Insofar as literature is defined negatively, by what it is not, censorship has had a determining ... more Insofar as literature is defined negatively, by what it is not, censorship has had a determining role in its historical constitution. Contemporary scholarship emphasizes the dynamic interplay between literary expression and forms of cultural regulation, recognizing its paradoxically productive capacity to generate as well as suppress meaning. At the same time, accounting for censorship’s role in the history of the world’s literature means coming to grips with the often brutal repression, prohibition, and persecution of writing, writers, performance, and cultural producers by sovereign power underwritten by violence. Tracing the genealogies of literary censorship, from its formulations in ancient Rome, through medieval religious persecution, sedition and heresy charges, theatre controls, early modern print and copyright licensing, to the seeming breakthroughs of the Enlightenment, details the interdependence of modernity and cultural regulation. At stake in this history are defining relations between culture and society, knowledge and power, not least in the manner in which literature traverses the boundary between public and private, and censorship polices that divide. The art-for-art’s-sake defense, which separates the literary from what is offensive—nominally from obscenity, pornography, libel, blasphemy, and sedition and effectively from politics, intimacy, and the real—stumbles and fails in the face of culture’s variant aims and readers’ differing pleasures. And the state’s use of the law to enforce its role as a custosmorum has placed not only art in opposition to the law, as Gustave Flaubert saw, but also culture in opposition to morality, when the state becomes the modern arbiter of culture’s social and political roles. The available frames for understanding censorship, from liberal, materialist, psychoanalytic, linguistic, and poststructuralist positions, face challenges from diversifying and yet synthesizing situations for literature in a global world.
A genuinely collaborative, cross-cultural examination of the publication and reception of Austral... more A genuinely collaborative, cross-cultural examination of the publication and reception of Australian literature in the German Democratic Republic, this work is a revealing case study for newly global accounts of the cultural Cold War. 'A compelling case study of the cultural Cold War and its effect on literary exchange.' — Professor Wenche Ommundsen, University of Wollongong 'This is considered, nuanced scholarship of a high order, [with] surprising and illuminating results, far beyond what might have been thought possible … There are few works of cultural history that offer such a stark and startling dialogic opening-up.' — Professor Nicholas Jose, University of Adelaide Exploring the imaginative construction of the post-colonial South by the communist East, this collaborative study of the reception of Australian literature in the German Democratic Republic has resonance for all newly global reckonings of the cultural Cold War.
Though literature and censorship have been conceived as long-time adversaries, this collection seeks to understand, rather, the degree to which they have been dialectical terms, each producing the other, coeval and mutually constitutive.
After the opening of the USSR’s spekstrahn, the enormous collections of literature forbidden under the Soviets, containing more than one million items, the push to redefine censorship so expansively has encountered cogent criticism. German scholars describing the centralised control of East German print publication, for example, have wanted to insist on the substantive difference of pre-publication state censorship from more mundane forms of speech regulation in democracies. Work on South African apartheid censorship and the operations of censorship in colonial countries is also demonstrating its formative role in the institutional structures of literature beyond the metropole. In light of these and other developments, Censorship and the Limits of the Literary examines a number of critical issues. Is literature ever without censorship? Does censorship need the literary? In a globalizing era for culture, does censorship represent the final (failed) version of national control?
Of particular interest has been the number of different countries from which manuscripts have bee... more Of particular interest has been the number of different countries from which manuscripts have been submitted. In addition to the United States and Canada, papers have come from fourteen others countries. Although the majority of the manuscripts come from the United States the percentage of submissions from other countries has increased in the last few months. Because an electronic journal is accessible worldwide it has always been editorial policy to serve the international medical physics community, and it is gratifying to see this taking place.
