Niall Lucy

Everybody Loves Raymond Williams: Critical Literacy, Cultural Studies and the New International

The standard complaint against literary theory at university used to be that it destroys the pleasure of reading. So often was this said, that it feels now like some of us must have been spending more time defending theory than just doing it. But since ‘theory’ is no longer a scandalous topic at university, certainly not in the humanities, I began to think of late that everyone must finally be agreed that the theory-versuspleasure brouhaha had always been a whopping furphy. I was wrong. On reading Graeme Turner’s recent criticisms of contemporary secondary-school English studies in Australia, in an essay for the International Journal of Cultural Studies (Turner 2007), I see now that complaining about how theory destroys pleasure has not gone away. It has simply gone off campus, to be directed squarely at those who support the teaching of ‘critical literacy’ in high schools across the nation. Yes, I was aware of this happening before I read Turner’s essay, and indeed this is not the first time I have had something to say on the subject. But Turner’s intervention makes everything new again, given that it comes from the Director of the Centre for Critical and Cultural Studies at Queensland University and someone who is also a Federation Fellow of the Australian Research Council. Unlike many other critics of English teachers and subject English, Turner is both institutionally powerful and credible. Given his commitment to cultural studies and his standing in the field, moreover, he might have reasonably been expected to be on side with socalled critical literacy, if not also an ally of those who support and teach it. Indeed, in the IJCS piece, Turner justifiably claims credit himself for helping to re-make secondary-school English in the image of media and cultural studies, back in the early 1980s, in Western Australia. Why, then, is he turning on it now? It seems the answer is that he feels his 15-year-old daughter’s generation has been let down by his theoretical offspring, or by what teachers have allowed what he helped to create to become. The fiery blaze of the ‘new’ English that Turner helped to ignite in the 1980s has been hosed down by an educratic system that now offers students nothing more imaginative to write about than ‘bloody Othering’, as he cites his daughter to bemoan (Turner 2007, 110)! Turner sees this as symptomatic of the ‘mechanical and formulaically pre-emptive nature’ of critical literacy approaches, which he maintains are focused on considerations of ‘discourse’, ‘politics’ and ‘ideology’ at ‘the exclusion of pleasure’ (Turner 2007, 109–10).

DIY John Curtin: Uncertain futures for heritage and citizenship in the era of digital friends and foes

This article introduces some of the problems confronting the popularization of national, civic and cultural heritage in the era of complex digital systems and social networks. Taking contemporary knowledge of John Curtin (Australia’s wartime PM) as its point of departure, the discussion explores some of the broader transformations of the conditions of citizenship, communication, heritage and knowledge production, and considers their implications for civic education and the uses of archives. In a novel thought experiment, the article explores some ways in which the figure of ‘John Curtin’ may be repurposed and reinvented for a new kind of DIY civic education based on user-led innovation.

Introduction: the source of plagiarism

What I was looking for were folk music records and the first one I saw was Odetta on the Tradition label. I went into the listening booth to hear it. Odetta was great. I had never heard of her until then. She was a deep singer, powerful strumming and a hammering-on style of playing. I learned almost every song off the record right then and there, even borrowing the hammering-on style. Dylan, Chronicles, 237

Structure, Sign and Play in the Discourse of Paul Auster's In the Country of Last Things

Calamity befalls the city in Paul Auster’s little novel In the Country of Last Things (1987), like a biblical plague. Once or twice a character refers to ‘‘the troubles’’ of the past, but otherwise we’re never told what caused the city – its buildings, its institutions, its whole social order – to collapse. We don’t even know its name. We’re given the names of a few streets (Muldoon Boulevard, Turquoise Avenue, Circus Lane) and a very loose sense of where the several precincts (any of the nine ‘‘census zones,’’ as they’re called, which should not be mistaken for neighbourhoods) might be located in relation to one another, but these and other features of the city are less distinguishing than stock. A city has to have streets; it has to be divided internally into metropolitan zones or districts; it has to have libraries and crematoria and the like. All of these belong to the city in Auster’s book as composite features of a city that belongs nowhere and everywhere at once. They’re just about the very least (or the last) things that have to be in place to stop a city from turning into a wasteland. So there are streets in Auster’s city, but they’re filled with rubble. There are buildings, but most of them are falling down. There’s a library, where Anna – whose letter forms the basis of the novel – finds sanctuary and love, but you would never be able to find a book in it, even though it was stacked with hundreds of thousands of them. ‘‘It was debatable,’’ she writes,