Going Forward to the Past: The Future of Literary Studies in Australian Universities

2014 ◽  
Vol 21 (1) ◽  
pp. 4-16
Author(s):  
Patrick Buckridge
Keyword(s):  
Older People ◽  
Literary Tradition ◽  
Literary Studies ◽  
Reading Groups ◽  
Head Of School ◽  
The Past ◽  
Long Time ◽  
Imminent Death ◽  
To Come ◽  
Australian Universities

The imminent death of the study of past literature in Australian universities has been pronounced many times since the 1980s. It seems to have been taking several decades to die, but its time may finally be upon us. When I first joined Griffith Humanities in 1981, the then Head of School, David Saunders, told me that though he might wish it otherwise, the literature of the past wouldalwaysbe studied in universities — if only because there was so much of it and because, like Everest, it was simply ‘there’. I now think he may have been wrong. It is likely enough, in my view, that some — mainly older — peoplewillkeep reading, studying and discussing the literary tradition for a long time to come: in reading groups, U3A classes and the like. More about that later. But I doubt if anyone will be doing it in Australianuniversitiesfor very much longer.

“The Hard Hit is Still to Come”: An Intifada Imaginary

2011 ◽  
Vol 4 (2) ◽  
pp. 105-112
Author(s):  
Philip Rizk
Keyword(s):  
Protest Movement ◽  
The Past ◽  
Economic Exploitation ◽  
Long Time ◽  
To Come

On 11 February 2011, Egyptian protestors from across the country forced their long-time president, Hosni Mubarak, out of power. A revolution does not happen in a vacuum. Thus I want to challenge two widespread notions regarding the events in Egypt. First, toppling ar dictator, does not constitute a revolution until political and economic structures are transformed. Thus, I claim that the Egyptian uprising in early 2011is more akin to the Palestinian Intifada than to a revolution – that is, an uprising against an occupation – though in this case a local one. Second, the demonstrations that started 25 January 2011 did not simply emulate the nearby Tunisian protest movement, but came from attempts, especially by workers in the past few years, to demonstrate against economic exploitation and corruption. By focusing on this earlier history I argue that, in Egypt, a revolutionary uprising is still in the making.

Appointing a Professor: Reflections on Filling the Chair of Organic Chemistry at the University of Sydney in 1948

2007 ◽  
Vol 18 (1) ◽  
pp. 19
Author(s):  
Ian D. Rae
Keyword(s):  
Organic Chemistry ◽  
Staff Member ◽  
Chemical Research ◽  
Head Of School ◽  
The Past ◽  
Implicit And Explicit ◽  
The University ◽  
Explicit Criteria ◽  
Australian Universities

Chemistry Departments, like other sections of Australian universities, long looked to Britain as the source of their senior appointees. None more so than the University of Sydney, where an attempt to fill the chair of organic chemistry in 1948 went badly awry. The selected candidate, an English chemist with a modest research record but qualities of leadership that were valued by the Head of School at Sydney, Professor Raymond Le Fèvre, at first accepted but then declined the appointment. The main cause for his change of heart was the support in the university, which came to the attention of the popular press, for the appointment of an internal candidate. This was Dr Francis Lions, a graduate of the university and a staff member for two decades who had a strong record of chemical research. Le Fèvre expressed a preference for someone more co-operative than Lions, with whom he had already clashed. The chair remained vacant for several years but was eventually filled by the appointment of an Australian, Arthur Birch. Australian universities at that time were slowly moving to appoint more local candidates to chairs whereas in the past they had almost automatically looked to Britain for their recruits. As well as noting this shift, this account of the 1948 incident also raises questions about the implicit and explicit criteria on which appointments are made and compares the case study with other contentious appointments in a range of disciplines in Australian universities.

The Jordan River Controversy

1965 ◽  
Vol 27 (1) ◽  
pp. 32-57
Author(s):  
Fred J. Khouri
Keyword(s):  
Middle Eastern ◽  
Water Diversion ◽  
Military Force ◽  
Great Likelihood ◽  
Jordan River ◽  
The Past ◽  
Major Stage ◽  
Long Time ◽  
To Come ◽  
The Many

