Optical Illusion in Victorian Culture. The aim is to undertake a major interdisciplinary study of optical illusion in Victorian culture, both as a form of popular entertainment and as a discursive field in which new modes of self-representation and knowledge were explored. By focusing on an extensive range of cultural forms including, optical treatise, literary texts, popular entertainments, new visual technologies, newspapers and the periodical press, this project will provide an invaluable his ....Optical Illusion in Victorian Culture. The aim is to undertake a major interdisciplinary study of optical illusion in Victorian culture, both as a form of popular entertainment and as a discursive field in which new modes of self-representation and knowledge were explored. By focusing on an extensive range of cultural forms including, optical treatise, literary texts, popular entertainments, new visual technologies, newspapers and the periodical press, this project will provide an invaluable historical context for contemporary speculations about the impact of new visual technologies on the increasingly blurred boundaries between different cultures, identities and modes of self-representation.Read moreRead less
A critical study of the works of V.S. Naipaul. This project aims to study V.S. Naipaul, whose books defy the protocols of post-colonial theory. Literature students have met Naipaul’s books with outright denigration and unnerving silence, leading to an absence of serious engagement with the genesis of his works and their relationship to post-colonial criticism. This project will emphasise post-colonial texts rather than post-colonial theory and criticism. It will use the Naipaul Tulsa archive to ....A critical study of the works of V.S. Naipaul. This project aims to study V.S. Naipaul, whose books defy the protocols of post-colonial theory. Literature students have met Naipaul’s books with outright denigration and unnerving silence, leading to an absence of serious engagement with the genesis of his works and their relationship to post-colonial criticism. This project will emphasise post-colonial texts rather than post-colonial theory and criticism. It will use the Naipaul Tulsa archive to uncover the difficulty in the material itself. A close reading of textual variants, their transmission and reception is expected to show a post-colonial writer's struggle with form, aesthetics and ideology.Read moreRead less
Metaphor and Mind: Literary Texts, Cultural Transmission, and How We Think about the Mind. This project will make a significant contribution to national and international research on both literary language and the mind. Its wide applicability will boost Australia's international reputation in interdisciplinary research. The project is also of more general public interest in that it probes why, despite major advances in scientific understanding, we are as likely as Chaucer and Shakespeare were to ....Metaphor and Mind: Literary Texts, Cultural Transmission, and How We Think about the Mind. This project will make a significant contribution to national and international research on both literary language and the mind. Its wide applicability will boost Australia's international reputation in interdisciplinary research. The project is also of more general public interest in that it probes why, despite major advances in scientific understanding, we are as likely as Chaucer and Shakespeare were to describe the mind as 'wandering' or as a compartmentalised storehouse. In providing a new perspective to the study of the mind and metaphor, this project will reposition current debate about language use and cultural memory and contribute to knowledge of fundamental, wide-ranging relevance. Read moreRead less
Discovery Early Career Researcher Award - Grant ID: DE120101359
Funder
Australian Research Council
Funding Amount
$375,000.00
Summary
Imagining diversity: race and ethnicity in popular fantasy. How do fantasy worlds represent and reconstruct real world approaches to racial and cultural difference? This project examines the ways reader and writers of popular culture think and talk about race and ethnicity, offering insight into contemporary discourses of diversity and an essential window into Australia's multicultural society.
Precarious Borders: The Nation-State and the Arab Diaspora Novel. This project aims to shed new light on diaspora voices in debates about the formation and narration of nations to argue for a more inclusive view of the nation and to challenge the dominance of canonical literature in these debates. Arab writing is closely tied to its diaspora, making it particularly significant for probing how fiction registers the transformative effects of migration on our grasp of the nation. Spanning four dias ....Precarious Borders: The Nation-State and the Arab Diaspora Novel. This project aims to shed new light on diaspora voices in debates about the formation and narration of nations to argue for a more inclusive view of the nation and to challenge the dominance of canonical literature in these debates. Arab writing is closely tied to its diaspora, making it particularly significant for probing how fiction registers the transformative effects of migration on our grasp of the nation. Spanning four diaspora sites and a century of writing, potential outcomes include a diaspora-focused approach to reassess the nation from a transnational perspective, a new awareness of the value of diaspora writers’ engagement with the nation, and the vital repositioning of Arab-Australian writing in this field of world literature.Read moreRead less
The world novel, distant suffering and humanitarian sensibility after 1989. As war and terror flicker across our televisions, writers like Rushdie, McEwan and Hosseini have turned the novel into a global form, expressing a new humanitarian ethic. This project explores the makings of these World Novels across sites of ongoing global conflict, and traces their plea for sympathy back to the novel's beginnings, in the eighteenth-century.
