Essays
Weaponising Learning
The quality and the democratic nature of a humanities education are both important: students must all be taught well, and they all must be taught equally well. But of the two, democracy matters more. The humanities are, by definition, interpretative ventures intrinsically concerned with the analysis and description of the human world, in which disciplinary mastery is largely a matter of expert judgement, not objective measurement. In this kind of undertaking, students’ collective intellectual growth is the ultimate rationale of teaching.
A Private Life: Philip Waldron
If you google Philip Waldron, you will not find him. For a man whose career spanned decades in university teaching, in an environment in which academics were told to publish or perish, his research output, as publications are sometimes termed, was almost nonexistent. His passion for literature was articulated on the unfashionable humanist end of the critical spectrum, and he felt only impatience for literary theory. He never bothered to do a PhD, and was one of the last lecturers qualified by MA only in the Department of English at the University of Adelaide. He sounds like a misfit in the modern university, and in many ways he was.
In the Room with Gerald Murnane
There’s nothing superior about a critic who does not know their material, and there’s no excuse for professional readers whose memories for fiction are faulty, but I’d hoped my usual need to plaster over lapses in attention would be less laborious in the company of readers who’d come together to celebrate the work of a writer whose implied author freely admits a failure to ‘follow plots and comprehend the motives of characters’ in the novels he’d read, a trait he once again asserts in the early pages of Border Districts, and one which endeared the author to me for all eternity when I first came across it in Barley Patch, where the narrator justifies his own haphazard textual memory by explaining that ‘a person who claims to remember having read one or another book is seldom able to quote from memory even one sentence from the text.
Unintentional Literature: Poememes as poetic practice
‘Just as there is no one way to write a poem, there is no one way to compose a meme. And, as with poetry, there are a number of forms and types of memes, the conditions of which provide some guidance or instruction regarding form and content. In the same way that the haiku form is typically characterised by a poem composed of 17 syllables (morae), with a seasonal reference (kigo) and juxtaposition of images (kiru); a Doge meme typically comprises an image of a Shiba Inu, and the dog’s internal monologue captioned in multicoloured comic sans. Just as the modes of production for poetry vary (and can be linked with the poem’s form/content, as in a cento) so to do those for memes.’