points to a certain tradition of collecting the prose of poets (4); this collection brings togeth... more points to a certain tradition of collecting the prose of poets (4); this collection brings together the literary criticism, political essays and writing on theatre of Dorothy Hewett, never only a poet. While Hewett's manifold achievements across diverse genres, especially poetry, have been well surveyed, her voice as a critic has remained historical, muffled by its scattered presence in small, even forgotten journals and magazines, and unavailable as a discrete body of work. Great affection remains for Hewett as a writer and figure, among her readers but also her witnesses, and this collection will find interest from many. Her trajectory, from young modernist to committed communist, to melodramatic apostate and then contrarian grande dame, can be traced in these pieces, and they are rich biographical resources for a commanding figure in Australian literature. But not only such-Hewett deserves to be read for her reach into Australian and international culture as a critic and commentator in her own right, and in her own changing times. Morrison has collected 32 pieces of Hewett's non-fiction prose, of differing size, weight and amplitude, grouped into three nominated sections, organised chronologically. The first of these presents literary critical pieces, and begins with two from 1945, when Hewett's poem 'Testament' had just won the ABC Poetry Competition and she was writing for Black Swan, the student magazine of the University of Western Australia. Two pieces of greater contrast are hard to find: one on the British modernist poet, eccentric and wit Edith Sitwell; the other on the recently published first volume of the goldfields trilogy completed by communist and West Australian Katharine Susannah Prichard. Written when she was not quite twenty-two, Hewett's piece on Sitwell is notably accomplished and striking now for its immediate address, as if Sitwell, her contemporaries, outlandish performative modernism, desiccated aristocratic family and committed readers were all directly present for the Black Swan, refusing volubly any imaging of Perth as a lonely outpost on the far edge of a mere former colony. The emphasis is on Sitwell's mythic self-fashioning, from the tawdry remnants of blasted Georgian England-'Enfant terrible of the twentieth century, with her patched ladies with parasols, walking in gold and tinsel landscapes, full of waterfalls, jewels and bear-dark woods … her own childhood appears again and again' (31). Hewett's assessment of Sitwell that 'to know her early work is to know her childhood' resonates of course with Hewett's own work, especially her poetry and 1990 autobiography Wild Card, and draws comparisons with Sitwell's own assessments of herself as both writer and figure. As a woman poet, she told Stephen Spender in 1946, 'there was no-one to point the way. I had to learn everything-learn, among other things, not to be timid.' Despite the tenderness and vulnerability often exhibited in Hewett's work, she was never accused of timidity. Her piece on Prichard contrasts in style, emphasis, weight and approach, as well as its topic. In a short, summative essay, Hewett delivers punchy characterisations in a declamatory style. Single sentence paragraphs dominate: 'There is always a sense of teeming vivid history in her characters and the events that shape their lives' (42). The Roaring Nineties carries Prichard's broadest attempt to cast Australian versions of egalitarianism as the building blocks for a socialist nationalism, sourced in a goldfields community democracy forged against 'the big money-grubbing operators who with backing from the Perth Parliament were Book reviews: Selected Prose of Dorothy Hewett edited and introduced by Fiona Morrison. Nicole Moore.
Communist of many years standing and a recognised troublemaker wherever he goes.' So begins the d... more Communist of many years standing and a recognised troublemaker wherever he goes.' So begins the dossier opening the Australian Security Intelligence Organisation (ASIO) file on Australian writer and union organiser Merv Lilley. He was later to become the third husband of the more prominent writer Dorothy Hewett, but in 1950 when his file was opened he was working as a miner, labourer and ship's crew out of the small coal and sugar ports of northern Queensland. 1 ASIO's descriptor serves as a useful title for this essay, which is more closely about Hewett and Australia's best-known Communist writer, Frank Hardy, because it concentrates the three tropes of recognition (figured as deliberated and yet suspicious observation), 'trouble', and travel, that come together in thinking about ASIO's surveillance of Australian writers internationally, beyond Australian borders, during the Cold War. Hardy's publications and travel in Europe, in the Eastern Bloc and in the USSR were closely followed by ASIO in the 1950s and 1960s, in an endeavour parallel and yet opposite to the kind of surveillance exercised over his notional enemies (as well as Hardy and his wife Rosslyn) by the Stasi or Soviet agencies in those countries. We could expect Hewett's publications and travel, in her case also to Eastern Europe and the USSR in the early 1950s, and further to Communist China, to be similarly scrutinised-and they were and yet were not, for reasons that are revealing. Both writers' ASIO files give us insight into the means by which state security secretly documented, and also shaped and to some extent directed, the lives and work of key Australian
The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this p... more The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use.
