Monash University English Podcast

Writers and Their World: Rosemary Cameron

Mon, 11 May 2009 13:00:03 +1000

11th May 2009

Literary festivals and the publishing industry: friends or foe?

Rosemary Cameron has been director of the Melbourne Writers Festival since November 2005. Before Melbourne, Rosemary directed the Brisbane Writers Festival for 3 years. For 2 years she was a judge of the Victorian Premier’s Literary Prize for Fiction and, when in Brisbane, she was a judge of One Book, Many Brisbanes for Brisbane City Council & on the selection panel for the John Oxley Fellowship at the State Library of QLD. Before being involved in literary festivals Rosemary worked mostly in performing arts management in Sydney, Brisbane and London. This included working for The Queensland Conservatorium Griffith University, Stage X Festival at QPAC, English National Opera & the Royal Opera House Covent Garden, Marrickville Festival, Oslo Early Music Festival, Performing Lines and the Australian Elizabethan Theatre Trust. She currently lives in Glen Iris with her two sons, George (15) and Daniel (12).

Vampires Conference: Narelle Harris

Sat, 20 Sep 2008 16:00:27 +1000

20th September 2008

Panel Discussion

An open discussion, with Narelle Harris, author of vampire novel set in Melbourne, The Opposite of Life; Laura Jane Maher; and Odette Kelada.

Vampires Conference: Rebecca Do Rozario

Sat, 20 Sep 2008 15:30:59 +1000

Undead Romance Writers

This paper examines the embedding of vampire romance writers in Tanya Huff’s ‘blood noun’¹ and Katie McAlister’s Dark Ones series. The use of a vampire as a first person narrator in Anne Rice’s work helped establish a new trend of construction of the sympathetic vampire, but whether as first person narrators or characters in someone else’s first person narration, today’s vampire romance writer serves not to create a sense of empathy with the reader by ostensibly writing the book in their hands, but to actually construct the reader as a particular consumer of vampire romance. This reader, engaged in negotiating believability or suspension of disbelief necessary to their position, remains conscious of the female author of the novel, but is also lead down the garden path by the potential metafictional, male vampire romance writer. The paper will discuss the gendered implications of the reader’s position and the metafictional inflections inherent in constructing undead romance writers.

Dr. Rebecca-Anne C. Do Rozario lectures in children’s and fantasy literature at Monash University. She has published in journals such as Women’s Studies in Communication, theatre journal and Children’s Literature Studies.

¹ The informal title for the series used by the publishers.

Vampires Conference: Michelle De Stefani

Sat, 20 Sep 2008 14:30:04 +1000

20th September 2008

The Mother is a Vamp: explorations into the Mommy-lit faction of Paranormal Romance

What do you get if you cross a working-class, forty-something-year-old single mother with a blood-sucking vampire? A whole lot, in fact. The ‘Mommy-lit’ hybrid of Vampire Romance fiction provides a novel platform for discussions of female subjectivity, constructions of motherhood and paranormal twists on the notion of the ‘traditional family’. This paper engages predominately with Michele Bardsley’s Broken Heart series as an inlet into social and psychoanalytic critique of this emerging trend in contemporary romance fiction. It is observed that Vampire Mommy-lit functions as a discourse of patriarchal resistance by embracing the mother-daughter plot as essential female experience, thereby relegating the female’s dependence on males and children to the periphery. The gothic fantasy of ‘the Mother as Vampire’ serves as an inlet back to preoedipal experience, providing a subversion of existing mother-archetypes and new representations of mothering.

Michelle De Stefani is a Bachelor of Arts (Honours) graduate in the Department of English and is currently completing a Bachelor of Laws at Monash University. Her research interests include Children’s literature and childhood studies, Victorian Literature, popular and visual culture.

Vampires Conference: Deb Watson

Sat, 20 Sep 2008 14:00:15 +1000

20th September 2008

Consuming Passions: Vampires, Hunger and Sexuality

The figure of the praying mantis, the monstrously sexual female who consumes her male mate at the height of the mating ritual, has underpinned constructions of female sexuality for centuries. Related to this has been a male fear of female consumption that implicitly links the act of eating to the sexually devouring woman. Susan Bordo demonstrates how the resultant repression and ideological control of female hunger promotes disordered a body image and leads to eating disorders such as anorexia nervosa and bulimia. The vampiric drinking of blood, particularly by the female, has traditionally been rendered highly sexual, and although her victim is not necessarily male, the female vampire’s eating is a form of literal, sexualised consumption, reproducing the figure of the hungering, desiring woman as sexually voracious man-eater.

