Kirstine Moffat

Transforming conceptual space into a creative learning place: Crossing a threshold

This article describes, discusses and reflects on a teaching and learning experiment in a first year BA course. Students were led out of the lecture room to a different space, the New Place Theatre. While this move out of the usual teaching space was appropriate for the text being studied, William Shakespeare’s The Tempest, the strategy aimed to develop students’ grasp of a critical concept we had identified as troublesome to students who had encountered it in the past: subjective interpretation. For us the concept of subjective interpretation shared the transformative and integrative, as well as the troublesome, characteristics of ‘threshold concepts’. According to threshold concept theory, threshold concepts are critical points where students may get ‘stuck’ before making ‘learning leaps’ as they journey towards a ‘new conceptual space and enter … a postliminal state in which both the learner and the learning are transformed’ (Land et al., 2010: ix). Students first participated in a collective exercise, creating the storm which opens the play through movement and vocalisation, and were then invited to intervene in a performance of the opening act, supporting the characters with whom they sympathised. Student feedback confirmed that this teaching strategy not only assisted them to grasp the concept of subjective interpretation, but also promoted transformative shifts in understanding through their active learning. A key factor in the resulting student engagement was movement to a different physical space, and a fresh, creative learning place.

The Poetry and Fiction of Scottish Settlers in New Zealand

Eight distinctly Scottish voices sound in the literature of New Zealand settlement: John Barr, William Golder, Alexander Bathgate, Dugald Ferguson, Wilhelmina Sherriff Elliot, Hugh Smith, Bannerman Kaye and Jessie Mackay. These writers remain nostalgic for their homeland, but also speak critically of the economic misery and class oppression they have left behind. Yet Scotland as a cultural and historical entity inspires eulogies to the ideals of freedom, justice and truth embodied in heroes such as William Wallace, the Covenanters and Robert Burns. The Scottish settlers seek to shape a New Zealand which transforms these egalitarian ideals into a lived reality. The authors are also linked in their meditation on the legacy of Presbyterianism. For most the Kirk is a beacon of morality and equality, but others challenge the Calvinist rhetoric of self-denial and retribution. This article aims to identify common themes and tropes in the fiction and poetry of New Zealand authors of Scottish birth and heritage from 1860–1946 and to examine the complex attitudes these authors articulate towards both Scotland and their adopted antipodean home.

“Devoted to the Cause of Woman’s Rights”: The New Zealand New Woman Novel

ABSTRACT This article examines New Woman novels written by New Zealand authors from 1882–1925. The fiction is embedded in a colonial settler culture. All of the authors discussed are European New Zealanders and only one of them addresses the rights of Māori. This silence regarding the indigenous population points to the ambivalent position of white settler women in an invader settler nation; preoccupied with their own predicament as an oppressed gender, most of these authors fail to acknowledge their complicity as imperial subjects in the subjugation of Māori people. Settler New Zealand is depicted by these New Woman authors as both a white space and a dichotomous space. It is lauded as the first country to give women the vote and reviled as a provincial backwater. New Women regularly leave New Zealand in search of expanded mental and artistic horizons in international metropolitan centres. Yet New Zealand New Woman fiction also frames the colony as a place promoting independence, agency, physical health, sexual desire and a re-evaluating of class hierarchies. The tradition of New Woman writing in New Zealand follows international models: protesting against patriarchy; demanding female autonomy, education and congenial work; and calling for the renovation of marriage and frank discussions about sexuality. New Zealand New Woman fiction is polemical and frequently autobiographical, typically focusing on heroines who are white and middle class. It tends to be more optimistic than some British and American fiction, in frequently ending with the heroines happiness being fulfilled.

New Zealand: Compiled and introduced by Kirstine Moffat and Helen Lavën

Jolisa Gracewood provided one of the most controversial and contested views of New Zealand literature in 2010 in comparing what she regards as the proliferation of “pyrotechnical plots” to the late Victorian sensation novel. She reacts to what she describes as the “new sensationalism” with “boredom” and a lack of engagement and urges New Zealand authors to ditch the “special effects” and write about characters “who do something, rather than relentlessly suffer things done to them” (Metro Jan-Feb 2011 p93). Sensational incidents are certainly to be found in some of this year’s offerings, but other works are characterised by understated realism. Likewise, while some authors adopt a pessimistic tone and outlook, others write with a sense of joy and an awareness of the possibly of transcendence. It is this variety of tone, style and genre which, in my view, makes the current year rewarding. Craig Cliff’s dazzling debut collection of short stories, A Man Melting, is a case in point. Winner of the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize for best first book, this collection also garnered considerable praise from Siobhan Harvey, who compares Cliff’s “deconstruction[s] of the New Zealand psyche” favourably with New Zealand short-story king Frank Sargeson. She writes that Cliff “examines all the big questions of life – birth, infancy, adolescence, violence, parenthood, death [...] in fresh and intriguing ways” (Listener 17 July, 2010). Master storyteller Owen Marshall’s new volume of stories, Living as a Moon, is praised by Elspeth Sandys as a “superb collection”, but she echoes some of Gracewood’s concerns, troubled by the “tone” of some of the stories, which she sees as embodying Thoreau’s comment that “most men lead lives of quiet desperation”, and by the way in which the characters “make do” rather than thrive or triumph (New Zealand Books 20 [3] p15).