ECPS News and Events

Drama & Theatre Seminar Series: Michael Coe

6 October 2008

A Mad Scenography!

• Full details and schedule here

B for BAD Cinema Screenings: Mister Lonely

9 October 2008

Claire Perkins and Alexia Kannas present: Mister Lonely

(Harmony Korine, 2007, UK/France/Ireland/USA)

• Full details and series schedule here

DTS Performance Season: The Musical: The Musical

9-11 October 2008

Directed by Stuart Grant, Musical Direction by Matt Lockitt

Join us in a rollicking ride of riotous research, utilizing a flabbergasting panoply of stylistic, formal and performative devices from the history of musical theatre: from Opera Bouffe to Contemporary experimental off-Broadway, via Rodgers and Hammerstein, Bernstein, Sondheim, Fosse, Lloyd-Webber and beyond. A non-stop ensemble piece of singing, dancing, acting, fun scholarship.

• Full details and season programme here

Communications & Media Studies Seminar Series: Geoff Boucher

13 October 2008

After the Subversive Paradigm: Notes toward a Communicative Theory of Literary Discourse

In this paper, I propose that the currently dominant paradigm of literary inquiry – the subversive paradigm of, for instance, New Historicism and Cultural Materialism – is beginning to break up. This is because it originates as a subversive response to the project of state sponsorship of cultural development in the postwar era, and depends on a politics of interest that results in persistent normative deficits. But what sort of epistemology might respond today to cultural concerns raised by globalisation in a way that is able to reflexively justify its ethical stance? To respond, I turn to recent efforts to reconstruct the aesthetic theory of the second generation of the Frankfurt School, especially in the work of Habermas and Wellmer. In Habermas, aesthetics is marginalised by the predominance of theoretico-practical concerns, where the centrality of an argumentative model of communicative rationality sidelines the world-disclosing function of language. Additionally, an expressive conception of aesthetics implies that literary works make no discursive contribution to the public sphere. However, Pieter Duvenage and Lambert Zuidervaart have returned to the original Habermasian insight into the importance of the republic of letters for the public sphere. In the light of Wellmer’s criticisms of Habermas, they combine a theory of discursive language with a theory of world disclosure, to propose a reconstruction of communicative aesthetics. Yet Duvenage and Zuidervaart’s proposals do not amount to an interpretive methodology. Secondly, the promised link between aesthetics and ethics appears on the horizon of this project but remains unformulated within it. To rectify this gap I turn in the final section of the paper to explore the potential of Bakhtin’s dialogism for communicative aesthetics. I ask whether, once we take Wellmer’s reconstruction of speech act theory into account and we therefore reject Habermas’s strict separation between validity claims, a Bakhtinian approach cannot link together discursive language, world disclosure and engagement with the public sphere.

• Details and series program here

Film & Television Seminar Series: Craig Frost

October 16 2008

Re-gendering the Final Girl: Eli Roth's Hostel Films

Image: Clean Cut by Ora Pera

Described by Carol J. Clover as “abject terror personified”, the traditional Final Girl has long been a staple figure of the slasher sub-genre of the horror film. Providing audiences with both a narrative anchor and a point of identification, the virtuous Final Girl has been presented as the binary opposite of her murderous antagonist. In Hostel, writer/director Eli Roth inverts the gender of his ultimate survivor and through his Final Boy re-configures gender constructs and audience identification within the contemporary slasher-horror film.

In this paper I will address how Roth’s film reinvents genre conventions and forces audiences to shift not only their pre-existing knowledge of the genre, but also how they relate, react and judge the images presented on screen.

Craig Frost is a PhD candidate in Film and Television Studies at Monash University. He is currently researching the horror sub-genre of “Torture Porn” and its relation to notions of gender, the body, and images of torture in a post-911 cinematic landscape.

• Full details and series schedule here

DTS Performance Season: Mother Sex Doll

16 - 18 October

Directed by Naomi Edwards, Devised by Naomi Edwards and Second Year BPA Students

Façade — an outward appearance that is maintained to conceal a less pleasant or creditable reality… Mother Sex Doll is a visceral exploration of facade through the texts of Mother Courage and her Children, Summer of the Seventeenth Doll and Sex and The City, uncovering the facade we show the world, the ideals we reach for, the soul mate we dream of, and the mother we never had.