The Jordan River has recently become one of the most politically important and controversial rivers of the present day. Ever since the late 1950's, when the Arabs became fully aware of Israel's determination to implement her long-range plans to divert Jordan River water to irrigate the Negev, UN and Western officials concerned with Middle Eastern affairs have looked forward with great foreboding to the time when the first major stage of Israel's project would near its completion, for they expected this to produce another Middle Eastern crisis. Arab-Israeli tension over the water question has grown steadily and began to reach alarming proportions by late 1963 and early 1964. Fortunately the decision of the Arab leaders, in an unprecedented summit meeting held in January, 1964, to use means other than military force to frustrate Israel's water diversion plans precluded any immediate threat of an armed conflict between the contending parties. Nevertheless, because the fundamental disagreements remain unresolved, there is great likelihood that, for a long time to come, the world will find the Middle Eastern water dispute a potentially explosive situation. But few Westerners are adequately aware of the many complex and serious ramifications that are actually involved. In the past, even UN and Western officials tended oversimplify and overlook many aspects of this controversy and naively sought to deal with it on a technical and economic level despite the fact that the primary obstacles were emotional and political in nature.

scholarly journals IMPACT OF THE PANDEMIC COVID-19 TO CRIMINAL ACTIVITY IN TRANSPORT

2021 ◽  
Vol 8 (2) ◽  
pp. 117-122
Author(s):  
Jaroslava Kubáňová ◽  
Iveta Kubasáková
Keyword(s):  
Economic Recession ◽  
Criminal Activity ◽  
Business Leaders ◽  
Current Crisis ◽  
The Past ◽  
The World Bank ◽  
The World ◽  
Long Time ◽  
The Difference ◽  
To Come

2020 has been a year like no other for most of us, dominated by a virus that has cost over 1.15 million lives globally and plunged the world into an economic recession which the Chief Economist of the World Bank says it could take five years to recover from. For business leaders in every sector, over the past six months it has been almost impossible to focus on anything but finding the most sustainable way through this sudden and unexpected crisis – and, for most, it will be hard to think about anything else for a long time to come as they battle to protect the futures of their organisations. Against such a dramatic and damaging backdrop, every business can be forgiven for letting Covid-19 dominate their thinking. They have shareholders to satisfy, customers to support and jobs to protect. Right now, the very survival of companies of every size remains in the balance with no end date in sight to the current crisis. The pandemic has not stopped the crime either, we can eve say that the number of criminal activities has increased. In this article, we want to point out the difference between criminal activity in transport at the beginning of 2019 compared to 2020. The statistics are taken from the international database of criminal activities processed by TAPA EMEA.

Adapting to the Image and Resisting It: On Filming Literature and a Possible World for Literary Studies

PMLA ◽  
2010 ◽  
Vol 125 (4) ◽  
pp. 968-976 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ian Balfour
Keyword(s):  
Literary Criticism ◽  
Recent Literature ◽  
English Literature ◽  
Literary Studies ◽  
New Work ◽  
Possible World ◽  
Work Of Art ◽  
The Past ◽  
To Come ◽  
Risky Business

Predicting any future—or futures—for literary criticism is a risky business, perhaps all the more so now that the relation of literature to its others is arguably subject to greater and faster changes than ever before. The changes to come in literary criticism will be determined by transformations in literature proper as well as by any number of forces outside literature. By changes “within” literature we cannot mean simply those to contemporary or recent literature, whose canons—to say nothing of what exceeds these canons—are far from settled. The literary past continues to change even if every given text endlessly repeats itself like a broken record. For an authoritative formulation of this position, one need not turn to some outré poststructuralist or to Walter Benjamin's contention that even the dead are not “safe” from the reaches of the present (“On the Concept” 391). One can appeal to the sober, usually conservative thinking of T. S. Eliot:The existing monuments form an ideal order among themselves, which is modified by the introduction of the new (the really new) work of art among them. The existing order is complete before the new work arrives; for order to persist after the supervention of novelty, the whole existing order must be, if ever so slightly, altered; and so the relations, proportions, values of each work of art toward the whole are readjusted; and this is conformity between the old and the new. Whoever has approved this idea of order, of the form of European, of English literature, will not find it preposterous that the past should be altered by the present as much as the present is directed by the past. (38)

Suicidal Behavior in Black South Africans

Crisis ◽  
2003 ◽  
Vol 24 (1) ◽  
pp. 24-28 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lourens Schlebusch ◽  
Naseema B.M. Vawda ◽  
Brenda A. Bosch
Keyword(s):  
South African ◽  
Suicidal Behavior ◽  
Health Care Facilities ◽  
South African Society ◽  
South Africans ◽  
The Past ◽  
The People ◽  
Care Facilities ◽  
Black South Africans ◽  
To Come

Summary: In the past suicidal behavior among Black South Africans has been largely underresearched. Earlier studies among the other main ethnic groups in the country showed suicidal behavior in those groups to be a serious problem. This article briefly reviews some of the more recent research on suicidal behavior in Black South Africans. The results indicate an apparent increase in suicidal behavior in this group. Several explanations are offered for the change in suicidal behavior in the reported clinical populations. This includes past difficulties for all South Africans to access health care facilities in the Apartheid (legal racial separation) era, and present difficulties of post-Apartheid transformation the South African society is undergoing, as the people struggle to come to terms with the deleterious effects of the former South African racial policies, related socio-cultural, socio-economic, and other pressures.

