid-century novelists, and her work is currently enjoying a revival of critical interest. In this paper, I argue that Dark’s fiction can be read productively in terms of a distinctive aesthetic of middlebrow modernism – a phrase that …

A Meditation on the Ethics of Kate Grenville’s One Life (Cheryl O’Byrne) In the prologue of One Life: My Mother’s Story (2015), Kate Grenville describes herself looking through the “fragments” of memoir her deceased mother had written. Following this prologue is a seamless, third-person chronicle of the first forty years of her mother’s life. In interviews and other …

Peter Kirkpatrick, University of Sydney The Poetry of the Intertitle: The Sentimental Bloke (1919) When they adapted C.J. Dennis’s The Songs of a Sentimental Bloke for the screen, Raymond Longford and Lottie Lyell drew extensively upon the poems themselves for intertitles, but how intrinsic are they to the film’s humour and, more specifically, its cinematic …

Guy Davidson, University of Wollongong Susan Sontag’s Impersonal Stardom  To refer to the celebrity intellectual and author Susan Sontag as a “star” is a cliché of commentary on her, but in this paper I take the idea of Sontag’s stardom seriously, working with and against film star studies to develop an account of Sontag’s queer …

Stephanie Jane Last, HDR Candidate in English at the University of Sydney, will discuss her work on villainesses in Victorian sensation fiction. Venue Rogers Room John Woolley Building Camperdown Campus University of Sydney

Lesa-Belle Furhagen, PhD Candidate in Art History at the University of Sydney, will give a paper called “Dashed and Transfixed,” about nineteenth-century exploration in the South Pacific. Venue  Rogers Room John Woolley Building, Camperdown Campus, University of Sydney