AustLit

'Disciplines are not simple things. They are mainly identified with the ideas and methods they produce, but ideas and methods can only be part of their overall constitution. Embedded in various kinds of institution, focussing on objects and topics that continually mutate, disciplines also professionalise and reproduce themselves by creating barriers to entry and hierarchising students. They legitimate themselves by ascribing particular cultural and social functions to themselves. They fracture into differing schools. And, of course, they teach.' (Introduction)

'On India’s west coast, as far as south as you can go, bordered on the east by mountains and on the west by the Arabian sea, there’s Kerala.

'It’s a beautiful place, which has been connected to the world for centuries. There are two simple reasons for that: because its soils, peoples and climate grow spices so abundantly and because so many people so many places like spicy foods. By the time (around 1500 BCE) that the Austronesians built the first ocean-going ships to establish the hemispheric trade routes, Kerala had already been trading spices northwards for over a millennium. That’s a significant slice of history' (Introduction)

'To think about the study of literature as possessing “values” is, I think, already to skew things. In the Anglophone tradition, something has “value” if it can be measured in external units. Adam Smith famously argued that a value of a thing is measured either in terms of what might be substituted for it (its exchange value) or in terms of its quanti able utilities (its use value). In this framework, value is primarily an economic concept, but, at least from Jeremy Bentham on, it has also been a governmental one. Although earlier philosophers like John Locke or David Hume did not deploy the term, Bentham introduced it precisely to advise those he calls “legislators” on how to manage a population’s happiness. As such, it quickly came under attack: “ Worth was degraded into a lazy synonyme of value ; and value was exclusively attached to the interests of the senses” as Samuel Coleridge put it. (Introduction)

‘Patrick White’s fiction has been ambivalently received. For all its celebration, dissenters continue to insist on a gap between its reputation and its actual achievements. In this essay, I want to take a step towards strengthening our assessment of it through an analysis that I hope may also illuminate possibilities for literary judgement more widely. I will limit myself to a single novel, The Solid Mandala (1968), and to using a received if somewhat old-fashioned critical technique – comparison. In the spirit of literary criticism as it was developed by T.S.Eliot, F.R. Leavis and the New Critics in the first half of the twentieth century, I will place passages from The Solid Mandala alongside passages from Saul Bellow’s Mr Sammler’s Planet.’ (Author’s abstract)

'This is a talk I gave at Tübingen to their Global South project recently. It attempts to outline the situation in which literary studies finds itself today. I am not sure that it will ever come together as a published essay but I would welcome responses that would allow me to improve it.' (Publication abstract)