Alexander Agassiz, 1835-1910

Biography with photograp

The Postmodern Classroom: Inhabiting the \u27Extra-territorial\u27 Space

The author discusses the term \u27extraterritoriality\u27 and the implications this has on the postmodern classroo

To Thrash the Offending Adam Out of Them: The Theology of Violence in the Writings of Great War Anzacs

The Anzac legend is often acclaimed as Australia’s unifying secular faith. However, there are significant connections between Christianity and Anzac. While the responses of the churches at home during the Great War have been well studied, this chapter examines the variety of the responses of Christian soldiers and chaplains at the front. In this context, this study engages Girard’s theory of sacralised violence as a framework for defining and critiquing religious responses to the war of fighting men. Was the war a crusade, a civilising mission, a just war, a necessary evil or something other

The \u27Poetics\u27 of Borders in Amitav Ghosh\u27s Sea of Poppies

Sea of Poppies enables an exploration of the notion of national and communal boundaries. It invites a reframing of boundaries, transgressing local and geographical lines, and pointing instead to a more globalised sense of place and self. What Sea of Poppies encourages is an interrogation of the presumed purity or sanctity of a nation’s borders. It celebrates the ruptures and breaches of the modern self in transition, negotiating for itself more fluid, intersecting and plural identities as it is forced to meet and overcome the challenges of new physical and psychological terrains. The novel’s interest is in the ways in which we are subjected by historical and social forces to participate and perform within restrictive and oppressive frameworks, and it asks how and why we succumb to such forces in as much as how and why we should break through those forces

The Search for Doma (Home) in Richard Flanagan\u27s \u27The Sound of One Hand Clapping\u27

Book summary from publisher\u27s website: This is the fourth volume in the series of Australian–Asian Association publications and carries on the interdisciplinary and international tradition of the same. The intensely provocative theme of ‘change’ is traced through motifs of convergence or conflict across a multiplicity of disciplines. The volume has attracted contributions from some of the best-known authorities in their different fields. The papers cover subjects ranging from Sri Lankan cricket to diplomacy on the world scene; from literary ‘blogging’ to trade performance; from Bollywood audiences to aboriginal rights in Australia and the development of Australian studies in Spain; from a nineteenth-century Shakespeare production in Sri Lanka to a performance of Bizet’s ‘The Pearl Fishers’ in Sydney. They cover the phenomenon of change as it manifests itself in a range of disciplines and highlight shared commonalities as well as contrasted experiences and perspectives. The book is a record of the richness of the dialogue between disparate groups connected by scholarly interest and intellectual curiosity, in fact, a global academic community

Spirituality and the Borderlands

The fluidity of borders calls for a re-thinking of new ways of articulating and experiencing community. How can we break the boundaries of closed worlds to open new vistas of understanding so as to experience spirituality through community without the old prejudices of race, caste and religion? How can cosmopolitan communities provide a new model of spirituality that defies the boundaries of class and caste

Introduction: Making Sense of Pain

Given that making sense of pain will continue to accrue progressive controversies as much as qualified consensus, we are indebted to those who over time have added to our understanding of pain. One of the clear strands that emerged from this conference was the need to collaboratively address the limitations of a clinical view of pain. The dialogue throughout this conference merged on the biopsychosocial terrain of the human persona: the emotional, social and psychological framing of the human personality. This conference proceeding provide an attempt to extend the conversation on pain, notwithstanding that the boundaries of the word pain are characteristically blurred by connotations of suffering and trauma. The variety of papers in this collection transgress these boundaries knowingly, inviting a more expansive rather than narrow definition of pain

“What in Me is Dark/ Illumine”(PL 1:22-23): The “Other” Body of Samson Agonistes

At the heart of Samson Agonistes lies a constellation of losses that cannot be overcome by any virtue that critics may accrue for Samson\u27s \u27heroic\u27 end. I wish to investigate the nature and significance of these losses to demonstrate how the text collapses, builds and overextends itself, and in so doing, anticipates its Other: a new paradigm of “peace and consolation” (\u27SA’ 1757). What can we make of the wilful death of a colossal giant like Samson, whose image tutored, crafted and developed through concepts of \u27consecrated\u27 violence, ends his life embroiled in the spoils of his own carnage? Accepting that the grand close of the Samson drama lies in the force of its narrative imagery, which powerfully depicts for us the colluding of two ideologically opposed worlds we must ask, what have we missed here?! What is the ideological breach/excess scripted in Samson\u27s mutilated frame? How can the text be retrieved to \u27illuminate\u27 for us the trajectories of our dark histories? How can the text lead us to the pregnant Silence, the Stillness encrypted in the in-between spaces of the text‟s framing, to enable, encourage and facilitate a purposeful and energetic \u27pursuit of global religious accord\u27

The Second Skin : a Critique of Violence. The Search for Scapegoats in the Fiction of K.S. Maniam

The explosions of violence around the world in the last half-century call for several and ongoing reassessments of the character and psychology of violence. Of particular interest today are the growing accounts of sacralised violence, the performative nature of violence and the misunderstanding that sanctioned violence provides us with immunity from the perils of violence we create and project upon each other. The search for scapegoats in our modern times points to the mysterious nature of intersecting desires and rivalries which ironically protect the performers of violence from the insidiousness of the own actions. By appropriating the lens that Girard\u27s theory of scapegoating enables, author Jane Fernandez-Goldborough traces the screens behind which violence is performed in the selected works of K.S. Maniam, so as to provide a literary expose on the secret rivalries that sustain the human predilection for violence