The ARC Centre of Excellence for the History of Emotions (Europe 1100–1800) presents: Symposium The Literary Academy Since 1968: Moods and Modes

DATE: Friday 2 March 2018 TIME: 8.30am–5pm VENUE: Toowong Rowing Club 37 Keith St The St Lucia REGISTRATIONS: Register online by Wednesday 28 February: https://survey.its.uq.edu.au/checkbox/ The-Literary-Academy-Since-1968.aspx

All welcome.

KEYNOTE SPEAKERS

• Professor Simon During (The ) • Professor John Frow (The )

PANEL SPEAKERS

• Dr Marion J. Campbell (The University of Melbourne) • Dr Ben Etherington (Western Sydney University) • Dr Tom Ford (The University of Melbourne) • Professor Ronan McDonald (The University of Melbourne) • Dr Alys Moody (Macquarie University)

RESPONDENTS:

This symposium will explore the trajectory of university English as experienced by • Professor Gillian Whitlock the generation that came of age around 1968. It’s an eventful history that includes, (The University of Queensland) among much else: the ‘theory moment’; professionalisation; the emergence of • Professor Ian Hunter so-called identity politics; and the arrival of managerialism in the university. The (The University of Queensland) symposium asks: What is the relation between that history and 1968? What intellectual commitments and affective dispositions did it afford? What structures and interests drove it? What were its triumphs and failures? Does it have a future? Image: Kazimir Malevich, Suprematist Composition (1916). Leave a legacy? Courtesy of Wikimedia Commons. Literary Academy Since 1968: Moods and Modes Symposium

FRIDAY 2 MARCH 2018 8.30–9am Arrival and coffee 9–9.15am Welcome KEYNOTE LECTURE 9.15–10.30am Simon During (The University of Melbourne), ‘Literary Academia, 1968–: From a Career to a History’ 10.30–11am Morning tea PANEL ONE 11am–12.30pm Marion J. Campbell (The University of Melbourne), ‘“With loss of Eden”: Narratives of Decline After the Revolution’ Rónán McDonald (The University of Melbourne), ‘Tough-Minded Moods: Critique and the Institution’ Ben Etherington (Western Sydney University), ‘Scripsi and the Shape of Australian Literary Conservatism Post-1968’ 12.30–1.30pm Lunch KEYNOTE LECTURE 1.30–2.30pm John Frow (The University of Sydney), ‘Ecologies of Literary Studies’ PANEL TWO 2.30–3.30pm Thomas H. Ford (The University of Melbourne), ‘Romanticism After 1968’ Alys Moody (Macquarie University), ‘The Pedagogy of 1968: Literary Education and the Demand for Relevance’ DISCUSSION 3.30–5pm Respondents: Gillian Whitlock and Ian Hunter (The University of Queensland)) 5pm Wine and cheese; launch of Nick Luke’s Shakespearean Arrivals: The Birth of Character (Cambridge University Press, 2018)

ABSTRACTS AND ‘ECOLOGIES OF LITERARY STUDIES’ BIOGRAPHIES John Frow (The University of Sydney) We have a lot of anecdotal evidence that English, and literary studies more generally, is in decline in Australian universities. In order to start looking for an appropriate language to talk KEYNOTE LECTURES about this I explore three questions posing alternative ways of approaching it: • How has the discipline of literary studies gone wrong? (Which wrong intellectual moves has it made over the last ‘LITERARY ACADEMIA, 1968–: half-century?) FROM A CAREER TO A HISTORY’ Simon During (The University of Melbourne) • How did the discipline actually succeed, but then get sabotaged, by the changing institutional forces of the university? This paper uses my own trajectory as a portal into the history of literary studies in • Did the discipline succeed, but somewhere else or in the post-sixties era. That allows it to another way? present the remarkable intellectual history of literary academia in the period in relation I then develop the concept of ‘disciplinary ecologies’ as a way of of a number of forces, including the power of getting beyond some of the more familiar languages with which networks and patronage, the emergence of we tend to discuss academic disciplines. neoliberalism and managerialism, and literature’s loss of cultural capital. John Frow failed to change the world in 1968. He left the academic life in disgust but returned to it in 1971, studying at and the Simon During is an Honorary Professor at The University of Heidelberg. Since then he has taught at , University of Melbourne. He has previously The University of Queensland, The , The University worked at The University of Queensland and Johns of Melbourne, and The University of Sydney, where he now ekes out his Hopkins University, among other institutions. His days. He is the author of Marxism and Literary History (Harvard University books include Modern Enchantments: The Cultural Press, 1986), and Cultural Value (Clarendon Press, 1995), Power of Secular Magic (Harvard University Press, Time and Commodity Culture (Clarendon Press, 1997), Accounting for 2004) and Against Democracy: Literary Experience in Tastes: Australian Everyday Cultures (with Tony Bennett and Mike the Era of Emancipations (Fordham University Emmison, Cambridge University Press, 1999), Genre (Routledge, Press, 2012). He is currently working on a book on 2006/2015), The Practice of Value (UWA Publishing, 2013), and Character the Idea of the Humanities. and Person (Oxford University Press, 2014/2016). His latest book, On Interpretive Conflict, is currently looking for a home. PANEL PAPERS