Journal of the association for the study of Australian literature, Aug 18, 2021
I start by acknowledging and offering my thanks to the Ngunnawal people, on whose land I live and... more I start by acknowledging and offering my thanks to the Ngunnawal people, on whose land I live and work. Their generosity seeks to keep those of us who live in the 'Canberra bubble' safe and educated about the land we occupy. I pay tribute to Elders past, present and emerging, and also to any First Nations people present for the initial online video delivery of this essay, in July 2020, including members of the Association for the Study of Australian Literature. When my colleague Paul Eggert retired from the University of New South Wales in Canberra, he passed on a portrait of the writer and critic Dorothy Auchterlonie Green that now hangs on my office wall. Paul was briefly a colleague of hers in the English discipline here and she is now a ghostly colleague of mine. In formulating this lecture in her name, I thought of her while we fight the same fights she fought-about the worth of literature and the humanities in contemporary education, now under multiform threat; about the uses of Australian literature, identified as such, in thinking and as thinking about the world. I thought about her involvement in the Vietnam moratorium marches and anti-nuclear protest, including protests at the Australian War Memorial against Australian involvement in what was argued to be Cold War aggression in South East Asia and even an imperial war. Anti-war protests, as well as protests calling for the inclusion of the Frontier Wars in AWM and ANZAC memorialisation, are now no longer allowed on any sites close to that institution. Green was a small but authoritative person and her speeches on the steps of the Canberra war memorial were apparently galvanising. I have always wanted to know what it took for Green to speak out, working for the ANU and UNSW at the Australian Defence Force Academy in the late 1960s and through the 1970s, as one of the few women with a relatively safe and senior academic role in literary studies in Australia. Biographies of Green haven't yet been able to tell us fully, waiting on access to more of her papers held in the UNSW Canberra Special Collections (McDonald 72-82, Modjeska), while in her own Dorothy Green lecture Susan Sheridan notes the irony of Green's position (156). This essay springs from the biography of a different Dorothy, eight years younger and with some shared characteristics, especially in voicing protest-on Dorothy Hewett's part reflecting a long and dedicated commitment to political activism, dating from 1945 when she joined the Communist Party of Australia. As photographic portraits of the two Dorothys can show, however, there were many real differences between them, too, and not least in how they thought about what it means to have had an impact on the history in which you participate. The historical character of literary protest was a pressing question for my talk, given under COVID conditions in July 2020, while the Black Lives Matter movement galvanised protests around the world, in the wake particularly of the police killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis on 25 May. Portrait of Dorothy Green. Private Collection. Photographer unknown.
Indeed, it has been said that as the nineteenth century is associated with the rationalization of... more Indeed, it has been said that as the nineteenth century is associated with the rationalization of production, so the twentieth will be known as the period of the rationalization of reproduction (Havelock Ellis, 1937).(1) The social management of nature-science-with its professional discourses of medicine, psychology and sexology, had perhaps already won interpretive control of the Western social subject, as body and mind, by 1937, when Havelock Ellis made this belatedly prophetic pronouncement.(2) The paradoxical figure of the embodied woman as a modern, rational subject was still a problem for those discourses, however. In many cultural and scientific ventures 'woman' featured as an opaque object of study, within which the natural manifested as the location of sexual difference, but her figure was also asserting a stronger role as a rational knowing subject. The problematic this provoked can be traced interestingly in the complex negotiations between sex and reproduction th...
Front matter and introduction available through Bloomsbury and Google preview: http://www.bloomsb... more Front matter and introduction available through Bloomsbury and Google preview: http://www.bloomsbury.com/au/censorship-and-the-limits-of-the-literary-9781628920109/ Though literature and censorship have been conceived as long-time adversaries, this collection seeks to understand, rather, the degree to which they have been dialectical terms, each producing the other, coeval and mutually constitutive. After the opening of the USSR’s spekstrahn, the enormous collections of literature forbidden under the Soviets, containing more than one million items, the push to redefine censorship so expansively has encountered cogent criticism. German scholars describing the centralised control of East German print publication, for example, have wanted to insist on the substantive difference of pre-publication state censorship from more mundane forms of speech regulation in democracies. Work on South African apartheid censorship and the operations of censorship in colonial countries is also demonstrating its formative role in the institutional structures of literature beyond the metropole. In light of these and other developments, Censorship and the Limits of the Literary examines a number of critical issues. Is literature ever without censorship? Does censorship need the literary? In a globalizing era for culture, does censorship represent the final (failed) version of national control?