The Pornographer and McGahern's Allusive Practice

2017 ◽  
Vol 47 (2) ◽  
pp. 281-297
Author(s):  
Tom Walker
Keyword(s):  
Social Practice ◽  
Literary Tradition ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Present Value ◽  
The Past

Allusions to other texts abound in John McGahern's fiction. His works repeatedly, though diffidently, refer to literary tradition. Yet the nature of such allusiveness is still unclear. This article focuses on how allusion in The Pornographer (1979) is depicted as an intellectual and social practice, embodying particular attitudes towards the function of texts and the knowledge they represent. Moreover, the critique of the practice of allusion that the novel undertakes is shown to have broader significance in terms of McGahern's whole oeuvre and its evolving attempts to salvage something of present value from the literature of the past.

Screen Wonders of the Past: And to Come?

1957 ◽  
Vol 11 (4) ◽  
pp. 381-393
Author(s):  
Kenneth MacGowan
Keyword(s):  
The Past ◽  
To Come

Music and Memory: The Tlatelolco Refrain

2015 ◽  
Vol 2 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Josh Kun
Keyword(s):  
State Violence ◽  
First Century ◽  
Student Movements ◽  
Octavio Paz ◽  
Mexican History ◽  
The Past ◽  
Rock Bands ◽  
To Come ◽  
Musical Memory ◽  
A Current

Ever since the 1968 student movements and the events surrounding the Tlatelolco massacre, Mexico City rock bands have openly engaged with the intersection of music and memory. Their songs offer audiences a medium through which to come to terms with the events of the past as a means of praising a broken world, to borrow the poet Adam Zagajewski’s phrase. Contemporary songs such as Saúl Hernández’s “Fuerte” are a twenty-first-century voicing of the ceaseless revolutionary spirit that John Gibler has called “Mexico unconquered,” a current of rebellion and social hunger for justice that runs in the veins of Mexican history. They are the latest additions to what we might think about as “the Mexico unconquered songbook”: musical critiques of impunity and state violence that are rooted in the weaponry of memory, refusing to focus solely on the present and instead making connections with the political past. What Octavio Paz described as a “swash of blood” that swept across “the international subculture of the young” during the events in Tlatelolco Plaza on October 2, 1968, now becomes a refrain of musical memory and political consciousness that extends across eras and generations. That famous phrase of Paz’s is a reminder that these most recent Mexican musical interventions, these most recent formations of a Mexican subculture of the young, maintain a historically tested relationship to blood, death, loss, and violence.

Re-centering the Cinema Experience in a Multi-Platform, Digital Age

2015 ◽  
Vol 8 (5) ◽  
Author(s):  
E. W. Nikdel
Keyword(s):  
Physical Environment ◽  
Cultural Memory ◽  
Emotional Response ◽  
Physical Space ◽  
Film History ◽  
Cultural Activity ◽  
Film Culture ◽  
The Past ◽  
Imminent Death ◽  
Multiple Media

With the advent of online distribution and the rise of multiple media devices, claims of the cinema’s imminent death have surfaced with greater intensity than ever before. Of course, with an ever-widening array of platforms these accounts have placed a newfound emphasis on the cinema as a distinctive physical space, one that plays host to a very particular and much cherished cultural activity. This article considers the substance of these claims by tracing a very particular historical route. Firstly, be revisiting Baudry’s notion of the dispositif, this article detects the importance of the physical environment in the process of film consumption. Secondly, I relate this emphasis on the physical to the traditional notion of the cinephile, a practice that ritualises the cinema experience. Many accounts across the spectrum of film history will attest to the profound ways in which the physical experience of the cinema summons a rich emotional response. Lastly, I consider how the cinema and the collective nature of film consumption provides an authentic trace to the past and a very certain time and place in history. In turn, despite competition from cheaper and more convenient platforms, this article will endeavour to show how the cinema retains its place at the centre of contemporary film culture. KEYWORDS Cinema, dispositif, cinephilia, cultural memory.

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document