Lee Wallace

Trouble in Mind: Supporting the Transition to Graduate Research in English.

This article considers the ways in which entry-level graduate students in the discipline of English begin to understand themselves as researchers within a particular disciplinary formation. Analysing data from student and staff reflections on the experience of undertaking a supervised research project, we argue that the ontological shifts and identity transformations that occur at doctoral level are also observable in the transition from undergraduate coursework to graduate research but only in the right conditions. We compare participant accounts of two supervised research projects that, although offered within the framework of a single fourth-year unit, created very different opportunities for transformative learning. This comparison of graduate research experiences raises a number of questions about threshold concepts in English and cognate disciplines, particularly those that have been transformed by the encounter with theory.

A House is not a Home: Gender, Space and Marquesan Encounter, 1833–34

In August 1833, a party of American missionaries with their wives and children took up residence at Taiohae on Nukuhiva, one of the three islands that comprise the northern group of the Marquesas, only to abandon their station eight months later in April 1834. This paper looks at the journal records of those few months and considers the pressure that cross-cultural encounter placed on American notions of gender and the domestic ideology that underwrites it. Desperate to make a home in an alien land, the missionaries oversaw the construction of a residential compound but, as the months progressed, it became increasingly obvious that the walls they built were not secure. Far from being a place of respite, the compound was continuous with the native landscape and an indigenous sexual culture the missionaries could only register with disgust. Despite the best efforts of the female missionaries to model Christian family life, the peculiar domestic architecture of the mission dwellings formed not the desired proscenium between savage and civil but a more disorienting hall of mirrors in which Marquesan concepts of sexuality and space dissolved the distinction between public and private on which American notions of gender depended. Accordingly, the fate of the Marquesan mission allows us to revisit many of the critical commonplaces that circulate around women and Pacific missionary endeavour.

Sontag’s late lesbianism: sexuality, photography, celebrity

This essay is concerned with two public figures whose intimate relationship complicates their established independent celebrity – on the one hand, Susan Sontag, an intellectual star whose authorial persona kept in play the open secret of her bisexuality; and, on the other, Annie Leibovitz, a photographer whose reputation derives from her capacity to capture the celebrity of others. As many specialist and non-specialist commentators note, Sontag always operated with a keen eye to the forms of celebrity sustained across the expanded literary marketplace and the middlebrow print-media of the 1960s–1980s. Across her career the celebrity-effect Sontag cultivated drew on the modernist ideal of a literary and cultural original, hence the significance she placed on the holograph documentation deposited at UCLA that now comprises the Sontag Papers, an extensive collection of manuscripts, journals, lecture notes and correspondence. But from the late 1980s onwards, Sontag’s celebrity avatar was increasingly drawn into the image-driven circuits associated with Leibovitz’s rising fame as the premiere photographer of contemporary celebrity. Occurring primarily at the level of image, Sontag’s photographic entanglement with Leibovitz reveals how lesbian celebrity, even in its most reflexive iterations, derives its charge from the volatile relations between privacy and publicity that continue to manifest in the vicinity of homosexuality.