Past Events
Poetry reading, Rachel Blau DuPlessis
Date: 22 March 2012
Time: 4.00 pm
Venue: von Zedlitz Building, Rm 802
Professor Emerita, Temple University
Distinguished Visiting Scholar, University of Auckland
A reading, with commentary, from Drafts
Rachel Blau DuPlessis is the author of the long poem Drafts, begun in 1986, and collected most recently in two books from Salt Publishing - Pitch: Drafts 77-95 (2010) along with The Collage Poems of Drafts (2011). Her newest critical book (2012) is Purple Passages: Pound, Eliot, Zukofsky, Olson, Creeley and the Ends of Patriarchal Poetry from University of Iowa Press. In 2006, two books of her innovative essays were published: Blue Studios: Poetry and Its Cultural Work (2006), and the ground-breaking The Pink Guitar: Writing as Feminist Practice ([1990] 2006) both from University of Alabama Press. A thirteen-essay feature on her work in poetry Called Drafting Beyond the Ending went up on Jacket2 in December 2011.
“DuPlessis’ ongoing long poem Drafts is proving to be one of the major poetic achievements of our time.” Ron Silliman, Silliman’s Blog, April 2004
“DuPlessis has created one of the most sustained and magnificent meditations written by a contemporary poet on loss, presence, and the haunting persistence of language to redeem what has vanished … The scale of Drafts is monumental; its focus anti-monumental.” Patrick Pritchett, On Drafts. Jacket 22: http://jacketmagazine.com/22/prit-dupless.html.
“Given the beauty and complexity of these drafts, it’s not much of an exaggeration to say that DuPlessis has invented a new way of integrating poetic form and content. Hers is a massive, cathedral-size project unlike any other in contemporary literature.” Andrew Ervin, “It’s truly poetry in motion,” Philadelphia Inquirer (August 21, 2005): H 12.
Fairy Tale Retellings: Developing Intercultural Competence Through Translation
Date: 14 March 2012
Time: 12.10 pm
Venue: von Zedlitz Building, room vZ 606
The New Zealand Centre for Literary Translation
The School of Languages and Cultures
The International Institute of Modern Letters
and The School of English, Film, Theatre, and Media Studies
Cordially invite you to a presentation by Maria González Davies
In this paper Associate Professor Maria González Davies will present a selection of some of the most relevant outcomes of a pilot project carried out with her Teacher Training students at the University Ramon Llull, involving 19 students in their third year. The project, which revolved around research related to Cinderella from both verbal and visual perspectives, is transferable to other educational levels and contexts.
Maria González Davies is an Associate Professor at the Faculty of Education at the University Ramon Llull in Barcelona, Spain. She is the author of the highly influential Multiple Voices in the Translation Classroom. Activities, Tasks and Projects, published by John Benjamins in 2004, and co-author (with Vincent Montalt) of Medical Translation Step by Step. Learning by Drafting, published by St. Jerome in 2004. In addition, she has published numerous book chapters and journal articles on foreign language acquisition, IT in teaching contexts, and translator training.
For further information please contact Dr Marco Sonzogni
Writers and Readers event for Orientation Week
Date: 1 March 2012
Time: 4.30 pm
Venue: Level 2, Central Library, Kelburn Campus
In conjunction with the International Festival of the Arts and Victoria University's Orientation Week, the Library will be hosting three University Staff for a public event related to the Writers and Readers Week.
From the School of English, Film, Theatre, and Media Studies: Professor Harry Ricketts and PhD Candidate Hamish Clayton.
From the International Institute of Modern Letters: Professor Bill Manhire.
4:30pm on Level 2 of the Library at Kelburn Campus.
For more information click here, alternatively contact Erin Scudder.
See you there!
