Goldsmiths, University of London: Journals Online
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Unifying Multiple Roles during Lockdown
Get PDFThis reflection highlights my experiences navigating through a lockdown in Singapore, which we analogously termed as a “circuit breaker”. Ironically, it was a time where many of our daily functions had to continue over electronic means. We also had to spend most of our time at home because of the social distancing measures. The use of devices and teleconferencing tools surged during the circuit breaker and people remained connected, if not more so than before. Like many others, I had to be acquainted with Zoom to carry out my roles and responsibilities, and spent most of my days in my room, on my computer, switching between these roles. The following discussion is a reflection on the discoveries I made during this new routin
‘A Medium More Important than Bodily Sense’: Wilde, the Antipodes, and the Techno-Imagination
Get PDFA decade ago, in his chapter for The Cambridge History of Australian Literature, Ken Stewart voiced what has long been the conventional understanding of Wilde and his relationship with Britain’s Australian colonies. ‘The image of aristocratic dandyism [Wilde] affected’, Stewart asserted,
was the reverse of typically Australian. In witty conversation and in his plays and other writings, he employed with pitiless brio the convention of Australia as a joke place, a vast and distant outpost overrun by convicts, sheep and wealthy philistines who were to be spurned, unless one was in debt.[i]
Indeed, some thirty years before Stewart, in his now still-standard biography of Wilde, the most significant statement Richard Ellmann makes about Australia is that Wilde turned the country into ‘the butt of his regional jokes’.[ii] Even twenty years before Ellmann, in 1970, Coral Lansbury declared that Wilde ‘could never regard Australia as a subject for anyone’s serious attention’.[iii] In this article, I seek to go beyond this somewhat unproductive understanding of Wilde’s relationship with Australia. Instead, I argue, over the course of the 1880s and ’90s, Wilde and Australia came (albeit, at times, begrudgingly) to identify with one another. In making this argument, I work to view the relationship through the prisms of both fin-de-siècle technology and celebrity culture, on the one hand, and ‘Antipodean’ discourses on the other.
[i] Ken Stewart, ‘Britain’s Australia’, in The Cambridge History of Australian Literature, ed. by Peter Pierce (Cambridge University Press, 2009), pp. 7-33 (p. 31).
[ii] Richard Ellman, Oscar Wilde (New York: Vintage Books, 1987), p. 207.
[iii] Coral Lansbury, Arcady in Australia: The Evocation of Australia in Nineteenth-century English Literature (Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 1970), p. 30
Incomparable Baudelaire
Get PDFLa première fois que je rencontre Baudelaire, je dois avoir dix ans.
Dans la bibliothèque familiale que j’écume déjà depuis un moment, je tombe sur une ancienne édition des Fleurs du Mal en cuir vert foncé, comme les pins, et lettres dorées. J’ai déjà lu de grands romans de Hugo, mais je n’ai pas encore dévoré de poésie. Je recopie « L’invitation au voyage » dans mon premier carnet de poésies, juste après « Le dormeur du Val » sur lequel s’ouvre le cahier bleu nuit. Je les apprends par cœur, comme tous les textes que je recopie dans ce journal d’incantations intimes
‘The English Fury’ at Mechelen, 1580
Get PDFThe late sixteenth-century religious wars prompted a Protestant movement within the Elizabethan regime that sought state-sanctioned military intervention in aid of the Dutch rebels. Printed military news also became a popular genre during this period. This article seeks to re-examine the journalistic legacy of soldier-poet Thomas Churchyard through a close reading of his 1580 account of the English pillaging of Mechelen by a group of English mercenaries. Churchyard’s text was the product of his connections to interventionist statesmen and the widespread vilification of Spaniards. His pamphlet utilised popular motifs that vindicated religious violence and exploited inchoate notions of journalistic credibility
