I haven’t posted a lot here (or anywhere, really) for a couple of months mainly because I’ve been working on organising a very beautiful conference which is happening in Melbourne in late November. Getting an event like this together is a phenomenal timesink (I’m so glad we decided not to go for the extra day), and I’ve also had more than a few bad nights’ sleep worrying over near catastrophes, sudden budget blowouts, and frightening emails from stern scholarly gods and goddesses on the other side of the world, but as it inches together I can see it’s really going to be a thing of absolute beauty. It’s almost all done now - I think - and I hope you won’t regard it as an abuse of your attention if I tell you about it, and perhaps even ask for a bit of your help getting the word out, if you feel so inclined.
The conference theme is Jane Austen - specifically, Austen as a comic writer - and even more specifically, what happens to Austen’s comedy when her work is translated into other languages and read in cultures quite distant from the one she wrote her novels in. We’ve put the bulk of our limited funds into bringing out to Australia speakers from developing countries, people who would never normally be able to participate in an event like this simply because of the economic disparities, and they’re going to talk about topics that really will throw fresh light on Austen. For example we have a very distinguished Indian scholar who’s going to talk about how Pride and Prejudice, without doubt the ultimate and original romance novel, goes over in a culture where it’s traditionally asumed that romantic love develops after marriage, not before.
There will be a nice mixture of Australians and international people, of senior types and those of us who are just starting out. And ah yes, there will be bloggers: Sophie C. and Dr. Cat will be on the plenary panel about the overlays and intertwinings of fiction and biography. And further, there are other kinds of reasons to be excited about the people who’ll be speaking: Julia Zemiro is going to be doing a comedy show to kick off the cocktail hour on the first day, and on the opening night, Professor Germaine Greer is giving a public lecture on Jane Austen. I’m biased but I think Professor Greer’s lecture (28 Nov, Capitol Theatre, tickets on sale now) is going to be the event of the year. Fingers crossed that it all goes smoothly….
OK, so if you think you might like to come to the conference, or the lecture, or you perhaps know a Janeite (Austen fan) who would be interested, your first port of call is the conference website at http://austen2007.net. Don’t wait too long to book lecture tickets as there aren’t that many. Here’s a flier with the details.
Excellent, Laura.
Thank you Sir
Great post and what a brilliant basis upon which to confer! Good luck with it.
Hope everything goes really smoothly and there are no snafus in any way, shape or form. I don’t envy you the work that’s gone into organising this.
Sounds fabulous, Laura. And certain to draw in a bloggy audience (the Julia Z fan club as well as the bloggers!)… the Indian paper will be quite fascinating, particularly given Bride & Prejudice.
Great for Greer alone, like St Crispin’s day.
Loved “Emma”- a beautiful gem of a little novel.
This week we had the philosopher Simon Blackburn in Adelaide and time was spent on David Hume, a supposed serious influence on Austen, which thus reminds this writer of an article on the evolution of identity ( protagonist, individual, self, person etc ).
Also recalled a darker thing; the famine in Bengal in 1770 induced by Clive that killed many millions of people. Apparently the the wider Austen family and its affilliates were themselves associated with a century of miltary freebooting ( Dukes of Chandos, Harding), which presents a sort of dark contrast as to attitude strangely reminiscint of our own time, contrasting to the genteel home counties world of Emma.
The postcolonial discourse later expanded to involve Canon writers like Conrad and Cahrlotte Bronte, whose Mad Woman in the Attic of “Jane Eyre” notoriety later found her own oppressed voice a century later in the Jean Rhyss novel, “Wide Sargasso Sea.
Bad times for women and subalterns.
…for me to poop on.
Good luck with the project though. Can’t say I’ll be going as Pride & Prejudice used up all its good will by page 100 during high school. However, I did like Clueless, so there you go.
Gotcha conference lobby card right here.
“Knock, knock”
“Who’s there?’
“Emma”
“Emma who?”
