Reprints, international markets and local literary taste: New empiricism and Australian literature

Taking a cue from Franco Moretti's research, my article applies statistical methods to probe the history of publishing Australian novels both locally and internationally. By temporarily suspending our discipline's preoccupation with close readings and canonical judgements, I aim to demonstrate how the computational analysis of large-scale publication data about Australian novels can also provoke alternative kinds of, and responses to, Australian literary history

Taking creative license: It's not an easy thing meeting your maker

Creators do not just 'create' or 'act' -- they are privileged agents, points of origin, sources of innovation and transformation. Within religious systems, creators can exist in an extra-discursive real beyond nature and culture, functioning as the origin of the word and being. They can be supernatural, existing outside nature to influence earthly events via strange powers. They can also be 'supra' natural -- above nature -- capable of acts that both break and establish laws to which the created are subject. Yet, these types of creators only seem to exist through the cultural economies which allow their representation. Their roles and personas can differ with the production, combination and utilisation of selected characterisations: in other words, creators are created

Apocacide, apocaholics and apocalists: A selective webography of endism

A term which blends apocalypse with suicide, apocacides could be best described as those groups or individuals who understand salvation from an imagined approaching armageddon to involve, indeed depend upon, the voluntary sacrifice of one's own life on earth

666 ways to ambush the future

For some time, I have been concerned with uses and abuses of the future, how the exchange of temporally loaded language through conversation and text affects the pace, moods and behaviour of individuals, communities, cultures and civilisations. I am equally curious about Christianity which as a narrative structure begins with creation but awaits a conclusion. Whether it is religions announcing ten-point plans to attain paradise quickly, or cults encouraging group passes to heaven through suicide, it is the future end that counts. Whether it be ego-theologists -- as I prefer to call those pastors who proclaim the 'you are/they are god' creed -- scalping spiritual quick-fixes at the local entertainment centre, with a McDonald's-like serving of 'Would you like a blessing with that?', or the visiting soulwinner from New South Wales distributing 'Mark of the Beast' warning pamphlets, the future conclusion of the Christian narrative plays the lead

Social dexterity: Maneuvering through the mix

It would be fair to say that in our day to day negotiation between the personal and the public, we encounter and process cultural, material and symbolic products in all strata and sections of society. In our homes and in our workplaces, we appear to manage multiple senses of timekeeping and contrasting time-frames with fluid unconscious dexterity. In our forms of entertainment and relaxation, from print to television to cinema or from html to Mp3s to DivX, we juxtapose like and unlike metaphors/images/products/ text in a post-Frankensteinian assemblage of innovated cultural meaning – for example, The Phantom Menace and Austin Powers are commentaries on our visual eclecticism, from mixing mythological elements from feudal times in a space opera to our nostalgic enjoyment of presenting the old sixties' "style" as renewed, millennium-way;Napster is a logical extension of file-sharing which reflects a globalising trend towards the distribution of all content worldwide while meeting the specific requirements of individual taste (that is, the do-it-yourself musical cdrom drawn from thousands of international mp3 libraries)

Editorial: End

In the public domain of end, what is the real impact of endism on our cultural and political lives? Are the proponents of apocalypse and armageddon correct to assume that there is an impending divine climax to the system of human affairs on this planet? Researching in the world of endism, it is usually the extreme, often dangerous forms of endist belief which the media popularly exploit to define 'other' forms of 'endist' fundamentalism. Reading about the apocacidal (suicides for the apocalypse) tendencies of various cults and sects horrifies us in their acts of forcible manipulation. Yet apocaholicism (a mental state of intoxication on the endtimes) can not be limited to the extra-societal gathering in the outer suburbs that awaits an end with grim but enthusiastic anticipation and which makes the occasional evening news headline or Sixty Minutes exposure. Nor can a keen sense of apocalypse be situated as being primarily a characteristic of religious fundamentalism. Secular society itself, as suggested by this collection of essays, is drunk on different meditations of the 'end'. In film alone, from Deep Impact through Armageddon to The End of Days, a mainstream space exists for courting the end in public forms of spectacularisation and profit-making. In this use, the end creates revenue. But there are other senses of the end too in secular society

Now your smile goes everywhere: Community, family sentiment and the desire for telepresence

The recent marketing campaigns by Apple and Microsoft suggest some of the ways that desire, emotion and narratives of familial life can be exploited to help embed new technologies. Undoubtedly, Apple and Microsoft are major stakeholders in – and makers of – technology and software. As separate businesses, both actively promote competing visions of interface ‐ based culture (or, at the very least, competing visual styles of interface ‐ based culture) yet both plug into similar affective states as ways of putting forward their brand of product and services. While Microsoft has recently attempted to position photographic manipulation in consumer consciousness as an entirely benevolent proposition, and while Apple works to foster the perception of immediate obsolescence for its previous iPhone product releases (as part of an ongoing program to overcome customer inertia which might reasonably see no need to keep upgrading), each company sculpts their messages around autobiography, self ‐ esteem, self ‐ realisation, enduring anxieties about appearance and conservative nuclear ‐ family / gendered identity categories. In this way, these companies offer (and profitably locate) the means for consumers to re ‐ imagine their place in the world while conveying conservative, hetero ‐ sexualised assumptions about the actual place of Apple’s and Microsoft’s target markets. With reference to commercials by Apple and Microsoft, this paper will explore the Janus ‐ faced personality of information ‐ cum ‐ internet technology advertising, a practice which simultaneously seeks to mediate and disarticulate pre ‐ technological forms of communication between people in favour of social relations grounded in digital forms of exchange

A policy of splendid isolation: Angus & Robertson, George G. Harrap and the politics of co-operation in the Australian book trade during the late 1930s

The tension between British and Australian publishers has long been a central property of antipodean print culture histories, particularly in relation to Angus and Robertson whom British publishers looked upon with some unease. John Barnes has argued that the "model of Australian creativity and originality unappreciated and resisted by London publishers has been generally accepted" but has demonstrated the utility of questioning this history. Similarly, though the archival record chronicles a certain amount of antagonism towards Angus and Robertson and that British publishers actively made the path of an Australian publisher more difficult through confirming agreements that froze out opposition, pre Second World War documents reveal a co-operative “axis” between the Australasian Publishing Co. (Sydney), Harrap and Co. (London) and Angus and Robertson (Sydney) whose collective aim was to “work closely in harmony but yet as distinct entities”. The Australian market might have been perceived to be the “special preserve” of some British publishers but in the late 1930s Harrap and Co. took a broader view that Angus and Robertson could be “used in an intelligent way as part of one huge machine whose object it is to increase the sale of books in the English language”. Conscious of how the book trade might react, Walter Harrap, in writing to Stanley Bartlett of the Australasian Publishing Co. about his London-based discussions with Angus and Robertson director George Ferguson, remarked that “a copy of this letter will be given to Mr Ferguson but it will not be seen by anyone and will be destroyed when he has read it”. Fortunately, traces of these discussions survive and thus this paper will examine Angus and Robertson’s negotiations within the “axis” and the broader politics confronting any Australian company which sought to become a publisher of consequence within early twentieth-century English speaking markets

Futurestext

During 1999, the world prepared for a millennium..

The millennium and judgement day

No abstract availabl