I will also consider the representations of female hunger and sexuality in the Buffy the Vampire Slayer television series, Keri Arthur’s “Riley Jensen” novels and Gerry Bartlett’s Real Vampires series, and demonstrate that Buffy and Riley Jensen perpetuate anxieties about female desire, and undermine the empowering narratives they offer. Arthur’s series also portrays a female sexuality which is always consenting to sex and thus contributes to the rape myths which prevent victims from obtaining convictions in court.
By contrast, Bartlett’s series grapples body image issues head-on and in fact undermines some of the anxieties about weight which lead to eating disorders and avoids portraying a monstrous female sexuality. Thus it is Bartlett’s heroine, the insecure vampire who overcomes her fears to save the day who ultimately offers the most positive narrative.

Deb Watson is working on her PhD on football culture and sexual assault at Monash University. She recently published in The Australian Feminist Law Journal and presented a paper on the male footballer’s body at Cardiff University.

Vampires Conference: Melanie Burns

Sat, 20 Sep 2008 13:30:14 +1000

20th September 2008

Possessing and Consuming Desire: Vampire as Metaphor

Traditionally a taboo topic, sexuality is surrounded with euphemisms. Mainstream romance novels are rife with metaphorical references to the sexual act which may act as a powerful conduit of ideological impact, structuring reality in certain ways and making it difficult to view the world in other ways (Fairclough, 1992: 195, 208). For example, George Lakoff (1987: 409-412) notes that metaphorical categories of lust - lust is a game, lust is hunger, a lustful person is an animal - overlap with those of anger, leading him to suggest that “sex and violence may be linked in the mind via these metaphors” (p. 412). In a similar manner, vampirism and sexuality evoke common metaphors: consumption, possession, compulsion and so on. Comparing vampire literature with more mainstream romantic fiction, I will argue that the two genres both use similar metaphorical constructions of sexuality, most notably ‘sex as possession’ and ‘sex as joining’. Indeed, the use of the paranormal as a narrative device may itself be viewed as a metaphor for human desire. The impact of such linguistic structuring is discussed with reference to dominance/submission, activity/reactivity, and female agency, and the potential effect on broader constructions of sexuality is broached.

Melanie Burns (BLitt (Hons), BBNSc) is a PhD candidate in the Linguistics program at Monash University. Her research interests include taboo, offensive language and swearing, gender and language, discourse analysis, the psychology of language, and the language of the media. Her doctoral research centres on the discursive construction of sexuality in media texts.

Vampires Conference: Odette Kelada

Sat, 20 Sep 2008 11:45:22 +1000

20th September 2008

Carmilla: corporeal integrity and reviving romantic bodies

This paper discusses the iconic lesbian vampire story of Carmilla, written in 1872 and explores how a positive reading of the text as paranormal romance may render it both an empowering and subversive queer romance narrative. While vampire mythology may be portrayed as horror, there is often a strong romantic narrative running in tandem with the terror. In classic gothic literature, the romance is often struck moreover between the romantic heroine and the 'monster'. This close positioning of the horror narrative and the romance narrative in the myth creates a provocative tension where the erotic potential of abject love and demonic seduction, gives voice to a generative and liberating space of desire and resistance. While in Carmilla, such potential may ultimately be contained in traditional frameworks, the reading of Carmilla as a ‘love story’, indicates the potency of reviving the romantic in subjugated bodies and transgressive sexualities.

Odette Kelada has completed a PhD from Charles Sturt University on Australian women writers. She is currently working at Monash University as a Research Associate for Prof. Rachel Fensham on a three-year ARC Discovery grant project on ‘Transnational and cross-cultural choreographies’. She also teaches in various literature subjects at Monash and has taught and guest lectured in politics at Melbourne University. Her areas of interest include feminism, post-colonial theory, literature, critical whiteness studies and cultural history.

