Fostering honours and postgraduate participation in university research communities

This paper addresses a problem Kiley (2005) and others have noted is endemic to Australian universities. In 2007, we look the first small practical steps to address the difficult task of drawing honours and postgraduate students of literature into the research culture of their discipline. Our focus was a conference we organised and that took place in July 2007. We chose keynotes who are not only internationally pre-eminent in their fields of literary theory and criticism, but have also participated in the recent wars that have surrounded the teaching of literature in the universities. We wanted to offer our students the opportunity to be more than awestruck listeners at the feet of Great Men; we wanted them to be conference-ready so they would engage directly with the new research that would be presented; we wanted them to experience a level of intellectual excitement that might feed into their own work. To that end, we set up a number of formal and informal enabling structures that brought groups of students and staff together in ways that included an informal reading group, a formal honours course based on the keynotes’ work, and how-to-write-and present- a-paper workshops for postgraduates. All were geared to the conference and fed into it as they fostered students’ awareness that they belong to, indeed are essential to, an ongoing vital research community. Our next step is to encourage and facilitate others who might wish to adopt and adapt these strategies

Second death in Venice, cognitive mapping in the Venetian fictions of Jeanette Winterson, Ian McEwan, and Robert Coover

grantor: University of TorontoVenice has long been a privileged site for writers in English, but for much of this century, it seemed there was little left to say. Since 1980, however, there has been a marked return to Venice as a literary setting, and this thesis examines the material conditions-cultural, political, historical, and geographical-that are responsible for that return. It considers the creative interdependence of city and culture, and their intersection with Venetian topography in contemporary literature, specifically in Ian McEwan's ' The Comfort of Strangers', Jeanette Winterson's 'The Passion ', and Robert Coover's 'Pinocchio in Venice'. The new twentieth-century cities are being mapped and produced by contemporary writers of fiction like Angela Carter, Paul Auster, Bret Easton Ellis, and William Gibson, and theorists like Marshall Berman, Edward Soja, Elizabeth Grosz, and Christine Boyer, who are interpreting and making sense of our urban state of mind much as Baudelaire and Dickens, Mayhew and Engels, made sense of that of the nineteenth. Such mapping shapes the thinking in this thesis, and the new Venetian novels are unquestionably part of this same broad literary continuum, but at the same time they are situated, quite literally, elsewhere. While these texts are seen as a return of the repressed other of an earlier literary Venice and hence as driven by the compulsion to repeat, they are also (and perhaps more importantly) seen as moves toward a cognitive mapping of an as yet illegible, shifting, and bewildering landscape. McEwan, Winterson, and Coover discover in Venice a means of articulating a late-twentieth-century or the edge city of postmodernity, but from within the contained symbolic landscape of the medieval city/Renaissance urbs that is Venice. Through the reading and deconstruction of existing maps/writings/readings of a clearly articulated, legible city whose mythologized history can be traced back at least fifteen centuries and which has changed little topographically since the Renaissance, these writers map--and shape--an as yet uncharted late-twentieth-century mind shift.Ph.D

Teaching Fun Home to Instil Reading Resilience in First-Year Literature Students

In this chapter, the authors report on the trial and rollout of a two-year, cross-institutional, Australian government-funded research project called Reading Resilience: Developing a Skill-Based Approach to Reading in Higher Education