Benjamin Madden
Benjamin Madden teaches modern literature and cultural studies at the University of Adelaide. He is formerly the managing editor of Modernism/modernity, and taught at the Beijing Foreign Studies University in 2015 and 2016.
All essays by Benjamin Madden
Conceiving Otherness
The heroes of Australian culture have tended not to come from within the academy. It is conventional to bemoan this fact as evidence of our backwardness, and at worst, it can inspire amongst some intellectuals a facile loathing for Australia’s ‘ordinariness’. But I’d like to think this state of affairs might have a more constructive result as well: that Australian intellectuals might be able to take up their traditional role as gadflies, like Socrates or Zhuangzi, without inviting much more opprobrium than they receive as a matter of course.