Dr Paul Atkinson
Lecturer
| Phone: | +61 3 990 26385 or +61 3 512 26385 |
| Fax: | +61 3 990 26359 or +61 3 512 26359 |
| Office: | 2W 280, Gippsland Campus |
| Email: | paul.atkinson@monash.edu |
Biography
Dr Paul Atkinson joined SAMSS in 2005 and teaches in the Communications and Writing program. He has lectured and researched in a wide range of areas including critical theory, media studies, cinema studies, visual aesthetics, gender studies, French philosophy and comic book culture.
Classes taught by Paul include:
- Contemporary Fiction
- Authorship and Writing
- Introduction to Communication Studies
- Research Methods
- Popular Writing and Criticism
Research interests
Paul's research follows two main lines:
- The relationship between materiality and corporeality in Henri Bergson’s writings on science, with particular emphasis on the relationship between immanent change and extended movement;
- Time and visual narration in comics books, painting and film.
Publications
Published articles explore a range of topics including Bergson’s vitalism, cinema and foreseeability, time and recognition, the durational limits of affect, futurism, 9/11 comics and the implied movement in still images. The latter involves the analysis of the structural properties of comic books and graphic novels. He is currently working on a series of articles that explore the relationship between processual theories of time, aesthetics and narrative. This involves the examination of the importance of rates of change in understanding how the visual surface is conceived in different media.
Book Chapters
- (2009) “Henri Bergson.” Deleuze’s Philosophical Lineage. Ed. Jon Roffe and Graham Jones. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press
- (2008) “The Time of Heroes: Narrative, Progress and Eternity in Miracleman.” The Contemporary Comic Book Superhero. Ed. Angela Ndalianis. New York: Routledge
- (2008) “The Movement of Dissolution: Bergson and the Aesthetics of Durational Difference.” Sensorium. Ed. Felicity Colman et al. Cambridge Scholars Press
- (2008) Atkinson, Paul and Simon Cooper. “Graphic Implosion: Politics, Time, and Value in Post-9/11 Comics.” Literature after 9/11. Ed. Ann Keniston and Jeanne Follansbee Quinn. New York: Routledge
- (2007) “Dynamic Sensation: Bergson, Futurism and the Exteriorisation of Time in the Plastic Arts.” Art and Time. Ed. Susan Tridgell. Australian Scholarly Publishing
Refereed journal articles
- “The Graphic Novel as Metafiction.” Studies in Comics 1.1 (2010)
- “Movements within Movements: Following the Line in Animation and Comic Books” Animation: An Interdisciplinary Journal 4:3 (2009)
- “The visualisation of Utopia in Recent Science Fiction Film.” Colloquy (2007).
- Atkinson, P. & Yell, S. “Affect, Time and the Enunciative Body.” Southern Review 38.2 (2006)
- “Picturing movement and Moving Pictures: Towards a Pragmatics of Pictorial Perception.” Southern Review: Communication, Politics & Culture 33.3 (2000)
Conference and seminar presentations
- “The Graphic Novel as Metafiction” The New Narrative? Comics in Literature, Film, and Art. University of Toronto, May 2008
- “Technology and the Vision of Utopia.” Imagining the Future: Utopia, Dystopia and Science Fiction. Monash University, December 2005
- “The Time of Articulation: Bergson’s Philosophy of Art.” Art and Time. ANU, November 2005.
- “The Time of Heroes: The Still Image and the Construction of an Epic Past in Miracleman” Holy Men in Tights. Melbourne University, June 2005
- “The Movement of Dissolution: Bergson and the Aesthetics of Durational Difference.” Sensorium. Melbourne University, June 2005
- With Simon Cooper. “Comic Books after 9/11.” SAMSS Seminar Series, semester 2, 2006
- With Sue Yell. “Affect, Time and the Enunciative Body.” SAMSS Seminar Series, semester 1, 2006
- “The Irreversibility of Irreversible: Material, Phenomenological and Narrative Irreversibility in Film Time.” SAMSS Seminar Series, semester 2, 2005
- “Outlining the Limits of a Bergsonian Science.” Critique Today, Australasian Society for Continental Philosophy Conference, Macquarie University, December, 2004
- “Is there Anything Living beneath the Surface?” Australasian Society for Process Thought conference November, 2001
- “Flexible Surfaces/Flexible Concepts: Between Science and Metaphysics.” Bergson and the Social Sciences Conference, Northumberland, UK, April, 2000