Alan Lawson

De-scribing Empire: Post-Colonialism and Textuality

Contributors: Stephen Slemon, Bill Ashcroft, Chris Prentice, Terry Collits, Gareth Griffiths, John Coetzee, Helen Gilbert, Jo-Ann Wallace, Simon Ryan, Bridget Orr, Robert Dixon, Howard McNaughton, Fiona Giles, Sue Thomas, Paul Sharrad

Realism And Romance

Although representations of the everyday and the familiar, as distinct from the extraordinary and the exotic, are as old as art itself, the term ‘realism’ to identify these does not seem to have been used in English until 1856. In that year, coincidentally the same that Flaubert shocked the French public and authorities with his anti-romantic ‘scenes from provincial life’ in Madame Bovary, George Eliot extended Ruskin’s use of ‘realism’ in Modern Painters to literature that presented social life with meticulous attention to detail, and in the United States Emerson used the word to describe Swift’s style. As a reaction against the romanticism of the earlier nineteenth century, realism—or a range of realistic subjects and styles- came to characterise new developments in fiction (and later drama) in Europe, the United States and, by the last decades of the century, when a new generation of predominantly native-born writers emerged, Australia.

Silly, Soft and Otherwise Suspect: Doctoral Education as Risky Business.

This article investigates how certain doctoral practices come to count as scandalous and with what effects on universities. To do so, it engages with a number of recent media allegations that relate to doctoral practice in Australia and elsewhere. The analysis of these allegations is developed in terms of three broad categories, namely allegations of silliness in relation to thesis content, allegations of softness in relation to entry, rigour and assessment, and allegations of suspect conduct and/or credentials. The impact of such allegations on university governance is then addressed.

The Macmillan anthology of Australian literature

Place and people living in Aboriginal Australia convictism the migrant experience cultural intersections the vision splendid mapping and naming cultural politics the writing process realism and romance person to person writing the self.

Who's Dean today? Acting and interim management as paradoxes of the contemporary university

Interim, discontinuous or ‘acting’ management is an increasingly ubiquitous feature of universities. This paper asks: What are the implications of this for good academic governance? Should we understand this managerial dance as a symptom of the collapse of good managerial order or, by contrast, as a symptom of the robustness and flexibility of the organisational culture of the university? Or both? This paper answers ‘all of the above’ to these questions. It reaches that conclusion by examining relevant literature, theorising a methodology for reading the field of interim management, and by applying this theorising to an analysis of qualitative data collected as part of a national collaborative research project conducted in Australia.

Place and People

‘Australia’, ‘literature’ and ‘Australian literature’ exist as subjects in discourse by virtue of substantial agreement about certain conventions. In order to talk at all we have to begin with some assumptions: assumptions about the general or rough-and-ready meaning of key terms and assumptions about what is worth discussing. While it is obvious that the value judgments of someone who has never heard of Australia will differ from those of someone who is either proud or ashamed of living in Australia, and equally obvious that the value judgments of a dispossessed Aborigine will differ from those of a large white mining or pastoral company, discourse can nevertheless proceed through agreement about the signi-ficance (if not the exact meaning or implication) of certain concepts. Geographical concepts such as the land, its features and contents may be referred to; historical concepts such as convictism, colonialism, pastoralism, or the gold rushes; sociological concepts such as urbanisation, racism, ethnic origin or multiculturalism; psychological concepts such as exile, loneliness, renewal and self-discovery; moral concepts such as mateship, endurance and fair play; socio-legal concepts such as equality and democracy; or linguistic and literary concepts such as laconicism, scepticism, the dismantling of expectations and hyperbole or the tall story. Qualities or demands (or, perhaps, inventions) such as these go to make up what is said to be Australian culture, and this culture is assumed to be overt or latent in writing in and about Australia.

The Writing Process

While other parts of this Anthology have paid attention to the way writers deal with what used to be called ‘their material’ or the way in which they respond to the world or participate in it, this Section turns to the essential inwardness of writing, the process of writing. It shows how texts reflect upon their own situation; how writing is often about writing.

Mapping And Naming

One of the most persistent beliefs about that part of the world colonised by Europeans since the sixteenth century is expressed in the name most commonly given to it: the New World. As several of the items in the previous Section exemplified, one of the key images of that ‘newness’ was its silence, its emptiness of language. And, as the Introduction to that Section, together with the remarks of Dr Mulhaus in the extract there from The Recollections of Geo f fry Hamlyn, suggested, it was a crucial part of the imperial enterprise to overlook the ‘oldness’ of the existing inhabitants and the validity of their naming of the place. Naming is a potent and contentious strategy because it confers ownership. And, as John Dunmore Lang pointedly observes in ‘Colonial Nomenclature’, as early as 1823, it is ideologically loaded as well. Lang, who wrote this poem in the year of his arrival in the colony as its first Presbyterian minister, was to have a long and controversial career as a radical reformer: for him, to name the land was to invest it with political significance. As a republican he preferred the names of democrats (like Hampden) and Aboriginal names (stanza 2) to those of Governors (like Macquarie) and imperial officials (like Goulburn).

Writing The Self

One of the commonest ways of trying to distinguish human beings from other creatures is to emphasise the human uniqueness of the faculties of deliberate or willed self-examination, self-consciousness, self-awareness, and self-identification. Human beings have a sense of superiority when they see other animals (typically dogs, cats, farm animals, and birds) appear to act as if they thought themselves human—ignoring the fact that the reverse delusion is sometimes suffered by human beings themselves. Behind this sense of superiority lies the assumption that the interpretation of reality, including the definition of what is human, is essentially and uniquely a human preserve.