Vampires Conference: Sian Mitchell

Sat, 20 Sep 2008 11:30:22 +1000

20th September 2008

“I think the thrall has gone out of our relationship”: Buffy and Dracula - a parodic adventure in romance

The first episode of season 5 Buffy the Vampire Slayer the television series sees Buffy come up against arguably the most famous vampire in the literary and cultural world, Dracula. The relationship formed between the ‘The Chosen One’ and ‘Prince of Darkness’ is an exercise in parody, a meeting between modern literature and post-modern television, a comment on the past and present through the romance and rejection of these two characters. Using the definition of romance as the ‘lure of the quest’ (Sorenson, 2004) this paper analyses the relationship between Buffy and Dracula as a rewriting of the modern romance associated with the literary version of the vampire through the post-modern lens of television and parody. Through the analysis of key scenes, I will argue that this episode turns Bram Stoker’s story on its head, undermining the seduction and preternatural masculinity that Dracula offers (to all the Scooby Gang, not just Buffy!), through the sardonic wit that has become associated with Buffy the series. Their relationship not only leads Buffy to question her own existence as a slayer (a criticism repeatedly aimed at this particular episode), but also subverts, and at times confuses, gender roles, a convention commonly linked with the post-modern romance. More broadly, associated erotic relationships within the episode, such as that between Dracula and Xander, will also be approached to further elucidate the post-modern nature of this episode with regard to romance.

Sian Mitchell is a PhD candidate in Film and Television Studies at Monash University. Her thesis is entitled “Human Nature: Psychoanalysis, Identity, and Cinema in the films of Charlie Kaufman, Spike Jonze and Michel Gondry.”

Vampires Conference: Patrick Spedding

Sat, 20 Sep 2008 10:00:03 +1000

20th September 2008

Dracula (1979) as Paranormal Romance

John Badham's Dracula (1979) has been described as a very romantic interpretation of the Bram Stoker's story, even the first Romantic interpretation of Dracula on screen. Frank Langella, who plays the eponymous hero, maintained that the defining feature of his Dracula was his refusal to be filmed biting necks and drinking blood. He wouldn't wear fangs, tattered funereal garb, pale face makeup, or contact lenses that changed the appearance of his eyes: he wanted to appear on screen as the impeccably-dressed lover of his victims, not their haggard destroyer. But there is more to a romantic narrative, especially a Paranormal Romance, than an impeccable smile and a clear shirt-front; and though the studio, director and writer of this film were sympathetic to Langella's "vision", each had different ideas about how to realize it on film.

This paper will examine the main romance elements of Badham's Dracula, comparing them to typical elements in Paranormal Romance fiction, to assess whether the film succeeds a romance narrative or a horror story with a romantic sub-plot.

Patrick Spedding is the author of A Bibliography of Eliza Haywood (2004) and the editor of Script & Print. He is an ARC-funded Research Fellow in the Daprtment of English at Monash University. His research project is an examination of the production and distribution of erotica in England in the eighteenth-century.

Vampires Conference: Phillippe Met

Fri, 19 Sep 2008 15:00:39 +1000

19th September 2008

A Discussion of Horror Films with Philippe Met

Adrian Martin chairs a talk and discussion with Philippe Met about horror film. Group discussion not included in this recording, just the talk.

Vampires Conference: Adrian Martin

Fri, 19 Sep 2008 13:30:14 +1000

19th September 2008

Playing Vampire Cool: The Strange Postmodern Romances of Michael Almereyda’s Nadja (1994) and Abel Ferrara’s The Addiction (1995)

Since at least the 1950s, popular culture has deployed various figures, types and tropes of the supernatural or fantastique – aliens, zombies, ghosts, vampires, body-snatchers, etc – as metaphors for common human and political problems: alienation, non-communication, social exclusion, and so on. From the 1980s, and the popular spread of postmodern cultural sensibilities, this metaphoric work on the supernatural (whether conscious or unconscious, latent or manifest) takes a highly ‘second degree’, self-conscious, and frequently comic (or camp), turn. Nadja and The Addiction, two important, ingeniously stylised films of the mid ‘90s by key figures of American independent cinema, re-introduce a definite seriousness into this cultural discussion. Vampiric romance comes to mean many things in these films: on the one hand, for Almereyda, a metaphor for ‘Generation X’ lifestyles and interpersonal relationships; for Ferrara, a vehicle to channel the unspeakable horrors of the 20th century. I want to look at the ambience of ‘vampire cool’ in these grandly self-conscious but deadly earnest movies, and in particular at how this is ‘played’ or performed by the actors, including Christopher Walken, Elina Lowensöhn and Lili Taylor. The talk will be illustrated by several film clips.