Productions
Shitshow
Date: 15–19 May 2012
Time: 8.00 pm
Venue: Studio 77, 77 Fairlie Terrace
Presented by The Unconventionals & THEA 308
Inspired by Alfred Jarry's Ubu Roi
8pm, 15-19 May 2012
$8 / $15 Waged / Unwaged
Tickets available NOW from theatre@vuw.ac.nz
Click Here for further information
Summer Shakespeare 2012
Date: 9 February – 3 March 2012
Time: 12.00 pm
Venue: The Dell
Summer Shakespeare 2012 presents
the Victoria University of Wellington Season of
Twelfth Night
Directed by Melanie Camp
The Dell, Wellington Botanic Gardens. BYO Picnics highly recommended.
“If music be the food of love, play on”
A night of frivolity, live music, food and wine, Melanie Camp’s production of one of Shakespeare’s most loved comedies is set by the seaside in the 1920s and promises to be a sassy, mischievous affair of colourful costumes and lively music. From raucous comedy to swooning romance, Twelfth Night swings through the many moods of love and life with wit and laughter.
Twelfth Night is directed by Melanie Camp, a student in the Master of Theatre Arts programme, co-taught between Victoria University and Toi Whakaari New Zealand Drama School. It features a vibrant cast of talented actors, including graduates and students of the Victoria University Theatre Programme and Toi Whakaari New Zealand Drama School. As well as a selection of New Zealand’s next generation of top actors, this well-rounded cast also includes more experienced performers including Todd Dixon, Ross Young and Kirsty Hamilton.
Gladstone Vineyard, Wairarapa 9-11 February, 5:30 pm
The Dell, Wellington Botanic Gardens 17 February-3 March, 7 pm (no show Mondays)
Matinee performances, Sunday 19 and 26 February, 4pm
Tickets $15 Full/ $10 Concession
Bookings through Downstage Theatre: Phone: 04 801 6946/ bookings@downstage.co.nz
Door sales on the night (eftpos available)
www.summershakespeare.co.nz
For more information on Summer Shakespeare, please click here
Seminars
Seminar - The 1926 General Strike, MacDiarmid, Scottish Modernism, and Communist Memory
Date: 24 May 2012
Time: 12.00 pm
Venue: von Zedlitz Buidling, Room 802
Dr Dougal McNeill
School of English, Film, Theatre, and Media Studies
Victoria University of Wellington
John McIlroy uses the term “the suppression of Communist memory” to discuss the work of forgetting that went on inside the Communist Party of Great Britain following its disastrous ‘class against class’ phase of 1928 – 1933. McIlroy’s phrase has a wider applicability. If, in the traditions of classical Marxism, we are used to thinking with Lenin’s idea of the mass workers’ party as the ‘memory of the class’, the experience of the Stalinised Communist parties involved a reversal of this project, as generations of militants were trained in habits of conscious, and politically-minded, forgetting. Literary tributes produced within the Communist movement negotiated these demands for forgetting in complex, occasionally tortured, sometimes revealing ways.
The ‘suppression of communist memory’ plays out in particular ways in cultural history, too. Scottish Modernism – most importantly MacDiarmid’s A Drunk Man Looks at the Thistle and Gibbon’s A Scots Quair – produced a series of texts intimately concerned with the lessons and significance of the Strike. And yet these works’ political aspect has been largely downplayed or ignored by later generations of criticism, guided as they are by either apolitical frames for receiving Modernism or cultural nationalist senses of Scottish writing.
This paper attempts order to carry out a work of historical recovery. Dropping Cold War-era worries over allegiance, we can explore MacDiarmid’s complexities instead. Attention to these details reverses standard accounts of Scottish Modernism. The specific, and detailed, interventions both MacDiarmid and Gibbon make into their contemporary political field are key to understanding their aesthetic ambition.
