School of Culture and Communication - Research Publications
Permanent URI for this collection
Search Results
1 - 10 of 18
-
ItemMaster Class, by David Pownall(Coghill, 1987)
-
ItemThree Sisters, by Anton Chekhov(Coghill, 1988)
-
ItemThe Lonely Passion of Judith Hearne, by Brian Moore(Coghill, 1987)
-
ItemAmy’s Children, by Olga Masters(Coghill, 1989)
-
ItemTelevision: presenting the memory machine( 1987)This essay situates developments in contemporary television in relation to the dominant social relations of time. It argues that time is a perpetual ‘problem’ for television, extending beyond the terms of configuring narrative formats and strategies of visual reflexivity, and instead indicating deeper epistemological and existential issues. While contemporary television programming often seems driven by a desire to give viewers the immediacy of a perpetual ‘now’, this creates a series of increasingly intense contradictions concerning the social experience of time and the functioning of memory.
-
ItemDiscipline and Discipleship( 1988)The transfer of knowledges is almost always mediated by institutions and by authorized persons. I set up some metaphors in this paper to try to examine these mediating processes by which knowledges are both reproduced and transformed. In particular, I take psychoanalytic andreligious training as metaphors for the transmission of a discipline, and then I briefly extend the figure of discipleship to talk about literary pedagogy and the training of graduate students.
-
ItemAccounting for tastes: some problems in Bourdieu's sociology of culture( 1987)Pierre Bourdieu's Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste completes what is perhaps the strongest case we have about the social functions of cultural artefacts; but it is a case that is deeply flawed. In this article I try to isolate some of the theoretical presuppositions and implications of its central concepts, and to clarify their political limitations.
-
ItemThe margins of the law( 1988-02)Text reviewed Roberto Mangabeira Unger, The Critical Legal Studies Movement. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1986. 128pp. One of the most powerful current readings of the law is that developed, as an “expansion of doctrine” by Roberto Mangabeira Unger. This reading begins with an acceptance of “the mimimal characteristics of doctrine - the willingness to take the extant authoritative materials as starting points and the claim to normative authority” (15). It accepts the historical givenness of doctrine, that is to say; but then pushes on from there to the point where doctrine crosses over into ideological conflict. This is the reading, in other words, of a “double inscription” it explores the “internal development” (2) of legal categories (for example, the causal categories embedded in notions such as imputed purpose), but it then tries to open this development out into a recognition and a deepening of the clash between contradictory principles. Legal categories are so closely tied in with the structure of the world that to contest them, or to elaborate them to the point of contradiction, is to challenge the naturalness and the necessity of that structure. Such a method of reading derives its political force from its belief that “the focussed disputes of legal doctrine repeatedly threaten to escalate into struggles over the basic imaginative structure of social existence”
-
ItemThe marks of want and care(McPhee-Gribble, 1988)It is not true that time heals all wounds. Some wounds linger on until the wounded die and their pain is forgotten. A generation of Australians harboured searing memories of the 1890s depression - of hunger, cold, bewilderment, humiliation and fear. But they are gone now, and their memories with them. If the depression is remembered at all, it is for the bank crashes of 1893, which produced panic among the propertied class. The working people and the unemployed who felt the chill most severely left few written records. Here, as in so many other areas of Australian life, the privilege of being remembered, being included in ‘history’, has been open to only a few. But why would anyone want to re-live the sufferings of a dead generation? Perhaps because so many of the institutions we take for granted began as attempts to do something about the effects of the 1890s crisis. Federation, state welfare, arbitration and the rise of the Labor Party all date back to that time. The crisis also ushered in profound changes in family life. As earlier chapters have discussed, the 1890s marked the beginning of the trend towards smaller families, with all that it implies for the way that people organize their lives. If the memory of the 1890s has gone, its legacy is still with us.
-
ItemFormal Method in Discourse Analysis( 1989)Developing a workable method of discourse analysis matters, presumably, and if it does, because it would allow us to demonstrate the play of power in language, the play of ideology. To demonstrate means being able to substantiate arguments in the public arena – to politicians, in courts of law, in hospitals or prisons or museums. What we envisage is something like the possibility of proof. We envisage, not a political process of judgement, but procedures of demonstration which could be mechanically repeated to produce identical results, and so bear witness to the underlying structure which causes them. Discourse analysis, like other uncertain knowledges, aspires to a state of hardness. My tone of irony covers a real ambivalence about this project, these projects, and certainly I intend no easy dismissal of them. Here I want to raise a series of questions about some of the work being done in and around the Dutch Konteksten series, especially by Tony Hak and Brian Torode;1 and to see whether it might be possible to define some of the limits touched by this raw, exploratory, interesting work. This is not, even in the case of individual writers, a unified body of research, but it has certain common points of reference. One of them is the ethnomethodological conversation analysis of Sacks and Schegloff; the other, more properly linguistic, is the work of Michel Pêcheux, and to a certain extent the analytic methods of Zellig Harris. The attraction of Pêcheux’s work is, I think, that it promises a rigorous and quasigrammatical account of presupposition: that is, the concept of the preconstructed promises direct access to ideology insofar as it appears to be equivalent to the Gramscian categories of 'common sense' – the obvious, the unthought, the taken-for-granted; and insofar as it both embodies these in a particular grammatical construction and relates them to a particular process of subject formation.