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Catholicism and pan-European identity from Schuman to Orbán
Get PDFThe aim of this article is to examine the role of Catholic political thought in relation to the history of European integration and show how the shift away from this communitarian tradition by mainstream social democratic and conservative parties can help explain the rise of populism. The idea of Europe as a unified entity has always been grounded in its Christian character, and this was the basis of the Christian Democratic pan-European project of the EU’s ‘founding fathers’ in the mid-twentieth century. The rise of both social and economic liberalism in the ensuing years led to a disconnect between the political establishment – who remain largely supportive of the project – and growing numbers of disaffected citizens. A refocusing of the political narrative in relation to European integration on the continent’s communitarian and Christian (and Social) Democratic traditions could halt the advance of populist-nationalism and Eurosceptic parties
EU Cultural Policy: Divided institutional interrelationships and strategic changes in policy development
Get PDFThe EU has engaged with cultural policy especially after the Maastricht treaty in 1992. To compare the division within two EU institutions, this paper mainly analyses the EU official documents: the “European Agenda for culture in a globalizing world”, published by the European Commission in 2007 – which was the first “Communication” regarding cultural policy – and “Work Plan for Culture” which was published as “Conclusions” by the Council of the European Union. The aim of this paper is to reveal that the Council focus only on a part of the policy of the European Commission on culture. It also concluded that the main strategies of the EU cultural policy have changed to incorporate some non-profitable aims
Parochial Canons: Teaching Australian Literature in Western Australia
Get PDFIn recent years, various studies have drawn attention to a lack of Australian literature being taught in secondary classrooms in Australia, with these findings often attributed to teachers’ minimal experience of Australian texts during their senior secondary and tertiary education. This paper draws on a state-wide study of texts studied in Year 12 English and Literature classrooms in Western Australia in 2018, which revealed that Australian works, and particularly Western Australian texts, were popular inclusions for study. The externally examined English course in WA not having a prescribed text list, yet this condition of text list expansion does not necessarily ensure that a wider variety of texts will be studied in schools. This paper explores some possible explanations for this situation by referring to sites of sociability and to the work of John Guillory on canonicity and cultural capital (1993), to consider the impact of a parochial canon on Western Australian English subjects
Black Holes in the Space of Literature: Gravitational Spacetime Singularities Applied to Maurice Blanchot’s Fictionality Face-to-Face with the Mystery of the Other
Get PDFThis article investigates and substantiates how Maurice Blanchot’s novels and récits collapse under their own gravity or in Blanchot’s words under “the gravity of one single word,” to form spacetime singularities/Neuters in the space of literature, where conception of the classical Einsteinian nonquantum spacetime continuum breaks down and where Hawking-Penrose theorems of spacetime singularities supersede; even though this supersedure entails General Theory of Relativity as its substratum. While spatiotemporal issues in Blanchot’s fictionality have to do with classical spacetime continuum and curvature, with establishing their legitimation through responsible and ethical relation with other persons as the only certain foothold to get at the authentic essence of time under the tutorship of Emmanuel Levinas, they are on the other hand subsisting on quantum theories engaged with the mystery of the Other whose wishful authenticity seems infinite, uncertain, and ungraspable ad infinitum. This is where this twofold Otherness having been dragging and spaghettificating itself from the beginning of time towards its end; that is, from the Big Bang to the Big Crunch, does emerge “to find the temporal transcendence of the present toward the mystery of the future” as Levinas asserts, so as to actualize our “horizontal escape” towards an infinite ecstasy face-to-face with “the Other that is time.
Australian Regional Literary History: Rethinking Limits and Boundaries
Get PDFThis paper emerges from a panel discussion at the ‘Texts and Their Limits’ conference (2021) between four scholars in the field of Australian regional literary history to consider its current concerns, practices and relationship to the frameworks of Australian literary studies. The panel flagged a renewal of regional literary scholarship in Australia through exploration of the panelists’ own projects and collaborations in regional and rural Victorian and Western Australian communities. Drawing on their reflections on the doing of regional literary history, the conversation canvassed the distinct qualities of contemporary regional Australian literary scholarship; the role of place, situated practice and community engagement in this field; and the implications for the regional literary studies of the always unsettled boundaries and status of the ‘region’ in Australian life. Following the original panel event, this paper discusses questions such as: what is regional literary history, where is it going, and what are limits?