Seminar - Multiculturalism and a Nation’s Grand Narrative
Date: 22 May 2012
Time: 5.10 pm
Venue: Hunter Lecture Theatre 119
Professor Vijay Mishra
Murdoch University
In a short monograph (Fear of Small Numbers, 2006), Arjun Appadurai referred to multiculturalism as a majoritarian theory which addressed a principle of ‘containment’ made necessary by the ‘fear of small numbers’. The point Appadurai makes is that ethnic groups that live within the borders of national polities give rise to a sense of uncertainty, which can ‘drive projects of ethnic cleansing that are both vivisectionist and verificationist in their procedures.’ The first echoes the ‘What do we do with them now?’ project that governed Nazi thinking; the second is a starker form of the redistribution dilemma faced by multicultural welfare states. That these ‘projects’ remain in the background requires a socially concerned and critically self-aware reader to be conscious of a fundamental fact about national sovereignty: ‘No modern nation, however benign its political system and however eloquent its public voices may be about the virtues of tolerance, multiculturalism, and inclusion, is free of the idea that its national sovereignty is built on some sort of ethnic genius’ (Appadurai, 10). This paper looks at the grand narrative of the nation which is the product of its ‘ethnic genius’, its place in western modernity, its links to the idea of a ‘national fantasy’, its continued force as the ground for liberal values, and its dialogic relationship with a multicultural definition of the nation as a multiplicity of narratives in the making. The overall argument and supporting documentation draws upon my recently published What Was Multiculturalism (Melbourne University Press, 2012).
Vijay Mishra, a VUW undergraduate in the sixties, is Professor of English Literature and Australian Research Council Professorial Fellow at Murdoch University. His most recent works include ‘Understanding Bollywood’ (The Wiley-Blackwell Handbook of Global Communication and Media Ethics), ‘The Gothic Sublime’ (The New Blackwell Companion to the Gothic) and What Was Multiculturalism? (Melbourne University Press).
Seminar - Glamour & Grind: the working lives of film crew
Date: 17 May 2012
Time: 12.00 pm
Venue: Room 103, 81 Fairlie Terrace
Ass. Prof. Deborah Jones
Victoria Management School, Victoria University of Wellington
This seminar will introduce Glamour & Grind, a Marsden-funded study which looks at working lives in the film industry. In the last few years there has been an explosion of critical research on what is called ‘creative labour’. Critical scholars have highlighted the precariousness, high-intensity demands and inequalities that characterise many traditional and emergent forms of creative work, along with its joys. It is argued that such work is characterised by ‘complicated freedoms’, ‘bulimic careers’ and by oscillations along ‘a pleasure-pain axis’. I will review key arguments in this literature, especially in relation to film work, and will discuss our study in this context. Glamour & Grind is an exploratory qualitative study which examines the experience of film work through life-history interviews. We have used the terms ‘glamour’ and ‘grind’ as a heuristic framework for an empirical investigation of lived tensions in the careers of New Zealand film crew workers as they unfold over time. In the seminar I will present some stories of their experience and discuss some of the theoretical issues we are exploring in analysing our data.
Deborah Jones is an Associate Professor in the School of Management at Victoria. She has degrees in English Literature and Language and Management Studies. Her research draws on critical theory in relation to issues of work, organisation and identity, especially gender, ethnic and national. She has studied the film industry in New Zealand from the point of view of working lives, and also of cultural policy and national identity. She was Principal Investigator in a project on the working lives of film crew, Glamour and Grind. Other current film-related projects include an analysis of The New Zealand Film Commission submission and report, the ‘Hobbit wars’, and Peter Jackson as a national icon.
