64 research outputs found
'A stalled revolution': what might it mean to be feminist in the 21st century? - Living Dolls by Walter
The value of books : the fantastic flying books of Mr. Morris Lessmore and the social hieroglyphic of reading
The late eighteenth century witnessed the emergence of new technologies of subjectivity and of the literary. Most obviously, âthe novel as a literary form appeared to embody and turn into an object the experience of life itselfâ (Park), and the novel genre came to both reflect and shape notions of interiority and subjectivity. In this same period, âA shift was taking place in the way people felt and thought about children and the accoutrements of childhood, including books and toys, were implicated in this changeâ (Lewis). In seeking to understand the relationships between media (e.g. books and toys), genres (e.g. novels and picture books), and modes of subjectivity, Marxâs influential theory of commodity fetishism, whereby âa definite social relation between men, that assumes, in their eyes, the fantastic form of a relation between thingsâ, has served as a productive tool of analysis. The extent to which Marxâs account of commodity fetishism continues to be of use becomes clear when the corollaries between the late eighteenth-century emergence of novels and pictures books as technologies of subjectivity and the early twenty-first century emergence of e-readers and digital texts as technologies of subjectivity are considered. This paper considers the literary technology of Appleâs iPad (first launched in 2010) as a commodity fetish, and the circulation of âappsâ as texts made available by and offered as justifications for, this fetish object. The iPad is both book and toy, but is never âonlyâ either; it is arguably a new technology of subjectivity which incorporates but also destabilises categories of reading and playing such as those made familiar by earlier technologies of literature and the self. The particular focus of this paper is on the multimodal versions (app, film, and picture book) of The Fantastic Flying Books of Mr. Morris Lessmore, which are understood here as a narrativisation of commodity fetishism, subjectivity, and the act of reading itself
Productive Anxieties: Lostness in The Arrival and Requiem for a Beast
The classic Australian childrenâs story Dot and the Kangaroo (1899) opens with a quintessential scene of lostness:
Little Dot had lost her way in the bush. She knew it, and was very frightened [...] she had pushed madly through the bushes, for hours, seeking her home. [...] The thought of being lost and alone in the wild bush at night took her breath away with fear, and made her tired little legs tremble under her.
(Pedley 1982, p. 1)
In part, Dotâs anxiety derives from her knowledge of children lost before her. She remembers the loss and death of a neighbour child whose mother ânever saw that little boy again, although he had been foundâ (Pedley, p. 2). The allusion to lostness as a state especially threatening to children informs Dotâs fear, so that Dot and the Kangaroo both draws on and extends what has been influentially described as a particularly âAustralian anxietyâ (Pierce 1999). The same landscape which gave rise to mythologies of frontier-like hardship and survival posed real threats to anyone who might become lost in it. Accordingly, the capacity of the Australian environment to consume people infused the cultural productions of a relatively young and sparsely populated colonial society
The art of interpretation: Tracing logics of evaluation in Shaun Tanâs The Lost Thing (2000) and Andrew Ruhemann and Shaun Tanâs The Lost Thing (2010)
Celebration (and the celebritisation) of the Australian-ness of childrenâs authors who enjoy critical or commercial international success, and especially of those who win international prizes speaks to a desire to partake in both national and international cultural spheres. Prizing is often presumed to both guarantee and emerge from a creator's reputation at home and abroad. Australian artist and writer Shaun Tan has received a wide array of cultural and literary prizes, ranging from Australian book awards, to an Academy Award, to the Astrid Lindgren Memorial Prize. This paper considers logics of evaluation and interpretation as they can be traced in the intratextual, intertextual, and extratextual codes of Shaun Tanâs picture book, The Lost Thing (2000), the animated film adaptation of The Lost Thing (2010). It further considers the ways in which the desire for a global audience may necessitate an erasure of the national culture which is traded on in a global market
Shakespearean Girlhoods in Contemporary Australian Young Adult Fiction
This paper reads a selection of contemporary Australian young adult novels in order to consider their depiction of the meaning and significance of Shakespeare in the formation of young womenâs subjectivity. In the competing tensions of patriarchal and postcolonial social values, these novels suggest that Australian girls may take up Shakespeare in order to further their emotional development and interpersonal relationships, or they may take up Shakespeare as an academic (âprofessionalâ) exercise. The careful delineations of personal and pedagogical uses for Shakespeare reflect wider cultural concerns about gender and culture in the Australian context.Cet article Ă©tudie un Ă©ventail de romans australiens destinĂ©s aux jeunes adultes afin dâanalyser ce que reprĂ©sente Shakespeare dans la formation de la subjectivitĂ© des jeunes femmes. Mettant en tension les valeurs sociales hĂ©ritĂ©es dâune sociĂ©tĂ© patriarcale postcoloniale, ces romans suggĂšrent que les jeunes Australiennes se tournent vers Shakespeare dans leur dĂ©veloppement Ă©motionnel et leurs relations interpersonnelles, ou bien lâabordent dans le cadre dâexercices universitaires (« professionnels »). La distinction entre utilisations personnelles et professionnelles de Shakespeare reflĂšte des enjeux culturels plus larges, liĂ©s notamment au genre, au sein du contexte australien
Enhancing mental health resilience and anticipating treatment provisions of mental health conditions for frontline Healthcare workers involved in caring for patients during the COVID-19 Pandemic - A call for action
The cradle of whose civilisation? : reading the Theseus myth in Riordanâs Percy Jackson and Ottleyâs Requiem for a Beast
This paper considers the functions of Greek mythology in general and the âTheseus and the Minotaurâ myth in particular in two contemporary texts of adolescent masculinity: Rick Riordanâs Percy Jackson series (2005-2009) and Matt Ottleyâs Requiem for a Beast: A Work for Image, Word and Music (2007). These texts reveal the ongoing flexibility of mythic texts to be pressed into service of shoring up or challenging currently hegemonic ideologies of self and state. Both Riordan and Ottley make a variety of intertextual uses of classical hero plots in order to facilitate their own narrative explorations of contemporary adolescent men âcoming of ageâ. These intertextual gestures might easily be read as gestures of alignment with narrative traditions and authority which simultaneously confer âlegitimacyâ on Riordan and Ottley, on their texts, and by extension, on their readers. However, when read in juxtaposition, it is clear that Riordan and Ottley may use classical mythology to articulate similarly gendered adolescence, they produce divergent visions of nationed adolescence
De-colonising Shakespeare?: agency and (masculine) authority in Gregory Rogers's the boy, the bear, the baron, the bard
Underlying social space are territories, lands,geographical domains, the actual geographical underpinnings of the imperial, and also the cultural contest. To think about distant places, to colonize them, to populate or depopulate them: all of this occurs on, about, or because of land. [âŠ] Imperialism and the culture associated with it affirm both the primacy of geography and an ideology about control of territory
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