‘“WITH LOSS OF EDEN”: NARRATIVES OF institutional bohemian pose whilst anchoring its structure of DECLINE AFTER THE REVOLUTION’ values firmly and uncritically in a European canonical mode. It gave a platform to apparently left, even radical, emerging Marion J. Campbell (The University of Melbourne) writers, not in order to give expression to those critical energies but to manage them. The paper will end with a After the destruction of his Republican program with the consideration of Scripsi’s legacy as manifested in the approach 1660 Restoration of a Stuart King, John Milton published to acquisitions taken by Michael Heyward’s publishing house, an epic poem that traced his culture’s primal narrative of Text Publishing, and the critical oeuvre of Peter Craven. failure and hope, the Biblical story of the ‘Fall of Man’. But rather than representing the Fall as a single moment of BEN ETHERINGTON is Senior Lecturer in English at Western Sydney explanatory origin, Paradise Lost repeats and disseminates University and a member of the Writing and Society Research Centre. He is currently writing a history of poetry in Anglophone Caribbean its agency and effects. An important historical tradition creoles spanning the period from the end of slavery to the Second persistently identifies Satan as the source of doubling and World War. He is author of Literary Primitivism (Stanford University division; but recently more critical attention has been paid Press, 2018) and, with Jarad Zimbler, the editor of The Cambridge to the separated moments of the ‘fall of woman’ and the Companion to World Literature (Cambridge University Press, ‘fall of man’. The initial acts of both sin and repentance forthcoming 2018). belong to ‘much deceived, much failing, hapless Eve’; her moral choices determine the poem’s action and her reproductive body carries into the future sin and its ‘ROMANTICISM AFTER 1968’ consequences. The emergence of feminism after 1968 as Thomas H. Ford (The University of Melbourne) critical paradigm and political movement has had a radical influence on how we read Milton’s poem; and of course on Since its establishment within the university, literary studies contemporary sexual and social relations inside and has been organised into fields that have been primarily outside the University. historical in nature. Although this institutional principle was While I do not propose to represent Paradise Lost as an more or less constant in operation through the twentieth allegory of the fate of ‘University English’ after 1968, I century – persisting across the break of ’68, for instance – the argue that a trajectory of loss is a key element of the relations between fields, their internal formations and their stories we tell ourselves about the last fifty years of our relative gravities within the larger system were all transfigured discipline; and that Milton’s version of the ‘loss of Eden’ in ways that are often illegible in historical accounts of the may open up some new ways of thinking about the literary academy as a whole. In this paper, I tell the story of ‘triumphs and failures’ of literary studies within a studies in Romanticism after ’68, focusing on three aspects in corporate University. In particular, and following Milton, I which wider transformations of literary studies were inflected want to emphasise sexual politics at the centre of post- in particular field-specific ways. The post-’68 uptake of literary revolutionary hope and despair. theory was characteristically pursued in a mood of historical self-reflection, given Romanticism’s prominence as a moment MARION J. CAMPBELL taught English Literature at The University when literature and literary theory were first articulated in of Melbourne for thirty years. She specialises in generic, something close to their contemporary senses. Romantic historicist and feminist approaches to writings in English in the studies was also a significant site of revisionary feminist and seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. new historicist contestation which, in comparison with work in earlier modern periods, tended to lean towards Marx rather Foucault, and operated more with the concept of ideology than ‘SCRIPSI AND THE SHAPE OF AUSTRALIAN of power. Finally, the field was central to the emergence of LITERARY CONSERVATISM POST-1968’ eco-criticism, and so to the ongoing realignment of the Ben Etherington (Western Sydney University) humanities in response to a sense of contemporary environmental crisis that can also be traced back to around Conservative positions are often conflated with reactionary ’68. I draw on some minor events and often overlooked ones in the debates conducted among liberal and socialist elements of the ’68 moment to suggest critical legacies that literary theorists and critics. Rather than understanding remain to be developed in Romantic studies, looking, in conservatism as an ideology that manages change in particular, at Robert Smithson’s tour of picturesque England in accordance with institutional and cultural precedents, 1969, and ’s 1970 translation of Leo Spitzer’s conservatism is made to be the straw man of dogmatic essay on ‘Linguistics and Literary History’. reaction. The ideological flexibility of conservatism thus tends to be underestimated and the conservative elements THOMAS H. FORD is a lecturer in English at The University of within ostensibly left cultural discussions misrecognised. Melbourne. A Cultural History of Climate Change, co-edited with Tom Bristow, was published by Routledge in 2016, and his new book, Such misrecognitions are especially common when it Wordsworth and the Poetics of Air: Atmospheric Romanticism in a Time of comes to the discussion of 1968 and its intellectual Climate Change, will be out in April 2018 from Cambridge University Press. aftermath. As a date that connotes youthful rebellion against all ‘status quos’ (a term, the use of which spiked through the 1960s) it seems inherently opposed to any TOUGH-MINDED MOODS: conservative cultural project. In this paper I want to CRITIQUE AND THE INSTITUTION consider how those of a conservative disposition