Tully Barnett

Counting culture to death: an Australian perspective on culture counts and quality metrics

ABSTRACT Metrics-based approaches to understanding the value of culture imply homogeneity of artistic purpose, invite political manipulation and demand time, money and attention from cultural organisations without proven benefit. The system retailing as Culture Counts, a dashboard approach to quality measurement that emerged from Western Australia and is currently trialling in Australia, the US, the UK and Asia, serves to further abstract assessment processes. Cultural policy-makers across international domains need a more robust appreciation of the limits of metrics. Statistical data, well channelled, may provide useful ancillary information. But, where questions of value are concerned, it cannot replace critical judgment.

Culture without “world”: Australian cultural policy in the age of stupid

ABSTRACT In March 2013, after six years of consultation, an Australian Labor government launched the national cultural policy document, Creative Australia. In July 2013, a Coalition government was elected, Senator George Brandis became Minister for the Arts, and the policy was dumped. With it went cross-party consensus about funding rationales and measurement strategies, with disastrous consequences for the cultural sector. This cautionary tale of gaffes, pay-back and abrupt changes of direction, highlights the fragility of policy memory that condemns artists and arts managers to a never-ending reinvention of the evidentiary wheel. Our paper examines the problem of collective understanding (“world”) in cultural policy-making in Australia, exacerbated not only by the short-term electoral cycles which undermine long-term cultural outcome timescales, but by a fixation on what Hannah Arendt calls “the peculiar and ingenious replacement of common sense with strict logicality”. Evidence of value is only meaningful when it occurs in a policy memory that can fully avow it and respond in appropriate ways. Measurement methods are over-determined by epistemology and by experience. We argue that the balance between these determinants of effective cultural policy-making has been lost. An emphasis on numerical data – especially economic data – has forced arguments for culture into a decontextualised register of quantitative proof. Recent events in Australia suggest that different, more direct ways of engaging with cultural policy-making are required for the problem of collective understanding to be successfully assayed.

Building reading resilience : re-thinking reading for the literary studies classroom

ABSTRACT This paper introduces the concept of ‘reading resilience’: students’ ability to read and interpret complex and demanding literary texts by drawing on advanced, engaged, critical reading skills. Reading resilience is a means for rethinking the place and pedagogies of close reading in the contemporary literary studies classroom. Our research was across four Australian universities and the first study of its kind in the Australian context. We trialled three working strategies to support students to become consistent and skilled readers, and to equip teachers with methods for coaching reading: ‘setting the scene’ for reading, surveying students on their reading experiences and habits, and rewarding reading within assessment. We argue that the nature and pedagogy of close reading has not been interrogated as much as it should be and that the building of reading resilience is less about modelling or outlining best practice for close reading (as has traditionally been thought) and more about deploying contextual, student-centred teaching and learning strategies around reading. The goal is to encourage students to develop a broad suite of skills and knowledge around reading that will equip them long term (for the university and beyond). We measured the effectiveness of our strategies through seeking formal and informal student feedback, and through students’ demonstration of skills and knowledge within assessment.

The affects of not reading: Hating characters, being bored, feeling stupid

This article brings recent debates in literary studies regarding the practice of close reading into conversation with Derek Attridge’s idea of ‘readerly hospitality’ (2004) to diagnose the problem of students in undergraduate literary studies programme not completing set reading. We argue that the method of close reading depends on encouraging students to foster positive affective responses towards difficulty – semiotic, emotional and intellectual. Drawing on trials of teaching methods in literary studies’ classrooms in four universities in Australia, we suggest that introducing students to the concept of ‘readerly hospitality’ – rather than assuming an appreciation of difficulty – can better prepare students for the encounters they will have in set literary texts and strengthen the effectiveness of classroom teaching.

Response: Culture counts: “A step along the way” or a step back?

Crossick, G., & Kaszynska, P. (2017). Understanding the value of arts & culture: The AHRC Cultural Value Project. London: Arts & Humanities Research Council. Gilmore, A., Glow, H., & Johanson, K. (2017). Accounting for quality: arts evaluation, public value and the case of “Culture Counts”. Cultural Trends. doi:10.1080/09548963.2017.1382761 Holden, J. (2006). Cultural value and the crisis of legitimacy: Why culture needs a democratic mandate. London: Demos. Hutter, M., & Throsby, D. (Eds.). (2008). Beyond price: Value in economics, culture and the arts. New York: Cambridge University Press. McCarthy, K. M., Ondaatje, E. H., Zakaras, L., & Brooks, A. (2005). Gifts of the muse: Reframing the debate about the benefits of the arts. Los Angeles: The RAND Corporation. Phiddian, R., Meyrick, J., Barnett, T., & Maltby, R. (2017). Counting culture to death: an Australian perspective on culture counts and quality metrics, Cultural Trends, 26(2), 174–180. Throsby, D. (2010). The economics of cultural policy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Book review: Digital Audiobooks: New Media, Users and ExperiencesHaveIbenPedersenBirgitte Stougaard, Digital Audiobooks: New Media, Users and Experiences. New York: Routledge, 2015; 164 pp. ISBN: 9781138821835, A