Dr. Adrian Martin is Senior Research Fellow in Film and Television Studies, Monash University. He is the author of Phantasms (Penguin 1994), Once Upon a Time in America (British Film Institute 1997), The Mad Max Movies (Currency 2003), Raúl Ruiz: sublimes obsesiones (Altamira 2004) and ¿Que es el cine moderno? (Uqbar 2008), and Co-Editor of Movie Mutations (BFI 2003) and the on-line film journal Rouge (www.rouge.com.au).

Vampires Conference: Kirsten Stevens

Fri, 19 Sep 2008 12:00:16 +1000

19th September 2008

Conformity through transgression: An examination of the proliferation of vampires within online cultures

From its long forgotten origins in the folklore of Eastern Europe, the Vampire has been held as something to be feared, something existing beyond the limits of the social system. A monster, hiding in the dark, it disturbs and transgresses the boundaries of social order, existing, as Veronica Hollinger suggests, as “the monster that used to be human… the undead that used to be alive; it is the monster that looks like us.”(1997: 201) Breaking the boundaries which so define western conceptions of the self and the body, notions of the human and of inevitable mortality; the vampire is a creature who in its very nature exits at the limit. In his book Neo-Baroque, Omar Calabrese investigates further those aspects which disturb and destroy the boundaries of a social system, in particular those resulting in eccentricity and excess. Associated with those values that Calabrese finds most de-stabilising, concepts of sex, violence and the monster, the Vampire is permanently located at and beyond the limit of the socially acceptable.

In light of this, it is then interesting that the vampire has more recently been integrated into the very heart of social ritual and community. This phenomenon has most visibly taken place in the setting of online communities, and most recently in the case of the Facebook online network. This paper addresses how members of online communities utilise this transgressive creature to entrench themselves within a social network and the irony implicit in this. It will take as a case study the Facebook online community and its Vampire and Slayer applications, where members are encouraged to fulfil the common folkloric tale of the Vampire reeking havoc on their friends and in the neighbourhoods they inhabited in life. I will also investigate how the very nature of the online identity can be seen to reflect notions of the Vampire, in particular theories of shape-shifting, gender play and the performance of sexuality.

Kirsten Stevens is a first year PhD student at Monash University, studying in the Department of Film and Television studies. She is currently researching the Public exhibition of Alternative cinema within the recent Australian context, following completing her Honours Thesis on Apocalyptic themes and imagery within contemporary culture.

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Vampires Conference: Virginia Keft-Kennedy

Fri, 19 Sep 2008 11:30:26 +1000

19th September 2008

Fantasising Masculinity in Buffyverse Slash Fiction: Sexuality, Violence, and the Vampire

The phenomenon of homoerotic fiction known as 'slash' is a form of fan-generated erotic literature which centres on the relationship between two or more same sex characters appropriated from the realm of popular television. This paper concentrates specifically on the slash fictions derived from Joss Whedon's cult television series Buffy the Vampire Slayer and its spin-off Angel. In particular, it explores the ways in which the authors of "Buffyverse" slash discursively conceptualise masculinity, male desire, and sexuality. My chief concern here is to examine how masculinity is constructed and constituted at a textual level through the trope of the vampiric. In doing so, I address the complex issues surrounding the ways in which writers of slash convey the figure of the vampire through the lenses of romance, sexual violence, and homosocial bonding in the representation of
the television series two vampire protagonists, Angel and Spike.

Virginia Keft-Kennedy holds a PhD from the University of Wollongong, NSW Australia. Her research focuses on the representation of gender and sexuality in popular culture with a particular emphasis on the dancing body. Virginia recently published her article “‘How does she do that?’ Belly Dancing and the Horror of a Flexible Woman” in Women’s Studies (Vol 34, No.3-4, 2005: 279-300). Her other research interests include the intersections between gender and race in literature, theories of the grotesque, queer theory and sexuality studies, popular culture and television studies, and vampire studies.