Insofar as literature is defined negatively, by what it is not, censorship has had a determining ... more Insofar as literature is defined negatively, by what it is not, censorship has had a determining role in its historical constitution. Contemporary scholarship emphasizes the dynamic interplay between literary expression and forms of cultural regulation, recognizing its paradoxically productive capacity to generate as well as suppress meaning. At the same time, accounting for censorship’s role in the history of the world’s literature means coming to grips with the often brutal repression, prohibition, and persecution of writing, writers, performance, and cultural producers by sovereign power underwritten by violence. Tracing the genealogies of literary censorship, from its formulations in ancient Rome, through medieval religious persecution, sedition and heresy charges, theatre controls, early modern print and copyright licensing, to the seeming breakthroughs of the Enlightenment, details the interdependence of modernity and cultural regulation. At stake in this history are defining relations between culture and society, knowledge and power, not least in the manner in which literature traverses the boundary between public and private, and censorship polices that divide. The art-for-art’s-sake defense, which separates the literary from what is offensive—nominally from obscenity, pornography, libel, blasphemy, and sedition and effectively from politics, intimacy, and the real—stumbles and fails in the face of culture’s variant aims and readers’ differing pleasures. And the state’s use of the law to enforce its role as a custosmorum has placed not only art in opposition to the law, as Gustave Flaubert saw, but also culture in opposition to morality, when the state becomes the modern arbiter of culture’s social and political roles. The available frames for understanding censorship, from liberal, materialist, psychoanalytic, linguistic, and poststructuralist positions, face challenges from diversifying and yet synthesizing situations for literature in a global world.
A genuinely collaborative, cross-cultural examination of the publication and reception of Austral... more A genuinely collaborative, cross-cultural examination of the publication and reception of Australian literature in the German Democratic Republic, this work is a revealing case study for newly global accounts of the cultural Cold War. 'A compelling case study of the cultural Cold War and its effect on literary exchange.' — Professor Wenche Ommundsen, University of Wollongong 'This is considered, nuanced scholarship of a high order, [with] surprising and illuminating results, far beyond what might have been thought possible … There are few works of cultural history that offer such a stark and startling dialogic opening-up.' — Professor Nicholas Jose, University of Adelaide Exploring the imaginative construction of the post-colonial South by the communist East, this collaborative study of the reception of Australian literature in the German Democratic Republic has resonance for all newly global reckonings of the cultural Cold War.
Though literature and censorship have been conceived as long-time adversaries, this collection seeks to understand, rather, the degree to which they have been dialectical terms, each producing the other, coeval and mutually constitutive.
After the opening of the USSR’s spekstrahn, the enormous collections of literature forbidden under the Soviets, containing more than one million items, the push to redefine censorship so expansively has encountered cogent criticism. German scholars describing the centralised control of East German print publication, for example, have wanted to insist on the substantive difference of pre-publication state censorship from more mundane forms of speech regulation in democracies. Work on South African apartheid censorship and the operations of censorship in colonial countries is also demonstrating its formative role in the institutional structures of literature beyond the metropole. In light of these and other developments, Censorship and the Limits of the Literary examines a number of critical issues. Is literature ever without censorship? Does censorship need the literary? In a globalizing era for culture, does censorship represent the final (failed) version of national control?
Of particular interest has been the number of different countries from which manuscripts have bee... more Of particular interest has been the number of different countries from which manuscripts have been submitted. In addition to the United States and Canada, papers have come from fourteen others countries. Although the majority of the manuscripts come from the United States the percentage of submissions from other countries has increased in the last few months. Because an electronic journal is accessible worldwide it has always been editorial policy to serve the international medical physics community, and it is gratifying to see this taking place.