“Emma going to continue to converse with you through your door Mr Knightley or will you let me in ‘cos I’ve got some really hot goss about that bitch Augusta?”
How many naval officers does it take to light a candle?
Oh who cares. He’s rolling in it now.
No, no need to thank me. I’m doing it for the kids.
Sounds like fun though. Doc Greer and Julia Z on the same bill alone would certainly “make sport for our neighbours, and laugh at them in our turn.”
Laura, will circulate URL, flier on my mailing lists and ask comrades to forward on to interested people. Contacts not all political -some literary and history types, but can’t guarantee any responses as Armidale is a long, long way from Melbourne. But all the best for the conference. Hope it goes very very well. Looks fascinating.
Thanks all, for the good wishes just as much as the offers to circulate. Can struggle on with out the poop, though, thanks Craig. You really should give P & P another go, it’s pure joy.
Paul Walter, there is a book called “Jane Austen and the Black Hole of British History”, by Gideon Polya, which deals with exactly the topics you mentioned - eg the Austen family’s connection with Warren Hastings. Jane’s mother was a near relative of the Duke of Chandos. The more general theory goes that Austen is so popular in large part because she screens out these horrible things. Debatable. But interesting.
Good one Laura.
Those with a wickedly humorous literary bent may want to to check out Jasper Fforde’s Thursday Next series of books. The most recent features a fiendish plot to turn Pride and Prejudice into a ‘reality book’ called The Bennetts.
Damn, Jasper fForde (perfect name-casting), like Terry Prachett and JK Rowling, has found an excellent eccentric-Anglo, quirky-jerky, snob-lite fantasy fiction market niche and is working it with great professionalism, talent and style. All power to their elbows I say. I’d do it too if I wasn’t so easily bored by my own writing.
But I do have this nagging feeling that the Robert Johnson of this current current in Brit-lit slipstream fabulism, Douglas Adams, would also smell an element of commercial calculation starting to overide the sheer joy of making up your own personal sardonic fantasia. Not that that’s anything wrong with that per se. But being praised for your imagination while recycling the same tropes over and again cannot ultimately be healthy for the praised or the praisers.
At least Alan Moore’s still out there, “operating without any decent restraint, totally beyond the pale of any acceptable human conduct.”
Yes, the unpublished paper I remember reading a while back suggested a few million at least in Bengal circa 1770, perhaps many, many, many more. And not the only famine the Brits induced in India over their protracted stay, so let’s not think of the Irish Potato Famine as anomolous. The last in India, again centred in Bengal, was during WW2 when rice harvests were expropriated away from the peasantry, presumably for the war effort, once again at a cost of millions of lives.
No black arm bands, but it is disturbing to find some of these things out in middle-age.
No use talking about Hitler or Stalin after reading this stuff; to parts of the Third World it may well turn out that WE are seen as just the fascists or occupiers that the movies taught us to see the nazis as. For good reason?
So, Austen produces beautiful literature about an era and in this era filmmakers like Lean and Merchant-Ivory and many Americans, say, on contemporary topics produce marvellous films on human nature, that are very true to the milleiu (s) within which they are located. But without malice or consciousness they obscure other stories needing a telling that also deal with “character” or meanness.
Meanwhile worse and worse jingoistic rubbish is produced now, as in the past, that valorises a Bruce Willis as a modern day Beau Geste say, crashing through barbarian “terrorist” rebels without ever explaining why “terrorists” become “terrorists”.
Yet Ned Kelly was more or less considered a “terrorist” from a certain point of view; from the mainstream press of his day. But from the point of view of many working class Australians he has been a hero, resisting the authoritarianism and heartless greed and corruption of wealthy Establishent toffs and bosses.
Taking it further, academics like Prof. Marilyn Lake in turn may query the heroic convict image, pointing also to women like Louisa Lawson as the true founders of this country, having to deal with both the elements and a brutal and brutalised male workforce and culture.