Vampires Conference: Laura Jane Maher

Fri, 19 Sep 2008 11:00:40 +1000

19th September 2008

Having it both ways: the queering of heteronormative romance

The simultaneous desire for and repugnance with Otherness serves to inform its status as erotic. Within the realm of supernatural fictions, Vampires encapsulate this heightened sexualisation by traversing the dangerous in-betweens of twilight and dawn, the undead and the demonic-human. The Vampire character provides a human reader with an identifiable and containable image of desire corporealised. However in doing so these characters actively defy the conventions of heteronormativity by flouting the social constructs relating to gender as power and role descriptive.

In this paper I will address the means by which vampire romances catering to a young adult readership interrogate the morality of queered sexuality and contrast this with adult romances which provide a queered space for erotic motif to develop without the need for ethical interrogation of sexuality within the narrative.

Laura-Jane Maher is an Honours student with the School of English, Communication and Performance Studies at Monash University, having graduated from a combined bachelors’ degree in Law and Performing Arts in 2006. Her current research focuses on the story telling process within the legal system, both the stories told within the legal system and the means by which narrative tradition underwrites legal structure. She has previously presented “Passionate Trousers: An exploration of erotic motif and sexual pedagogy in the Harry Potter novels” (2007) and is beginning to see a theme here…

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Vampires Conference: Lenise Prater

Fri, 19 Sep 2008 10:00:26 +1000

19th September 2008

He is a Monster: Masculinity, Animalism and the Gendering of Power in Paranormal Romance

In my paper I contend that the genre of paranormal romance can provide new and more equitable narrations of sex and gender, but that this is rarely the case. The ‘self-evident’ (and self-perpetuating) construction of men as stronger than women justifies problematic power relations in most romance novels. Indeed, many feminist scholars such as Winifred Woodhull and Sharon Marcus have noted that the normalisation of sexual and domestic violence is due, in part, to the attribution of power to men and powerlessness to women. In paranormal romance, where vampires, werewolves, shape shifters and witches abound, common-sense understandings of men’s and women’s bodies can be undermined. Unfortunately, paranormal romance authors often create myths or pairings where the heroes are more monstrous and powerful than the heroines. Women in these novels are not correspondingly monstrous or animalistic; they are, for example, far more likely to be virgins and less likely to attack the hero. In order to articulate my arguments, I will examine two paranormal romance series in depth. The Immortals After Dark series by Kresley Cole exemplifies the problems associated with the paranormal romance genre. I will contrast this with the Black Dagger Brotherhood series by J.R. Ward that provides a framework in which men are at least held responsible for their misuse of power and demonstrates how paranormal romance can undermine anti-feminist constructions of gender and sexuality.

Lenise Prater BA (Hons) is currently writing her PhD in literature on the torture memoirs produced in the ‘war on terror’. Her honours project was a feminist account of the romance ‘subgenre’ of ‘romantic suspense’. She also spoke at the After Harry symposium about the construction of romance in the Harry Potter series.

Poetry and the Trace: Some readings

Mon, 14 Jul 2008 18:30:58 +1000

14 July 2008

A series of readings from the Poetry and the Trace conference at the State Library in Melbourne. The speakers are:

Lionel Fogarty

A deeply political poet, Lionel Fogarty is a leading spokesman for indigenous rights in Australia. Fogarty writes an innovative, passionate poetry, transforming the language and forms of Europe to resist its colonising force and, in the process, generates new connections between the Australian land, its people, and modern life. His books include Dha’gun Jabree Djan Mitti: The More Complete Works of Lionel Fogarty (Salt Publishing, 2008), New and Selected Poems: Munaldjali, Mutuerjaraera (Hyland House, 1995), Booyooburra: A Story of the Wakka Murri (Hyland House, 1993), Ngutji (Cheryl Buchanan, 1984), Yoogum Yoogum (Penguin, 1982), and Kargun (Cheryl Buchanan, 1980)