Rioting and the literary archive. This project aims to examine writers' enduring engagement with the riot's destructive energy and its transformative potential. Riots have become a familiar feature of an increasingly volatile global politics, but contemporary responses to these events have a long history across a range of media and modes of writing. Literary writers have historically struggled in the aftermath of riots to make sense of and communicate the collective trauma felt by families and c ....Rioting and the literary archive. This project aims to examine writers' enduring engagement with the riot's destructive energy and its transformative potential. Riots have become a familiar feature of an increasingly volatile global politics, but contemporary responses to these events have a long history across a range of media and modes of writing. Literary writers have historically struggled in the aftermath of riots to make sense of and communicate the collective trauma felt by families and communities who suffer resulting injury, death, homelessness or unemployment. Drawing together writing from Britain, United States of America, Australia and the Middle-East, this project will provide an understanding of the resurgence of the riot in a contemporary global context.Read moreRead less
Future thinking: utopianism in post-colonial literatures. This project examines the critical function of creative writers around the world in their society's imagination of the future. It investigates post-colonial literatures from a wide range of countries and regions to show the prevalence and power of hope, of ideas of liberation, self-determination and future possibility.
Monumental Shakespeare: a transcultural investigation of commemoration in 20th-century Australia and England. Shakespeare represents a key conduit of Anglo-Australian cultural definition. This first internationally collaborative investigation of the popular, political and scholarly influences at work in the desire to commemorate Shakespeare in the 20th century - beginning with the tercentenary of his death in 1916 - will produce new knowledge about the embedding of Shakespeare into English and A ....Monumental Shakespeare: a transcultural investigation of commemoration in 20th-century Australia and England. Shakespeare represents a key conduit of Anglo-Australian cultural definition. This first internationally collaborative investigation of the popular, political and scholarly influences at work in the desire to commemorate Shakespeare in the 20th century - beginning with the tercentenary of his death in 1916 - will produce new knowledge about the embedding of Shakespeare into English and Australian cultural foundations. This transcultural investigation of the ways in which very different memorials - the National Theatre (London) and Sydney's Shakespeare Place - emerged from debates over appropriate forms for memorialisation will provide new understandings of the reproduction of Shakespearean heritage across nations, hemispheres and cities.Read moreRead less
Creole Voices in the Caribbean and Australia: Poetics and Decolonisation. Creole Voices will investigate the experiences of Caribbean people that have been repressed or lost in colonial archives. Its first theme introduces the methods of historical poetics to Caribbean literary studies in order to recover a forgotten archive of poems written in the region’s hybrid creole languages and to reconstruct for the first time the history of Creole poetry between the end of slavery and formal decolonisat ....Creole Voices in the Caribbean and Australia: Poetics and Decolonisation. Creole Voices will investigate the experiences of Caribbean people that have been repressed or lost in colonial archives. Its first theme introduces the methods of historical poetics to Caribbean literary studies in order to recover a forgotten archive of poems written in the region’s hybrid creole languages and to reconstruct for the first time the history of Creole poetry between the end of slavery and formal decolonisation. Its second theme synthesises archival research and literary reconstruction to explore the lives of Caribbean people arriving in Australia over the same period. Creole Voices’ discoveries will be made readily accessible to Australian and Caribbean communities through online digital archives, podcasts, and publications.Read moreRead less