points out in his introduction, ‘in each year from 2000 to 2010, historical epics have made the top ten highest-grossing films, and attracted numerous awards and nominations’ (p. 1). Elliott places Gladiator (Ridley Scott, 2000) as ‘the first of a long line of ancient-world epics’ and ‘the catalyst, if not the cause, for the revival of the epic’ (pp. 4, 5). Indeed, Gladiator exists at the core of the book, frequently surfacing as a key text in each of the chapters. The book is structured around three major concerns: how the epic uses history, what aesthetic forms epic film revivals have taken and how to define the epic canon. With three to five chapters for each theme section, the book is very cogently organised, and presents more of a cohesive analytical narrative than many other edited collections exploring a single film genre. In the first chapter, Jeffrey Richards explores the influence of Ridley Scott upon the renaissance of the epic film, considering how Scott’s films Gladiator, Kingdom of Heaven (2005) and Robin Hood (2010) deploy historical narratives to work through contemporary political agendas. Richards’ analysis lays down a solid foundation for the rest of the book as each of these films are important – but not necessarily always central – to many of the subsequent chapters. Other chapters in Part I include Mark Jancovich’s analysis of the critical reception of recent epics, and Robert Stow’s audience research exploring viewer expectations about the epic’s historical accuracy. This section is the book’s most rewardingly unified, offering diverse but complementary perspectives on the epic’s cultural role in the early 21st century. Part II includes Robert Burgoyne’s nuanced analysis of how colour crafts and communicates meaning in epics, and Elliott’s engaging analysis of the dialectic tensions between computer-generated imagery (CGI) spectacle and historical authenticity. The final section does not present as cohesive an analytical through-line as Parts I and II; however, Sheldon Hall’s archival research on the etymology of the term blockbuster unpacks uncharted critical and industrial contexts surrounding epic film production. Saër Maty Bâ’s chapter on the opacity of whiteness in epics and Aarttee Kaul Dhar’s work on recent cinematic renegotiations of the Indian tale Ramayana provide important additional cultural and global dimensions to the book’s earlier discussions about national histories. Overall, The Return of the Epic Film is a well-rounded and carefully organised collection that achieves a satisfying balance of depth and breadth across its 12 chapters. The writing style across the book is generally engaging and unencumbered by unproductive jargon, ensuring that a number of the chapters could serve as reading material on undergraduate courses on 21st-century blockbusters or genres. The book is an essential text for scholars studying contemporary epics, for it provides both a thorough and comprehensive overview of the role of epic films in the 21st century, and of the cinema histories that this recent cycle engages with, renegotiates and defies.

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Technologies of memory and affect are all around us. In this introduction to a special issue of Media International Australia on the theme of technologies of memory and affect, we report on the activities of year-long collaborative and interdisciplinary research programme funded by the Flinders Institute for Research in the Humanities. We offer insights into the research program, its structure and methodologies, from which some of these articles emerged, including brief description of collaborative processes and creative outputs. We include field note excerpts and selected images from the visual arts exhibition, part of the Adelaide Fringe Festival, in an effort to share the energies and embodied dynamics of the event. We summarise the six articles that form the collection and reflect upon their relationship to one another and our theme.

Curating Technologies of Memory and Affect

In recent years, the “memoir boom” coupled with an explosion of “books about books” has seen members of the literary establishment writing about their experiences of reading in their childhoods and adolescences. Readers are impacted by what they read and their sense of self can be both constituted and signified by the texts they have read, and when and how they read them. Memoirs of literary figures underscore ways in which this can happen. This article considers bibliographic nonfiction works by Michael Dirda, Alberto Manguel, and Karla Holloway, as three very different kinds of autobiographical expressions about reading in childhood, in order to explore how these narratives are put to use. These authors construct their childhood reading experiences in different ways. In all three, however, the value of books and the act of reading serve to frame their autobiographical recollections and to solidify a position in the literary establishment. Ultimately, memoirs of reading can advance conservative constructions of childhood that locate acts of reading and book appreciation in opposition to, and as a means of escaping, a social class.

“Reading Saved Me”: Writing Autobiographically About Transformative Reading Experiences in Childhood

Melinda Rackhams web-based multimedia installation carrier invites its audience to consider the intersections of virus and human, through an investigation of the Hepatitis C Virus (HCV) and its impact upon conceptions of the self in the posthuman digital era. Rackham uses her experience with HCV to posit the infected as more-than-human, and in doing so she prompts new ways of thinking about the personal story in a hypertextual framework.