The Teaching Australian Literature (TAL) team invite you to have a look at the newly developed Teaching Aust. Lit. Resource on the AustLit site: http://teaching.austlit.edu.au/. Developing this resource has been part of the ALTC funded Teaching Australian Literature Survey project. The Resource compiles data about Australian literature teaching organised by institution, course, unit, and texts studied. This data is available through a searchable web interface so that users can quickly find information about where and in what context Australian literary texts are taught and the types of assessment undertaken, providing links to relevant university websites in schools and departments at universities around the country. We are also keen to develop the international content, so please let us know about your courses in Australian literature, film, Indigenous studies, life writing, poetry and etc.

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Workshop for postgraduate students and interested members of the public hosted by the English Department at the Free University of Berlin and The Ludwig Hirschfeld-Mack Chair of Interdisciplinary Australian Studies at the Free University of Berlin to inaugurate a joint PhD programme between the Free University of Berlin and the University of Western Australia:

“Australian Literature Local and Global”

Wednesday 17 February 2010 – 10:00-15:00, at the Free University of Berlin, “Rostlaube”-Complex, Habelschwerdter Allee 45, 14195 Berlin-Dahlem, Seminar Centre Room L 116

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Just a reminder that abstracts for ASAL 2010 are due 19 February 2010.

The theme of the ASAL 2010 conference is “Archive Madness”, and aims to promote and enable consideration of the limits of disciplinary borders and the revival of the archive in literary analysis. The title echoes and redirects Derrida’s famous study “Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression”. Archive fever is, for Derrida, is “a compulsive, repetitive, and nostalgic desire for the archive, an irrepressible desire to return to the origin, a homesickness, a nostalgia for the return to the most archaic place of absolute commencement” (p. 91.) The archive is simultaneously a site of revelation and concealment, both of which are accorded the authority of the actual trace. (more…)

The following new online resource may be of interest to members and friends of ASAL:

http://www.apfa.esrc.unimelb.edu.au/home.html

Master classes and symposium in textual studies

19-20 March 2010
Woolley Building University of Sydney

See http://www.unsw.adfa.edu.au/hass/conferences/book_logic.html

Conveners: Paul Eggert and Robert Dixon

The master classes and symposium are intended to be accessible to non-experts. Honours year and postgraduate students, as well as academics and others wishing to get up to scratch with current thinking and practice in textual studies, scholarly editing and the editing of student editions of literary works will benefit from this event.

An open meeting to discuss the state of textual studies in Australia and New Zealand, and the development and funding of electronically-based editions will also be held.

Topics covered: the editing of works from the early modern period to the present, including works of Australian literature; editorial theory, book history and print culture, editorial practice, manuscript study and online editions.

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