Rachel Blau DuPlessis

Rachel Blau DuPlessis is a Professor of English at Temple University and author of Blue Studios: Poetry and Its Cultural Work and the now reprinted landmark collection, The Pink Guitar: Writing as Feminist Practice (both by U of Alabama P, 2006). DuPlessis is also the author of Genders, Races, and Religious Cultures in Modern American Poetry, 1908-1934 (Cambridge University Press, 2001), Writing Beyond the Ending: Narrative Strategies of Twentieth-Century Women Writers (1985), H.D.: The Career of that Struggle (1986), both from Indiana University Press, and The Pink Guitar: Writing as Feminist Practice (Routledge, 1990). She is the editor of The Selected Letters of George Oppen (Duke University Press, 1990), and the co-editor with Peter Quartermain of The Objectivist Nexus: Essays in Cultural Poetics (University of Alabama Press, 1999). The Feminist Memoir Project: Voices from Women’s Liberation, co-edited with Ann Snitow, was published by Three Rivers/Crown in 1998; it will be reprinted by Rutgers University Press in 2007. She is also the co-editor with Susan Stanford Friedman, of Signets: Reading H.D. (University of Wisconsin Press, 1990). Her recent books of poetry are Drafts 1-38, Toll (Wesleyan University Press, 2001) and DRAFTS. Drafts 39-57, Pledge with Draft, Unnumbered: Précis (Salt Publishing, 2004). Torques: Drafts 58-76 is forthcoming. An interview of DuPlessis conducted by Jeanne Heuving appears in Contemporary Literature (2004).

Wystan Curnow

Wystan Curnow’s latest book of poetry is Modern Colours (Auckland, Jackbooks, 2005). His poetry has appeared recently in Jacket, Landfall, London Review of Books, Green Integer Review, and Critiphoria. He co-edits Reading Room, A Journal of Art and Culture, and co-directs Jar, a project art space in Kingsland, Auckland. Dr Curnow is a Professor of English at the University of Auckland, where he teaches modern and contemporary poetry and creative writing. He has published on the work of poets such as Ron Silliman, Lyn Hejinian and Charles Bernstein and artists who work with language. Curnow has authored, or co-authored, monographs on a number of artists including Imants Tillers, Stephen Bambury, and Max Gimblett ,and has curated survey exhibitions of work by Colin McCahon and Billy Apple.

Susan Stewart

Susan Stewart is the author of five books of poems, including The Forest, Columbarium, which won the 2003 National Book Critics Circle Award, and the forthcoming Red Rover. Her many prose works include Poetry and the Fate of the Senses, which won both the Christian Gauss and Truman Capote prizes for literary criticism, and The Open Studio: Essays on Art and Aesthetics, a collection of her work on visual art. Recently she co-edited TriQuarterly 127: Contemporary Italian Poetry and her translation of the selected poems of Alda Merini will appear in 2008. The Annan Professor of English at Princeton University, she is a former MacArthur fellow, a current Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets, and a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

The Centre for Postcolonial Writing Presents Professor Harish Trivedi

Tue, 17 Jun 2008 18:30:29 +1000

17 June 2008 - The Centre for Postcolonial Writing Presents:

An Alternative Postcolonial: Language, Location and Culture

Followed by a discussion with Bill Ashcroft, Bruce Bennett, Lynette Russell and Paul Sharrad (Participating Chair)

Harish Trivedi is Professor of English at the University of Delhi. A former Vice-Chair of the International Association for Commonwealth Literature and Language Studies, Prof Trivedi presently holds the position of Vice–President of the Comparative Literature Association of India. He is also co-ordinating the international project in writing a History of World Literature.

Prof Trivedi is the acclaimed author of Colonial Transactions: English Literature and India (Manchester University Press). His co-authored books include Post-colonial Translation: Theory and Practice (Routledge), Literature& Nation: Britain and India 1800-1990 (Routledge), and Interrogating Post-Colonialism: Theory, Text and Context. Prof Trivedi is currently working on two monographs: Translation in India: India in Translation and Anthology of Indian Literature in English Translation from 1500 B.C. to 2000 A.D.

Note: This recording does not include the panel session afterwards, only Professor Trivedi's paper. A DVD of the entire evenening's proceedings may be made available from the Centre.

To download, right-click (or control-click) one of the download links and choose “Save” or “Download Link”, or subscribe to the podcast with the link below.