points to a certain tradition of collecting the prose of poets (4); this collection brings togeth... more points to a certain tradition of collecting the prose of poets (4); this collection brings together the literary criticism, political essays and writing on theatre of Dorothy Hewett, never only a poet. While Hewett's manifold achievements across diverse genres, especially poetry, have been well surveyed, her voice as a critic has remained historical, muffled by its scattered presence in small, even forgotten journals and magazines, and unavailable as a discrete body of work. Great affection remains for Hewett as a writer and figure, among her readers but also her witnesses, and this collection will find interest from many. Her trajectory, from young modernist to committed communist, to melodramatic apostate and then contrarian grande dame, can be traced in these pieces, and they are rich biographical resources for a commanding figure in Australian literature. But not only such-Hewett deserves to be read for her reach into Australian and international culture as a critic and commentator in her own right, and in her own changing times. Morrison has collected 32 pieces of Hewett's non-fiction prose, of differing size, weight and amplitude, grouped into three nominated sections, organised chronologically. The first of these presents literary critical pieces, and begins with two from 1945, when Hewett's poem 'Testament' had just won the ABC Poetry Competition and she was writing for Black Swan, the student magazine of the University of Western Australia. Two pieces of greater contrast are hard to find: one on the British modernist poet, eccentric and wit Edith Sitwell; the other on the recently published first volume of the goldfields trilogy completed by communist and West Australian Katharine Susannah Prichard. Written when she was not quite twenty-two, Hewett's piece on Sitwell is notably accomplished and striking now for its immediate address, as if Sitwell, her contemporaries, outlandish performative modernism, desiccated aristocratic family and committed readers were all directly present for the Black Swan, refusing volubly any imaging of Perth as a lonely outpost on the far edge of a mere former colony. The emphasis is on Sitwell's mythic self-fashioning, from the tawdry remnants of blasted Georgian England-'Enfant terrible of the twentieth century, with her patched ladies with parasols, walking in gold and tinsel landscapes, full of waterfalls, jewels and bear-dark woods … her own childhood appears again and again' (31). Hewett's assessment of Sitwell that 'to know her early work is to know her childhood' resonates of course with Hewett's own work, especially her poetry and 1990 autobiography Wild Card, and draws comparisons with Sitwell's own assessments of herself as both writer and figure. As a woman poet, she told Stephen Spender in 1946, 'there was no-one to point the way. I had to learn everything-learn, among other things, not to be timid.' Despite the tenderness and vulnerability often exhibited in Hewett's work, she was never accused of timidity. Her piece on Prichard contrasts in style, emphasis, weight and approach, as well as its topic. In a short, summative essay, Hewett delivers punchy characterisations in a declamatory style. Single sentence paragraphs dominate: 'There is always a sense of teeming vivid history in her characters and the events that shape their lives' (42). The Roaring Nineties carries Prichard's broadest attempt to cast Australian versions of egalitarianism as the building blocks for a socialist nationalism, sourced in a goldfields community democracy forged against 'the big money-grubbing operators who with backing from the Perth Parliament were Book reviews: Selected Prose of Dorothy Hewett edited and introduced by Fiona Morrison. Nicole Moore.
Communist of many years standing and a recognised troublemaker wherever he goes.' So begins the d... more Communist of many years standing and a recognised troublemaker wherever he goes.' So begins the dossier opening the Australian Security Intelligence Organisation (ASIO) file on Australian writer and union organiser Merv Lilley. He was later to become the third husband of the more prominent writer Dorothy Hewett, but in 1950 when his file was opened he was working as a miner, labourer and ship's crew out of the small coal and sugar ports of northern Queensland. 1 ASIO's descriptor serves as a useful title for this essay, which is more closely about Hewett and Australia's best-known Communist writer, Frank Hardy, because it concentrates the three tropes of recognition (figured as deliberated and yet suspicious observation), 'trouble', and travel, that come together in thinking about ASIO's surveillance of Australian writers internationally, beyond Australian borders, during the Cold War. Hardy's publications and travel in Europe, in the Eastern Bloc and in the USSR were closely followed by ASIO in the 1950s and 1960s, in an endeavour parallel and yet opposite to the kind of surveillance exercised over his notional enemies (as well as Hardy and his wife Rosslyn) by the Stasi or Soviet agencies in those countries. We could expect Hewett's publications and travel, in her case also to Eastern Europe and the USSR in the early 1950s, and further to Communist China, to be similarly scrutinised-and they were and yet were not, for reasons that are revealing. Both writers' ASIO files give us insight into the means by which state security secretly documented, and also shaped and to some extent directed, the lives and work of key Australian
The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this p... more The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use.