Certainly the new narrative suggests at the least that women also must have played a role in modern Australia’s birth; that it was not exclusively bronzed Anzacs while women sat on their tuffets sipping tea and reading the Weekly.
I should go into Aborigine narratives( including their scarcity through attrition? ). But am tired now and will leave it to reader’s imaginations.
Thanks for reference, Laura.
James Ivory is an American.
You should perhaps actually read PC Wren. While big chunks of “Beau Geste” and “Beau Sabreur” and “Beau Ideal” and many of his short stories are set in North Africa, you’d be surrised at how little the locals impinge on his elaborately plotted stories of Edwardian style subtle revenge and humilation scenarios and caste and rank mindgames.
Well obviously I meant “surprised”.
But I now do kinda like the heft and feel of that tipsy neologism “surrised”.
“We surmised we wouldn’t be surprised Mr President but it appears we were wrong.”
“Yer saying yer were surrised?”
“That’s about the shape of it Mr President.”
“Goddamn it, our great nation should never be surrised. Make damn sure it never happens again General!”
“I feel embiggened already, Sir.”
I don’t know what your field is, Paul, but this kind of work started being done in various branches of Australian Studies decades ago. Brian Matthews wrote a ground-breaking biography of Louisa Lawson in 1988. And if you read Judith Wright’s essay ‘The Upside-Down Hut’, reprinted in various places since she wrote it in 1964, you’ll see that the ‘heroic convict’ image is a relatively new idea, a construct of 1970s movies and TV, which was in its turn questioning the earlier notion of a convict background as something shameful.
If you want an absolutely brilliant on-the-spot as-it-was-all-happening analysis of the colonial relation to Britain in the 19th century and the problematic relationships among the categories of history, writers and class, all you need to do is read Great Expectations. (Reading between the lines, of course, which is how fiction is supposed to work.)
There’s an 1854 (I think) Australian novel called Clara Morison, by South Australian suffragette and heroine Catherine Helen Spence (the woman on the $5 note) that powerfully makes this very point — it’s set in Adelaide during the Ballarat gold rush, and the men all rush madly across the border like gold-drunk lemmings while the women stay at home building a community and a town and becoming self-sufficient.
From the line you’re running about Austen and England’s atrocities, I think I could almost put a name to the person who’s been teaching you, but as Laura says, this point is debatable. Austen’s novels (and by extension ‘literature’ in general) can peacefully co-exist with non-Anglocentric revisionist histories.
Sorry, enough with the Miss Hathaway already. I thought I’d fixed my name already up there.
By their gravvies ye shall know them, though.
Ah, 19th century Australia, referred to by one English visitor as being “heaven for men and dogs and hell for women and horses”.
Her work is done [link]
Good grief, what has happened here as I slept?
Firstly, Greg M.
My suspicion is that that much of the nineteenth century would have harsh and rough for both sexes bar the privileged few. We know well enough of convicts having the skin flayed off their backs by the likes of Rev. Marsden doing the 1830’s version of “workchoices”. But the reality of a huge aspect of colonial life that had previously remained beneath my radar, exposed through poems like “Drovers Wife” was a revelation that stopped me in my tracks. As did postcolonial narratives from an “other” point of view.
As I understand it people who Hathaway seems to belittle, but of great intelligence and diligence patiently unearthed, thought over and presented fine art like Louisa Lawsons that was good enough to help add to our understanding of ourselves.
BTW, must before going further must explode the sneaky misrepresentation of the Hathaway alleging I claim Austen novels and other fine literature cannot coexist with what she(?)describes in crudley reductionist terms as, “non anglocentric revisionist histores”.
She has the cheek to invoke Laura as referee, but anyone reading my post will recognise that my position is diametrically opposed to the one Hathaway alleges of me.