who came Rónán McDonald (The University of Melbourne) of age in ’68 absorbed the spirit of their time yet prosecuted conservative cultural agendas. I will argue that The recent kerfuffle in literary studies against ‘critique’ does bohemianism offered itself as way of taking on the not always name 1968 as a significant moment. The genealogy appearance of rebellion whilst using it to police cultural of critical thought, with deep roots in the Enlightenment and in change. This larger claim will be substantiated with a the triumvirate of Nietzsche, Freud and Marx, goes back much discussion of the emergence of Scripsi magazine in the further than that year. However, much of the spirit of 1980s. I will show how the magazine adopted an anti- ideological suspicion that the recent anti-critique polemics THE PEDAGOGY OF 1968: LITERARY EDUCATION target took hold in the late 1960s. Perry Anderson’s landmark AND THE DEMAND FOR RELEVANCE 1968 essay, ‘Components of National Culture’, identifies sociology as the ‘absent centre’ of British intellectual life and Alys Moody (Macquarie University) deals a serious blow to literary criticism as an autonomous and inductive academic practice. Through waves of subsequent The 1968 student protests were remarkable, among other neo-Marxist, structuralist and postcolonial approaches, things, for their sustained focus on questions of pedagogy. As literature was analysed as part of social processes with a student protests, they took the university as their ground of political, rather than an artistic, emphasis. There was an ethic organisation, calling for a ‘relevant’ education that would of ground clearing, of the exposure of mystification and connect the university classroom with the world beyond its ideological befuddlement, especially around a category like walls and place student needs and interests at the centre of the ‘literary value’. pedagogical scene. Such calls were particularly challenging for literary studies, which, in the decades after World War II, It is precisely the disposition and attitude of critique that are developed its institutional status in part by overlaying claims to targeted by Rita Felski and her allies in the current move to aesthetic autonomy with claims to the autonomy of the expose its limits. Her disquiet is not only with the critical method university, most canonically through the institutional success of but also with the critical mood, which allegedly possesses an the New Criticism. The student activists of the 1960s, in identifiable rhetoric and affective disposition: knowing irony and contrast, advocated for a fundamental rethinking of university cynicism, a tendency to debunk and demystify, a forensic and teaching, which called into question the claims to autonomy dispassionate tone. The allure of the clear-sighted in modern shared by both the university and literature itself. In so doing, critical discourse, the charisma of unveiling, also has they not only challenged the hegemony of the New Criticism as institutional dimensions, to which Felski has paid less attention. a critical and pedagogical method, but also introduced a new One of the appeals of critique, one of the reasons for its success vocabulary for thinking about the goal of a literary education in the final decades of the twentieth century, is that it had the and its relation to society and to political action. advantage, in institutional terms, of allying intellectual tough- mindedness with ethical purpose. Critique imparted a sense of The student activists’ language of ‘relevant’ and ‘student- solid knowledge acquisition, a dispassionate and serious attitude centered’ education has found a welcoming home in the that chimed with the protocols of the modern university. It neoliberal university, where it has been repurposed to imagine tended towards convergent solutions to, and determinate social students no longer as revolutionary subjects or self-realised causes of, the meaning of a text. Whether the more numinous, individuals, but as future employees and consumers. But is this phenomenological criticism advocated by the post-critique all that is left of the pedagogy of 1968? This paper investigates enthusiasts can pass institutional muster so effectively remains the legacy of 1968’s pedagogical innovations and their questionable. For all the radicalism of the ’68 moment, and for implications for literary studies in the academy, suggesting all its targeting of the ‘status quo’, it may have chimed more with that the co-option of the dream of a relevant education by the institutional norms than the more ineffable and elusive question neoliberal academy has also been accompanied in recent years of literary value sought in previous generations and which is now by a reprisal of these ambitions in both contemporary student re-emerging within literary studies. activism and the impulses of the so-called ‘post-critique’ moment in criticism and theory. RÓNÁN MCDONALD took up the Gerry Higgins Chair in Irish Studies at The University of Melbourne in early 2018. His research interests include ALYS MOODY is a lecturer in English at Macquarie University, where she modern Irish literature and culture, modernism, theories of cultural teaches modernism and world literature. Her first book, The Art of value and the role of the humanities in the modern university. His books Hunger, is forthcoming from Oxford University Press in 2018. With include Tragedy and Irish Literature (Palgrave Macmillan, 2002), The Stephen J. Ross, she is currently editing an anthology of source texts for Cambridge Introduction to Samuel Beckett (Cambridge University Press, global modernism, which will be published with Bloomsbury in 2019. 2006) and The Death of the Critic (Continuum, 2007). Recent edited collections include The Values of Literary Studies: Critical Institutions, Scholarly Agendas (Cambridge University Press, 2015) and Flann O’Brien and Modernism (with J. Murphet and S. Morrell, Bloomsbury, 2014). His next monograph is The Irish Revival and the Crisis of Value, which will be published by Cambridge University Press in 2019.

EMOTIONS MAKE HISTORY