Category: Blog

By James Jiang Few words have performed as much public service of late as character.[1] With the resignation of Barnaby Joyce as the National Party Leader and Deputy Prime Minister, we may finally be getting an end to the use and abuse of this c-word. Nationals MP Andrew Broad weighed into the controversy by quoting American Baptist minister Billy Graham: “When character is lost, all is lost”. Liberal MP Andrew Hastie quickly followed up by insisting that Joyce had failed “that character test” apparently required by deputy-prime-ministerial office. Joyce himself paid lip service to the term by referring to his…

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By James Jiang     This Valentine’s Day marks the twenty-fourth anniversary of the death of the American historian and cultural critic, Christopher Lasch. Best known for The Culture of Narcissism (1979), a trenchant critique of the therapeutic sensibility that had supplanted religious conscience and political conviction as the cornerstone of American social thought, Lasch would seem an odd figure to invoke on this particular saint day. But by the mid-eighties, Lasch had begun conceiving of a project tentatively titled The Domestication of Eros, which he described as an attempt “to trace the interconnections between the modern ideology of intimacy,…

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By James Jiang   “You don’t have to have read a book to have an opinion on it. … I don’t read novels. I prefer good literary criticism. That way, you get both the novelist’s ideas as well as the critic’s thinking.” So says Tom Townsend, the strait-laced Princeton undergraduate who inadvertently falls in with a group of New York debutantes in Whit Stillman’s preppy comedy Metropolitan (1990). No, he hasn’t read Mansfield Park, he confesses to the Fanny Price-like heroine Audrey Rouget, but he has read Lionel Trilling’s essay on the novel. He hasn’t read the Bible either, but…

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By Nasrin Mahoutchi-Hosaini Karl-Heinz Stierle writes, “The prototype of the narrator, is the storyteller. We have a quite definite conception of him: he is old rather than young; in fairytales he is the kind uncle or—if it is a woman—the kind aunt or grandmother. He does not stand up, but is seated—in an armchair, on a sofa, or by the fireplace. His hour is evening, after work. He likes to interrupt his story in order to have a puff on his pipe or cigar (rarely a cigarette!). His movements are slow; he takes his time, looking at his audience one…

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By Nasrin Mahoutchi-Hosaini The modern Persian short story is almost a century old and arrived to Persia via the translation of writers such as Chekhov, Poe, Kafka, and Gogol. When in 20’s and 30’s the Iranian government aimed at modernising the country it allowed  university students to travel to foreign countries and, among  other skills, to acquire  new skills in language and  translation. Therefore, as with other fictional forms ofwriting, the Persian short story has been strongly influenced by the techniques and styles of Western Literature and adapted them into its own socio-political cultural demands. Although the modern Persian short…

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By Nasrin Mahoutchi-Hosaini A new diverse and dynamic literary landscape has emerged since the 1978-79 revolution in Iran, “…a fusion of creative resistance and resistant creatively[1].” New male and female writers have succeeded in bringing fresh aesthetic principals to the era. In fact one of the remarkable achievements of modernity in Iran is the inclusion of Iranian womens’ voices in literature. For example, Zoya Pirzad, Farideh Golbu, Fariba Vafi and Shiva Arastui are female writer who have diverged from social realism and employed post modern techniques, as enchanting to the reader as free air. They were eager to experiment and…

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By Nasrin Mahoutchi-Hosaini During the war between Iran and Iraq (1980-1988), there were constant curfews and darkness. My family used one of our big family rooms to sit, eat, read and even sleep in. At night, it was like a dark classroom with students from different ages sitting side by side, reading and writing diverse materials. My sister’s two boys, who were year one and year four, would lie down on the carpet side by side. My sister would read from their school books, giving them spelling tests. Under candlelight, my father would  study the newspaper. Next to him, using…

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By Chloe Wilson I attended Catholic schools and went through all their various rituals: dreaming up things to confess to our sleepy parish priest; allowing communion wafers to adhere to my palate; flicking through hymn books to find the most amusing hymn to request during singing practice in the chapel (the winner was typically ‘God of Abraham’, as it had seventeen verses and we all liked to see if the choirmaster would endure the entire thing[1]). But no-one ever attempted to describe the afterlife to us. It was tacitly agreed that there was one, and that God’s huge eye could…

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By Chloe Wilson Headline writers seem to find toilets irresistible. Search for the Faggiano Museum in Lecce, Puglia, and the title of every result will mention that its existence is owed to a broken toilet and one man’s obsessive quest to restore functional sanitation. The story is true: Luciano Faggiano bought a property near the town’s Roman ampitheatre with the intention of turning it into a trattoria. However, sewerage kept backing up. Faggiano therefore began to search for the broken pipe which was causing the problem. In doing so, he inadvertently began a full-scale clandestine archeological excavation. He told neither…

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By Chloe Wilson I’m not sure what drew me to read the one- and two-star reviews for Palermo’s Catacombe dei Cappuccini (Capuchin Catacombs). Perhaps it was their inherent potential for absurdity — there’s something so tenaciously churlish in taking the time and effort to write a scathing review of a centuries old burial site. How had so many people been unable to resist? The reviews I read ranged from the practical (‘The times posted for admission were DEAD wrong [pun intended]’) to the frugal (‘No reduced price for kids’) to a slew of inexplicable comments which expressed visitors’ surprise and…

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By Chloe Wilson In Palermo, I came across a portrait of a rather unhappy-looking nun. The image was cluttered with accoutrements demonstrating her piety: a spindly bunch of white flowers, a crucifix, a crown of thorns. For all that, her expression was sullen, or bored; she sat slouched with her eyes half-closed and her mouth half-open. The sitter in the portrait was Isabella Tomasi di Lampedusa, or as she was later known, Sister Maria Crocifissa della Concezione. She had entered the convent in Palma di Montechiaro at age fifteen, after a childhood spent giving long orations, voluntarily undertaking difficult manual…

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