Booking Form

The 2011 Duchesne College Summer Schools

Classics in the Colonnades

Tuesday 22 November — Friday 25 November 2011

Dear Friends of the Summer Schools

I have heard many wonderful things about the Summer Schools and I am confident that our next offerings will deliver an exciting and satisfying experience for all lovers of English literature. You will see below the information which has been provided thus far by our presenters.

For information concerning costs and booking details, please click here. And do inform others who have not yet had the pleasure of attending ‘Classics in the Colonnades’.

Best wishes…Denis Brosnan (d.brosnan@duchesne.uq.edu.au)

Jane Austen

PRIDE AND PREJUDICE - the World's Most Popular Novel

It is almost 200 years since Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice was first published in 1813, and in that time it has delighted millions of readers around the world as a novel, as a movie, TV series, musical, play, comic, and so many other forms. It has been prequelled and sequelled, adapted, zombies have been added to it, and its famous opening sentence has been used in the most astonishing number of ways, but no amount of fiddling around can ever diminish the incredible charm and brilliance of this book.

This course will look at many different aspects of Pride and Prejudice - we will discuss its themes, its gorgeous heroine Elizabeth Bennet and the hero every woman adores, Mr Darcy. We will look at its style, its wonderful comedy, and what it has to say on social issues such as the position of women. You will enjoy extracts from several film versions, learn something of the extraordinary after-life of the original novel, and be entertained by Pride and Prejudice games and quizzes.

Join Susannah Fullerton, President of the Jane Austen Society of Australia and author of Jane Austen and Crime, and Dr Joanna Penglase, editor of the Jane Austen Society of Australia journal Sensibilities, and author, for a wonderful few days immersed in Pride and Prejudice.

Shakespeare

Ulysses: A Guided Tour - the 8th Annual James Joyce School

Ulysses and beyond

The Story So Far... I

This year, we left off about half way through “Ithaca,” which gives us 1½ chapters to go. “Penelope” will probably be one we want to take slowly. For a start, it’s a chapter that carries an enormous amount of the back-story of the Blooms’ life together. Writing it while he was correcting proofs and placards of the earlier chapters, Joyce repeatedly took the opportunity of inserting this new material back into the earlier parts of the book. Careful reading will reveal a lot of this. Molly’s habit of using pronouns instead of names will probably also make us slow down, if we’re to find out just who it might be that she’s thinking of at any particular point. It may let us find an answer to a question that readers often disagree on: how many lovers has Molly had during her marriage? “Ithaca,” after all, does have a list of 25 men it associates with her, beginning with the young Lieutenant Mulvey in Gibraltar and ending with “Hugh E. (Blazes) Boylan and so each and so on to nolast term,” but it’s hardly probable as a list of Molly’s lovers. ( I mean, Maggot O’Reilly, the Lord Mayor, and a bootblack at the Post Office? Really?) I think this is more like a list of men Bloom’s noticed looking lustfully at her. My hypothesis is that she’s had one lover during her marriage, and he’s not on that list. We can see if that works next year.

Still, with only 1½ chapters to go, we may finish before the four days are up. The idea is to use whatever time we have left to follow through some more back-stories. Many of the minor characters in Ulysses come into the stories of Dubliners, so we’ll trace through some of these. So, get out your Dubliners. Later on, we’ll email suggestions about the stories to focus on, and ask you for your suggestions.

In 2012, we’re planning a foray into Finnegans Wake, with a tour of some half-dozen or so of its high spots—and there are plenty of them to keep us busy. The Wake has a reputation for fearsome unreadability, and there are certainly passages of it that justify that. I think that like Ulysses it’s also a deeply funny and generous book, and that it has in it some of the greatest passages you’ll find anywhere in twentieth-century literature. We’ll circulate material on the Wake well in advance. It’ll be something to look forward to.

The Story So Far... II

If you haven’t yet seen Robert Berry’s Ulysses Seen, you should: http://ulyssesseen.com. It’s that utterly improbable thing, an attempt to turn all of Ulysses into a graphic novel. He’s now completed the first chapter, “Telemachus.” There are always going to be different opinions of how he’s doing it, but you’ve got to admire the sheer chutzpah of it. Long may he continue.

Joyce in Pasadena

The 22nd North American Joyce Conference is to be held in Pasadena and San Marino, California, 12-16 June. Sessions will be at the Huntington Library, which is one of the largest research libraries in the United States. It’s being held in conjunction with the Arroyo Literary Festival, which will feature readings from Joyce by Angelica Huston (pending confirmation), and poetry from Paul Muldoon, Eavan Boland and others. And of course you can add Californian sun and wine to that, and the promise of some post-conference tours. Tempting?

You can get the details at http://www.joyceconference2011.com/huntington.html. The Conference also has its own Facebook page, at http://www.facebook.com/event.php?eid=110186285713881.

Best wishes….Tony Thwaites

The Presenters

The Shakespeare School is led by Victoria Bladen who obtained degrees in Arts and Law and an M.Phil. (Medieval and Renaissance Studies) from the University of Western Australia. In 2009 she received her Ph.D. from The University of Queensland with an interdisciplinary thesis entitled Imagining the Tree of Life: The Language of Trees in Renaissance Literary and Visual Landscapes. She has published articles on Shakespeare, Shakespearean film, and Andrew Marvell, in Australia and France, the most recent of which is on Cymbeline in an essay collection Rapt in Secret Studies: Emerging Shakespeares, edited by Darryl Chalk and Lawrence Johnson and published in 2010 by Cambridge Scholars Publishing. Also due shortly is an article on Titus Andronicus in the volume This Earthly Stage: World and Stage in Medieval and Early Modern Europe, published by Brepols and edited by Brett D. Hirsch and Christopher Wortham. She has two articles forthcoming in 2011: an art historical article on “Imagining Zeus and the Zeus of Olympia in early modern culture” in the volume The Statue of Zeus of Olympia: New Perspectives, edited by Tom Stevenson and published by Cambridge Scholars Publishing; and an article entitled “The Ghost and the skull: borders between life and death in filmed Hamlets” to be published in France by the Université du Havre in the volume Shakespeare on Screen: Hamlet, edited by Sarah Hatchuel and Nathalie Vienne-Guerrin.

Victoria has taught in courses on Shakespeare, Renaissance Literature, Renaissance and Baroque Art, Art and Science, and Literary Classics at UQ. She has recently completed a secondary school guide to Romeo and Juliet, to be published by Insight Publications, Melbourne in 2011. In 2010 the Université du Havre funded her presentation at the Shakespeare on Screen: Hamlet conference in Le Havre. She also recently presented a paper “Spherical and Circular Spaces in King Lear and the Bell Shakespeare’s 2010 production” at the Shakespearean Spaces conference, Hobart, part of the inaugural Australian Shakespeare Festival. In 2011, she will co-convene an international panel on Macbeth on screen at the World Shakespeare Congress in Prague with Professors Sarah Hatchuel and Nathalie Vienne-Guerrin.

Dan O'Neill is one of the legendary teachers and scholars of UQ, with a vast fund of knowledge from the classics to the modern, and has been honoured with a university teaching award. Since his retirement from the School of English, Media Studies and Art History a few years ago, he has initiated a number of ongoing and eagerly-attended reading groups, on topics as diverse as Proust, Dante, Don Quixote, Wordsworth and literary theory.