AustLit

'In beginning to prepare this tribute to Meaghan Morris’s work I went to the bulging folder that contains the letters and postcards and draft papers she sent me over a period of about twenty years, from the early 1980s to the early 2000s (more recently we’ve communicated almost entirely by email). One of the things that strikes me, looking through these pages with their typewritten text full of crossings-out and handwritten marginalia, is the enormous care Meaghan gives to her intellectual relationships, in my case with someone she didn’t know all that well, who lived on the other side of the country, and with whom there were significant points of intellectual difference. One of the letters I’m going to quote from is ten closely typed pages long, and to write it she would first have to have read, closely and carefully, a dense and abstruse paper of mine, set in what looks like 8-point font and to me today almost unreadable. Now consider that I was just one of Meaghan’s correspondents. I don’t know how many people received letters like this from her, but I’m pretty sure she had ongoing written conversations with a number of other people in Australia and elsewhere. Meaghan was and is a teacher: she takes intellectual debate as seriously as anyone I’ve ever known, and she conducts it with care, with tact, and with passion.'  (Introduction)

'In recent years the disciplines of literary studies and cultural studies have engaged in occasional hostilities but very rarely in productive engagement with each other’s methodologies. Yet each offers a set of rich resources for the other in a period of disciplinary crisis across the Humanities.

'The essays collected here, working at the point of intersection of these two fields, are centrally concerned with conflicts of value: the aesthetic value that is ascribed to texts; the economic value that accrues to intellectual property; the processes of social valuation that turn waste into worth and back again; the structures of valued knowledge that shape both the disciplines of knowledge and everyday life; and the political struggles over social and cultural difference that give rise, at their most intense, to the desolation of communities and the destruction of cultures.' (Publisher's blurb)

students today still respect their libraries, but reading rooms are nearly empty on some campuses...Modern or postmodern students do most of their research at computers in their rooms. To them, knowledge comes online, not in libraries. They know that libraries could never contain it all within their wall, because information is endless, extending everywhere on the Internet, and to find it one needs a search engine, not a card catalog. ('The Library in the New Age', New York Review of Books, 12 June 2008)

John Frow attempts 'to reconstruct the early days—roughly the decade of the 1980s—of cultural studies in Australia, in a way that relies heavily on anecdote and reminiscence. ' Source: Modern Australian Criticism and Theory (2010)