And yes, have read and really enjoyed “Clara Morrison”, so we are not totally at odds Hathaway, thank heavens for small mercies . Maybe not quite in the same league as her contemporary Charlotte Bronte, but a superbly-crafted little gem operating within the the probably consciously self-imposed limitations accepted by the young writer, that ought to wipe away notions of “cultural cringe” for anyone who takes the time to read it. The young woman who wrote the novel did eventually had a profound impact on the political and social development of the reasonably civilised state I’ve spent most of my life living in, so time to say thank you, Catherine Helen..
As to Nabakov, that was precisely the point I was trying to make. The locals remain “invisible”-oddly enough a feeling that permeated Spences book as a colonial reacting to anglocentrism.
Paul, let’s drop the Hathaway nonsense (a stupid cross-thread narrative I should never have engaged with) for a start and for good, though the misidentification is entirely my bad for not attending to LP’s predictive text name thingy. I am Pavlov’s Cat and shall continue to be so.
Now then, Paul W: frankly I can’t make head or tail of what you’re talking about, and can’t even begin to disentangle what you think I said or what you think I thought you said, so I won’t attempt to. Except to say that there was no belittling, no alleging and no sneakiness intended, and you are imagining animus where there was none.
If you don’t want your comments engaged with or discussed, then perhaps you should add a rider to that effect at the end. I certainly won’t do it again.
I’m pretty sure Lake was arguing along those lines in the ’80s also, indeed could be seen as working alongside that trend in Australian studies over the period you refer to PC.
If I am deciphering Paul’s points correctly, I think there are some good ones in there, but I agree with PC that her interjection shouldn’t be read as an instance of animosity, or an imperative to read in one way or another exclusively. I would try not to assume that a literary text - indeed any text, no matter how partial - was primarily or fundamentally an instance of ‘false consciousness’, even if I was going to offer a reading in terms of its partiality or tendency to obscure this or that (which I’m quite likely to do in my own work.)
Ah, thank you, Adam; I begin to see the odd beam of light.
Briefly and for the record:
1) I was not intending to attack Marilyn Lake, whose work I admire, but merely to point out that much work has been done in this field over a long time and by a wide variety of people in several different disciplines.
2) I was not using ‘revisionist’ in its negative or post-David Irving sense, but rather in the sense in which Larry McMurtry writes revisionist westerns. As far as I am concerned, non-anglocentric revisionist histories are a good thing, and I was using the phrase to describe a particular approach to history. It would only be ‘crudely reductionist’ if I were applying it as a description of a particular text. Which I wasn’t.
That is all.
I also forgot to mention: I really appreciated the reference to Judith Wright. There are some fascinating things within Wright’s body of work, and I’ll be sure to chase that piece up. Point 2 was also clear to me, but the word ‘revisionist’ is prone to misreading at this moment, as you suggest, PC. These kinds of discussions have unfortunately inherited a whole lot of polemical overtones and associations.
Also, my final sentence was mainly directed at Paul, because I feel like it was implied in your position already Dr Cat.
Pavlov’s cat. or Hathaway’s what not… or whoever you are (why don’t you just use your name and be responsible for your comments)I in turn am baffled by your comments concerning mine.
Is it personal?
Will go back and reread both lots, but for the life of me cannot understand where the mix up is for you, unless its personal because I am south australian and not a liberal voter.
If I wasn’t convinced of your hostility from earlier threads surely am now.
Thanks for this Laura.
Have just booked for the lecture on line. Will we party on after the lecture?
Those ungovernable South Australian non-liberal voters. Can they discuss anything without it becoming personal?
My thoughts exactly, from my readings of the last Saturday morning train to Port Adelaide.
Rider: I do not want my comments discussed or in any way engaged-with. Not like that’s ever a problem, naturally.
Nicholas, glad you’re coming along. I will certainly let you (and everyone else who’s asked) know about partying on afterwards possibilities. I would love to, but whether I can make it depends on what the rest of the committee decide on. No reason I need to be present at any bloggy get-together, of course.
BYO bonnets and barouche-landaus.