Seminar - Adolescent Realism As A Literary Slipstream: Discovering You're A Werewolf
Date: 10 May 2012
Time: 12.00 pm
Venue: von Zedlitz Building, room 802
Caoilinn Hughes, doctoral candidate
English Programme, Victoria University of Wellington
Adolescent Fiction, which emerged in the 1970s as a sub-category of Young Adult Fiction, presents teenage protagonists predominantly contending with adolescent issues of self-discovery, rites of passage, sexuality, agency, socialization and separation anxiety. As late twentieth and early twenty-first century Adolescent Fiction has come to be strongly associated with romantic fantasy genres (vampires) and supernaturalism (wizards), this paper argues that these fantastical or non-realist genres have become the ‘mainstream’ in Adolescent Fiction; whereas, realist Adolescent Fiction has become a slipstream genre itself, where the processes of self-discovery and social estrangement the protagonists endure demonstrate the strangeness and surreal-ness of adolescent experience. This paper argues that realism in adolescent fiction is a slipstream genre itself; in its irreverence, its heightened metaphysical awareness, its embodiment of the uncomfortable, transitionary space of adolescence, and in its estrangement of social systems. The adolescent realism of contemporary New Zealand writers Paula Boock and Bernard Beckett demonstrates that there can be no more appropriate a parody of the mainstream werewolf novel than the aggressive, hair-sprouting everyday teenagers who are all too aware of moon. The paper will look at Bernard Beckett’s No Alarms (2002) and Paul Boock’s Out Walked Mel (2000) as examples of adolescent novels that use realism as a slipstream genre to present and problematize the strange, subversive adolescent individual struggling with societal assimilation; within the family, the educational system, and the sexual, political and legal expectations made of adolescents. The analysis of these realist adolescent novels will demonstrate the cognitive dissonance at the heart of the adolescent experience and of the adolescent slipstream genre.
Caoilinn Hughes has a First Class Honours Degree in English from The Queen's University of Belfast and a Masters Degree (with Distinction) in Twentieth Century Irish Theatre & Culture, aslo from Queens. Her PhD in English at Victoria consists of writing a Young Adult Sci-fi novel about the inventor of time travel, and a thesis on the use of Realism in New Zealand YA Literature.
Seminar - Scandalous Images: Still Photography in Post-Boom Italian Film
Date: 3 May 2012
Time: 1.00 pm
Venue: Room 103, 81 Fairlie Terrace
Dr Sally Hill
Italian Programme, Victoria University of Wellington
Commercial and popular photographic images helped create, document and market some of the most infamous scandals in Italy during and after the economic boom of the late 1950s and early 1960s, reshaping public and private notions of what could and should be seen and shown. Yet most critics have largely neglected the influence of such images on Italian cinema and literature. In this work in progress, I argue that still photography played a significant role in shaping how some of Italy’s most important writers and filmmakers of the period conceptualized the country's transformation into a capitalist “society of spectacle” and the transition from a neorealist to a postmodernist aesthetic. Focussing here on Federico Fellini and Michelangelo Antonioni, I analyse their use of photographers and still photographs in two of their best-known films, La dolce vita (1960) and Blow-Up (1966). Despite the many differences between the two, I argue that both demonstrate the influence of what I will call a “paparazzo gaze”.
Sally Hill is a Senior Lecturer in the Italian Programme at Victoria University of Wellington. Her research interests and publications focus on twentieth-century Italian literature, cinema and visual culture, and the history and theory of interactions between the visual arts and literature, with a particular interest in photography. She also works on migrant writing, Italian women writers, and representations of disability. She is completing revisions to a book manuscript on the influence of photography in post-war Italian literature and an edited volume (with Giuliana Minghelli) entitled “Stillness in Motion: Italy, Photography and the Meanings of Modernity.”
Seminar: It’s About Time: Three Case Studies in Sustainable Scenography in the Pacific
Date: 26 April 2012
Time: 12.00 pm
Venue: Room 305, 77 Fairley Terrace
David O’Donnell and James Davenport
Lecturers, Theatre Programme, School of English, Film, Theatre, and Media Studies
Victoria University of Wellington
The urgent need to consider more sustainable practices in theatre production is being recognised by organisations in the USA such as Electric Lodge Performing Arts Centre, the Green Theater Initiative and the Broadway Green Alliance. However there are considerable costs in setting up such ventures, and in the smaller theatre economies of island nations on the Pacific rim, many wasteful practices continue to dominate in theatre production. Yet issues of sustainability in the face of climate change are particularly pertinent to Pacific nations, with atolls such as Tuvalu gradually disappearing due to rising ocean levels.