Journal of the association for the study of Australian literature, Aug 18, 2021
I start by acknowledging and offering my thanks to the Ngunnawal people, on whose land I live and... more I start by acknowledging and offering my thanks to the Ngunnawal people, on whose land I live and work. Their generosity seeks to keep those of us who live in the 'Canberra bubble' safe and educated about the land we occupy. I pay tribute to Elders past, present and emerging, and also to any First Nations people present for the initial online video delivery of this essay, in July 2020, including members of the Association for the Study of Australian Literature. When my colleague Paul Eggert retired from the University of New South Wales in Canberra, he passed on a portrait of the writer and critic Dorothy Auchterlonie Green that now hangs on my office wall. Paul was briefly a colleague of hers in the English discipline here and she is now a ghostly colleague of mine. In formulating this lecture in her name, I thought of her while we fight the same fights she fought-about the worth of literature and the humanities in contemporary education, now under multiform threat; about the uses of Australian literature, identified as such, in thinking and as thinking about the world. I thought about her involvement in the Vietnam moratorium marches and anti-nuclear protest, including protests at the Australian War Memorial against Australian involvement in what was argued to be Cold War aggression in South East Asia and even an imperial war. Anti-war protests, as well as protests calling for the inclusion of the Frontier Wars in AWM and ANZAC memorialisation, are now no longer allowed on any sites close to that institution. Green was a small but authoritative person and her speeches on the steps of the Canberra war memorial were apparently galvanising. I have always wanted to know what it took for Green to speak out, working for the ANU and UNSW at the Australian Defence Force Academy in the late 1960s and through the 1970s, as one of the few women with a relatively safe and senior academic role in literary studies in Australia. Biographies of Green haven't yet been able to tell us fully, waiting on access to more of her papers held in the UNSW Canberra Special Collections (McDonald 72-82, Modjeska), while in her own Dorothy Green lecture Susan Sheridan notes the irony of Green's position (156). This essay springs from the biography of a different Dorothy, eight years younger and with some shared characteristics, especially in voicing protest-on Dorothy Hewett's part reflecting a long and dedicated commitment to political activism, dating from 1945 when she joined the Communist Party of Australia. As photographic portraits of the two Dorothys can show, however, there were many real differences between them, too, and not least in how they thought about what it means to have had an impact on the history in which you participate. The historical character of literary protest was a pressing question for my talk, given under COVID conditions in July 2020, while the Black Lives Matter movement galvanised protests around the world, in the wake particularly of the police killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis on 25 May. Portrait of Dorothy Green. Private Collection. Photographer unknown.
Indeed, it has been said that as the nineteenth century is associated with the rationalization of... more Indeed, it has been said that as the nineteenth century is associated with the rationalization of production, so the twentieth will be known as the period of the rationalization of reproduction (Havelock Ellis, 1937).(1) The social management of nature-science-with its professional discourses of medicine, psychology and sexology, had perhaps already won interpretive control of the Western social subject, as body and mind, by 1937, when Havelock Ellis made this belatedly prophetic pronouncement.(2) The paradoxical figure of the embodied woman as a modern, rational subject was still a problem for those discourses, however. In many cultural and scientific ventures 'woman' featured as an opaque object of study, within which the natural manifested as the location of sexual difference, but her figure was also asserting a stronger role as a rational knowing subject. The problematic this provoked can be traced interestingly in the complex negotiations between sex and reproduction th...
Front matter and introduction available through Bloomsbury and Google preview: http://www.bloomsb... more Front matter and introduction available through Bloomsbury and Google preview: http://www.bloomsbury.com/au/censorship-and-the-limits-of-the-literary-9781628920109/ Though literature and censorship have been conceived as long-time adversaries, this collection seeks to understand, rather, the degree to which they have been dialectical terms, each producing the other, coeval and mutually constitutive. After the opening of the USSR’s spekstrahn, the enormous collections of literature forbidden under the Soviets, containing more than one million items, the push to redefine censorship so expansively has encountered cogent criticism. German scholars describing the centralised control of East German print publication, for example, have wanted to insist on the substantive difference of pre-publication state censorship from more mundane forms of speech regulation in democracies. Work on South African apartheid censorship and the operations of censorship in colonial countries is also demonstrating its formative role in the institutional structures of literature beyond the metropole. In light of these and other developments, Censorship and the Limits of the Literary examines a number of critical issues. Is literature ever without censorship? Does censorship need the literary? In a globalizing era for culture, does censorship represent the final (failed) version of national control?