• Full details and season programme here

Collaborations: Creative Partnerships in Art and Writing

22 October 2008

ECPS is pleased to present a cross-disciplinary seminar on artistic and literary collaborations focused on the work of new Monash Fellow, Janine Burke. Dr Burke’s Being Geniuses Together: Artist Couples, Communities and Collaborations interrogates the notion of the lone (male) genius, replacing it with an examination of rich and fruitful interactions between individuals, the elective affinities that make artistic breakthroughs possible. The Collaborations seminar brings together papers which explore the subtle, complex, emotional connections on which such relationships depend, and sometimes founder.

• Full details and programme here

A Public Lecture by Claire Farago and Donald Preziosi

22 October 2008

Art’s Relation to the Commodity Form as a Central Problem of Modern Philosophy

The ability of art to heighten the individual’s feeling of its own cognitive powers and freedom raised art to the supreme philosophical problem in German Idealist thought. Marx made clear that although the commodity is defined by the independence or autonomy of exchange-value from use-value, this can never be complete since it is use that is ultimately exchanged, and if something ceased to be useable, it would also cease to be exchangeable. Therefore, as Stewart Martin has argued in his work on Adorno, an artwork’s affinity to a commodity doesn’t prevent it from contradicting capital, but rather enables it. Our presentation will take up the discussion from this point: Art is simultaneously produced and destroyed by capitalist culture. Martin recommends a refusal of commodification by a subversive mimesis of art. By contrast, we will suggest that the irreducibility of art to either absolute commodity or absolute autonomy demands attending to what it is that “art does” does. Only that which does not submit to the principle of heteronomy, i.e. the re-presentation of otherness or alterity (quid quo pro, the classical nature of the sign), has the potential to become free of domination.

• Full details here

DTS Performance Season: Widows

23 - 25 October

By Ariel Dorfman with Tony Kushner, Directed by Mark Constable

In this smoldering political allegory, the men have disappeared from a war-torn village. The women—their mothers, wives, daughters—wait by the river, hope and mourn. Their anguish is unspoken until bruised and broken bodies wash up on the banks and the women defy the military using the only form of protest left to them.

Ariel Dorfman is a Chilean citizen who was forced into exile after the September 11, 1973 coup brought down the democratically-elected government of President Salvador Allende. He is best known for his novels and for the screen adaptation of his play, Death and the Maiden.

• Full details and season programme here

Drama & Theatre Seminar Series: Finale

27 October 2008

End of semester discussion/meeting/drinks.

• Full details and schedule here

Stoning Mary

30 October to 1 November

By Debbie Tucker Green, Directed by Suzanne Chaundy

Melbourne Premiere

A husband and wife with AIDS can only afford one prescription.
A child soldier comes home.
Mary is going to be stoned.

What if this is happening here, in Melbourne? What if these people are white?

Debbie Tucker Green has been described as “one of the most assured and extraordinary new voices we’ve heard in a long while” (The Independent, UK). Stoning Mary was premiered at the Royal Court Theatre in April 2005. Disturbing, darkly funny, poetic and raw, this 3rd year production is the Melbourne premiere of an unforgettable contemporary work.

• Full details and season programme here

• Call for Papers: Colloquy Issue 17
  The submission deadline is November 15, 2008…

• Military Media Relations and the War in Afghanistan: The Australian Experience
  Saturday 22 November - This one day symposium, bringing together journalists who have reported from the front lines in Afghanistan, ADF PR personnel, academics and media commentators, will explore how, by whom, and with what effects the Australian military's current deployment has been reported…

• Distinguished American Musicologist Philip Bohlman Visits Monash
  December 2008 - …he will present the keynote address at the National Conference of the Musicological Society…

• Art and the Political
  Throughout 2008 - This is a series of six graduate seminars and two public lectures…

• Call for Papers: B for BAD cinema: aesthetics, politics and cultural value
  The Inaugural Centre for Film and Television Studies Conference, April 15–17, 2009…