In this presentation we explore models for more sustainable theatre production, giving examples from our own experiences as theatre practitioners working in different locations around the Pacific. We examine three contrasting performance projects that we have worked on in recent years: a film, The Land has Eyes, (Rotuma, 2004, written and directed by Vilsoni Hereniko, assistant director James Davenport); a play, Heat (New Zealand, 2008, written by Lynda Chanwai-Earle, director David O’Donnell); and a conference TEDx (Honolulu, 2011, designer James Davenport). Not only does each project utilise innovative approaches to sustainable scenography, the scenographic materials used actively reflect and engage with the dramaturgy and themes of each work.
In examining these projects, we make extensive use of visual documentation (photographs, maps and plans). In each example, the sustainability of the scenography reflects and enhances the themes of the diverse performance texts, creating performative critiques of unsustainable methods of production. By close analysis of the interaction between text and technologies in the Pacific, we will present methodologies for sustainable theatre practice of the future.
Film and Media Studies Programme Seminar
Date: 5 April 2012
Time: 12.00 pm
Venue: Room 103, 81 Fairley Terrace
New Zealand-Domiciled Screen Production: Institution, Industry, and Cultural Identity
Dr Trisha Dunleavy
Media Studies Programme, Victoria University of Wellington
This seminar presents some key findings from a newly released book which examines the five decades of film and TV production in New Zealand, taking a particular interest in the ‘high-end’ of the production spectrum through its case studies of feature films and long-form TV dramas. Whilst this book acknowledges the influences of internationalism and of major foreign-funded projects upon the development of this country’s film and television industries, its central interest is ‘New Zealand-domiciled’ screen productions, a term through which we distinguish those whose conception, narratives, financing, development, and completion are all centred on New Zealand culture, creative personnel, and institutions. This book has extended the scope of existing literature on New Zealand screen production in two ways. First, it examines New Zealand’s film and television industries side by side, a revealing juxtaposition because of the differences and commonalities between them. Second, this book emphasises the facilitation of film and TV production, aiming to generate better understandings of the institutional and commissioning considerations, along with the industrial and creative processes, from which New Zealand’s feature films and TV dramas come.
Dr Trisha Dunleavy is Senior Lecturer in Media Studies at Victoria University of Wellington. This book, which she authored in collaboration with Dr Hester Joyce, is entitled New Zealand Film and Television: Institution, Industry, and Cultural Change and was published by Intellect Books (Bristol) in association with Chicago University Press. This research project and publication was facilitated by investment from Victoria University of Wellington (The Research Trust) and La Trobe University Melbourne.
English Programme Seminar
Date: 22 March 2012
Time: 12.00 pm
Venue: von Zedlitz Building, room 802
Marginalia: The Littoral Figure in Poetry, Chiefly Victorian
Professor Herbert Tucker
University of Virginia
The pensive solitariness with which Victorian poetry went to the seashore - in distinct contrast to the holiday jollity that Victorian popular culture discovered there - kept faith with a very long tradition of maritime poetics. In their alienated marginality, seaside poems both expressed an emergent understanding of the human condition and exercised verse's privileged means of making such an understanding felt, as a matter of sensed experience. Brisk survey of the littoral tradition, numerous close illustrations from a dozen poets.
Herbert Tucker is John C. Coleman Professor of Nineteenth-Century British Literature at the University of Virginia. His publications include Epic: Britain’s Heroic Muse (Oxford 2008), Tennyson and the Doom of Romanticism (Harvard, 1988), as well as many other collections and chapters on British literature.
Film and Media Studies Programme Seminar
Date: 22 March 2012
Time: 12.00 pm
Venue: Room 103, 81 Fairlie Terrace
“Keeping it real”: Discourses of Authentic Identity from Hollywood to High School
Felicity Perry
PhD candidate, Department of Film, Television and Media Studies, University of Auckland
Authenticity is a key cultural rubric in the contemporary West. Texts aimed at young people frequently direct viewers to “keep it real”, to “be themselves”, and to avoid “putting up a front”. This seminar considers how students at an urban high school in Aotearoa New Zealand conceive of being “real”, exploring what they deem to be authentic identity and its expressions.