Insofar as literature is defined negatively, by what it is not, censorship has had a determining ... more Insofar as literature is defined negatively, by what it is not, censorship has had a determining role in its historical constitution. Contemporary scholarship emphasizes the dynamic interplay between literary expression and forms of cultural regulation, recognizing its paradoxically productive capacity to generate as well as suppress meaning. At the same time, accounting for censorship’s role in the history of the world’s literature means coming to grips with the often brutal repression, prohibition, and persecution of writing, writers, performance, and cultural producers by sovereign power underwritten by violence. Tracing the genealogies of literary censorship, from its formulations in ancient Rome, through medieval religious persecution, sedition and heresy charges, theatre controls, early modern print and copyright licensing, to the seeming breakthroughs of the Enlightenment, details the interdependence of modernity and cultural regulation. At stake in this history are defining ...
In 2014, the MLA will release the first title on Australian and
New Zealand literatures in its O... more In 2014, the MLA will release the first title on Australian and
New Zealand literatures in its Options for Teaching series. The afternoon presents an opportunity to explore
contemporary issues for the study of Australian and
New Zealand literatures in international frames, to
investigate key debates in literary pedagogy, and to
think about how best to engage a new, worldwide
generation of readers in literature from Australasia.
With the volume still in development, the aim is to allow
plenty of time for audience discussion and engagement,
and to encourage feedback from potential users.
Uploads
Drafts by Nicole Moore
Books by Nicole Moore
'A compelling case study of the cultural Cold War and its effect on literary exchange.' — Professor Wenche Ommundsen, University of Wollongong
'This is considered, nuanced scholarship of a high order, [with] surprising and illuminating results, far beyond what might have been thought possible … There are few works of cultural history that offer such a stark and startling dialogic opening-up.' — Professor Nicholas Jose, University of Adelaide
Exploring the imaginative construction of the post-colonial South by the communist East, this collaborative study of the reception of Australian literature in the German Democratic Republic has resonance for all newly global reckonings of the cultural Cold War.
Though literature and censorship have been conceived as long-time adversaries, this collection seeks to understand, rather, the degree to which they have been dialectical terms, each producing the other, coeval and mutually constitutive.
After the opening of the USSR’s spekstrahn, the enormous collections of literature forbidden under the Soviets, containing more than one million items, the push to redefine censorship so expansively has encountered cogent criticism. German scholars describing the centralised control of East German print publication, for example, have wanted to insist on the substantive difference of pre-publication state censorship from more mundane forms of speech regulation in democracies. Work on South African apartheid censorship and the operations of censorship in colonial countries is also demonstrating its formative role in the institutional structures of literature beyond the metropole. In light of these and other developments, Censorship and the Limits of the Literary examines a number of critical issues. Is literature ever without censorship? Does censorship need the literary? In a globalizing era for culture, does censorship represent the final (failed) version of national control?
Papers by Nicole Moore
'A compelling case study of the cultural Cold War and its effect on literary exchange.' — Professor Wenche Ommundsen, University of Wollongong
'This is considered, nuanced scholarship of a high order, [with] surprising and illuminating results, far beyond what might have been thought possible … There are few works of cultural history that offer such a stark and startling dialogic opening-up.' — Professor Nicholas Jose, University of Adelaide
Exploring the imaginative construction of the post-colonial South by the communist East, this collaborative study of the reception of Australian literature in the German Democratic Republic has resonance for all newly global reckonings of the cultural Cold War.
Though literature and censorship have been conceived as long-time adversaries, this collection seeks to understand, rather, the degree to which they have been dialectical terms, each producing the other, coeval and mutually constitutive.
After the opening of the USSR’s spekstrahn, the enormous collections of literature forbidden under the Soviets, containing more than one million items, the push to redefine censorship so expansively has encountered cogent criticism. German scholars describing the centralised control of East German print publication, for example, have wanted to insist on the substantive difference of pre-publication state censorship from more mundane forms of speech regulation in democracies. Work on South African apartheid censorship and the operations of censorship in colonial countries is also demonstrating its formative role in the institutional structures of literature beyond the metropole. In light of these and other developments, Censorship and the Limits of the Literary examines a number of critical issues. Is literature ever without censorship? Does censorship need the literary? In a globalizing era for culture, does censorship represent the final (failed) version of national control?
New Zealand literatures in its Options for Teaching series. The afternoon presents an opportunity to explore
contemporary issues for the study of Australian and
New Zealand literatures in international frames, to
investigate key debates in literary pedagogy, and to
think about how best to engage a new, worldwide
generation of readers in literature from Australasia.
With the volume still in development, the aim is to allow
plenty of time for audience discussion and engagement,
and to encourage feedback from potential users.