(Re)considering Australian Geography with First Nations Literature - Jeanine Leane’s Walk Back Over
Get PDFTaking First Nations literature as a point of entry, the aim of this paper is to reconsider Australian geography. Focusing on the poetic collection Walk Back Over by Wiradjuri poet and academic Jeanine Leane, the current study considers the role of culture in our understanding of Australian geography, and the central place of vision and visuality in the transmission of geographical knowledge. Reading Walk Back Over requires the reader to look beyond the text, beyond colonial-settler geography in order to see another geography of Australia. In doing so, Jeanine Leane brings into the light another geography and, therefore, another history of the land.
Key words : First Nations Literature, Jeanine Leane, Geography, Vision, Culture, Postcolonialism
 
Resisting Action: Slow Response and Care-Full Movement in a Post-Fire Terrain
Get PDFInitially I stood at a threshold peering into a place of momentous ending. I shook my head. Gundungurra country needs to burn, I imagine its people say across time, just not like this. There is a requirement for care-full in/action when living with and on a post-fire terrain while still in trauma. It is a difficult balancing act for humans who like to fix things. Beyond the domestic clean-up of burnt buildings and infrastructure, my teachers await my attention. They are not of the human kind, rather they are the critters that perch in branches or skitter under rock. They are the soil movers, the crevice crouchers and the mark makers. They are the stirring plants and the underground tendrils of fungal hyphae. They send slow signals and resist tidy aesthetics. They challenge the perception of “dead” and question short-term human economies of usefulness. Ultimately, they remind me that home is made up of many intersecting homes weaving, twisting and turning in a constant process of becoming
Setting Fire to the Poetic Correspondence of Multispecies Relationships
No full textThis poetic work is a multispecies love letter seeking to make the reader aware of the strange aporia of human ‘love’ for animals.[1] Contradictory human expressions of love, care, indifference, and harm towards animals can be seen in words that change perceptions of animals (as individuals, groups or in general). Consider the changing status of a ‘pet’ cat being discarded and becoming ‘feral’. Is ‘it’ a ‘pest’ to be ‘culled’, not even ‘killed’ or ‘put to sleep’ or can ‘they’ be ‘rescued’? This work explores multiple and conflicting affective outcomes words have on building compassion, understanding and support for animals, or adding to misconceptions which can result in disregard or violent treatment. The words we use to represent animals and express our relationships to them can reduce animals to iconic national symbols and supportive anthropocentric tools, or to draw out the diversity, multiplicity and intrinsic value of animal being and create space for animals in the text.
The poem focuses on the contemporary Australian context for the aporia of human love for animals. It grounds the work in place and time by using Australian phrases, idioms, slang, associations, terms and names for animals, plants, and places while concentrating on recent events of bushfires, droughts, floods, and pandemic isolation. It references ongoing Australian settler-colonial practices where human animal entanglements and conflicts are highlighted, including horse racing, hunting, bushwalking, fishing, and farming.
Repetition and wordplay are used to amplify, destabilize, complicate, confuse and decentre human perspectives. The method is informed by the fictocritical work of Ania Walwicz in horse utilizing ‘The process of associative thought and reflection. Improvisation and analysis. The flight of thought, a trajectory and reflection, retrieval, recoil. The use of multilevel text comprising poetics, theory and appropriated text’ (5). The poet aims to draw attention to the ways our relationships with animals are constructed and circulated through our use of language which forms an inherently anthropocentric frame of reference. Unresolved contradictions between intimacy and distance in human animal relationships are used to create a space of questioning to provoke thought.
Work Cited
Walwicz, Ania. horse: A Psychodramatic Enactment of a Fairytale. Crawley, Western Australia: UWAP, 2018. Print.
[1]Although encompassing both, ‘animals’ is used here to differentiate ‘animals of different species’ from ‘human animals.’ Terms like ‘nonhuman animals’ and ‘other animals’ are definitions centring humans, in terms of what is not human rather than what are these beings. Words like ‘beast’ also have othering meanings.