This seminar examines how the students conceive of authentic identity as both stable and fluid, as both anchored in bodily experience and as produced at the moment of recognition by others. It asks, how do the students reconcile the work they undertake to embody a subject position with their understanding of “true” identity as “effortless”? How do they resolve the tension produced through their positioning of identity as inseparable from the gaze of others and their notion that to live for others is inauthentic? That is, how do the students utilize both constructionist ‘surface’ and essentialist ‘depth’ discourses of identity?
The students use the figures of the ‘tryhard’ and the ‘clone’ to demonstrate their own authenticity. How might the students’ conceptualization of authenticity and use of these figures aid the positioning of authentic identity as performative, produced through its enactment?
Felicity Perry has recently submitted for examination her PhD thesis, conducted through the Department of Film, Television and Media Studies at the University of Auckland. Her thesis examines the way students at an urban non-uniformed school in Aotearoa/New Zealand use dress – and dress-related discourses – to both construct and express their identities.
Rainbows and Wonder: Richard Dawkins’s Misreading of Keats
Date: 15 March 2012
Time: 1.00 pm
Venue: von Zedlitz Building, Room 802 (vZ 802)
Presented by Heidi Thomson
Much good literature celebrates the awareness of the limitless experience of wonder by equating it with a state of ‘Negative Capability’ which Keats attributes to Shakespeare’s character in particular: ‘when a man is capable of being in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason.’ This applies to both writing and reading. Not surprisingly, Keats wrote a sonnet about re-reading King Lear which combines a phoenix rebirth through fire with a humble attempt to try and figure something out again: ‘for, once again, the fierce dispute / Betwixt damnation and impassion’d clay /Must I burn through; once more humbly assay / The bitter-sweet of this Shaksperean fruit’ (5-8). Richard Dawkins underestimates the labour and pleasure of reading. C. P. Snow’s ill-fated use of the term ‘Two Cultures’, despite his qualified discussion of it in the actual lecture, has set up a tradition of mutual exclusivity between science and literature, and Dawkins’s references to poetry confirm the split once more. This lecture does not question Dawkins’s enthusiasm for science or poetry, but it demonstrates that Dawkins’s understanding of poetry in Unweaving the Rainbow: Science, Delusion and the Appetite for Wonder is limited and often entirely mistaken. Reading deserves the attention and care of an ideal scientific experiment: encompassing, with attention for detail, tentatively conclusive, and mindful of a coherence of sorts.
Film and Media Studies Programme Seminar: "Creative Commons and Open Scholarship"
Date: 8 March 2012
Time: 12.00 pm
Venue: Room 103, 81 Fairlie Terrace
Jane Hornibrook, Creative Commons Aotearoa, the Royal Society of New Zealand
'Open access' involves a wide range of copyright practices, from the most restrictive use statements to placing work in the public domain. The debate is no longer just about the ability to freely 'access' materials, but about the ability to share or adapt them. Creative Commons is an infrastructure that scholars and publishers can use to observe open access in respect to sharing or allowing reuse.
This session is an opportunity to learn about Creative Commons, find out how licences operate, and where to source the best reusable content. You can also hear about current developments in the world of open access across a range of sectors and discuss their implications for New Zealanders.
Jane Hornibrook is the Public Lead of Creative Commons Aotearoa, at the Royal Society of New Zealand. Her background is in literature, publishing and disruptive technologies.
Symposiums
The Orphan in the Text
Date: 13 February 2012
Time: 9.00 am
Venue: von Zedlitz Room 802
A one day symposium at Victoria University
Maria Holmgren Troy will speak about “The Orphan American Dream”:
Orphans in American Literary History and Criticism
Proposals for 20 minute papers welcome
Send to anna.jackson@vuw.ac.nz