A Discussion of Fairytales - Little Red Riding Hood

Mon, 16 Jun 2008 10:56:23 +1000

This is the final podcast series of the inaugural semester of ENH2360/3360 Fairy Tale Traditions. Previous podcasts have been student-access only. Information on the unit is available at at this link. For this podcast, the unit coordinator, Dr Rebecca-Anne Do Rozario, and tutor, Dr Odette Kelada, are joined by a number of students from the first cohort, 2008. The podcast is broken up into four episodes, each dealing with a separate fairy tale. The views recorded are those of the speakers.

Episode 3: Little Red Riding Hood

Joined by: Naja and Aaron.

In this segment, we’re examining the darker undertones of the ever-popular tale of a girl in a red hood and a big, bad wolf.

Please note that themes of sexuality and violence are discussed in the podcast. Some of these themes may not be suitable for younger listeners.

A Discussion of Fairytales - Goldilocks and the Three Bears

Mon, 16 Jun 2008 10:56:23 +1000

Episode 3: Goldilocks and the Three Bears

Joined by: Gabriel and Matthew.

In this segment, were looking at Southeys tale and todays retellings, including Jasper Ffordes The Fourth Bear.

Please note that themes of sexuality and violence are discussed in the podcast. Some of these themes may not be suitable for younger listeners.

A Discussion of Fairytales - Beauty and the Beast

Mon, 16 Jun 2008 09:55:23 +1000

Episode 2: Beauty and the Beast

Joined by: Sara and Shirlaine

In this segment, were focusing on the romance myth as exemplified by Beauty and the Beast.

Please note that themes of sexuality and violence are discussed in the podcast. Some of these themes may not be suitable for younger listeners.

A Discussion of Fairytales - Stardust

Mon, 16 Jun 2008 08:54:23 +1000

Episode 1: Stardust & Introduction

Joined by: Isabel, Sophie, Dan and Peter.

In this segment, were focusing on the question of what constitutes a fairy tale. Is Neil Gaimans novel, Stardust, an actual fairy tale? And what is the difference between a fairy tale for adults and a fairy tale for children or is there a difference?

Please note that themes of sexuality and violence are discussed in the podcast. Some of these themes may not be suitable for younger listeners.

A Postgraduate Seminar with Professor Harish Trivedi

Wed, 11 Jun 2008 10:00:22 +1000

11 June 2008

Postcolonial Translation: A History and Some Issues

Harish Trivedi is Professor of English at the University of Delhi, and has been visiting professor at the University of London and the University of Chicago. He is the acclaimed author of Colonial Transactions: English Literature and India. His co-edited books include Postcolonial Translation: Theory and Practice; Literature and Nation: Britain and India 1800-1990; Interrogating Post-Colonialism: Theory, Text and Context; The Nation across the World: Postcolonial Literary Representations; Tess of the d’Urbervilles; Heritage of English. Professor Trivedi is Chair of the Indian Association for Commonwealth Literature and Language Studies (IACLALS), and also Vice–President of the Comparative Literature Association of India. Professor Trivedi is the Distinguished Resident Scholar of Centre for Postcolonial Writing from 10-20 June 2008.

Recommended Readings: Postcolonial Translation: Theory and Practice, edited by Susan Bassnett and Harish Trivedi

To download, right-click (or control-click) one of the download links and choose "Save" or "Download Link", or subscribe to the podcast with the link below.

Writers and Their World: Adib Khan

Fri, 16 May 2008 10:00:54 +1000

16 May 2008

The Business of Creativity: the Tension between Aesthetics and Commerce in Serious Fiction

Adib Khan

A presentation for staff and postgraduates.

Adib Khan is the author of five novels. His first novel, Seasonal Adjustments won the Christina Stead Prize for fiction and the Book of the Year in the 1994 New South Wales Premier’s Prize, and won the 1995 Commonwealth Writers’ Prize for First Book. His second novel, Solitude of Illusions was shortlisted for the Christina Stead Prize for fiction and the Ethnic Commission Award in the 1997 New South Wales Premier’s Prize, and won the 1997 Tilly Aston Braille Book of the Year Award. His other novels are The Storyteller and Homecoming. His latest work Spiral Road was listed among the twenty books for the 2008 State Library of Victoria’s summer reading program. Currently, Adib is a PhD (Creative Writing) Scholar, Centre for Postcolonial Writing.