Literature and Science

http://www.aal.asn.au/conference/2010/program/index.shtml

Program

Literature and Science Programme      Day 1:  Monday, July 5

08.30 - 09.15 Registration
Robert Webster Building (RWB), Landing, Lvl 2
09.15 - 10.30 Welcome: Prof James Donald (Dean FASS, UNSW)
Keynote: Prof Brian Boyd
Psychology and Literature: Mindful Close Reading Macauley Theatre, Quad Building
10.30 - 11.00 Morning tea
RWB, Landing, Lvl 2
  RWB137 RWB138 RWB251 RWB256
11.00 - 12.30

Philosophy and Science

Sara Wellman, University of Minnesota

Accessing science through literature in Fontenelle’s Conversations on the Plurality of Inhabited Worlds

Matthew Holt, UTS


The Fictional Origin of Scientific Consciousness: The Cartesian Cogito and the ‘madness’ of autonomy

Poetics 1

Gavin Smith, UWS

Poetry and the Mind: Cognition and the Nature of the Poetic Object

Dr Louise Fairfax, UMelb


Literature as catalyst of scientific change: Blake and Goethe, rebels of their age

Jason Tuckwell,  UWS


Indeterminate Signs: some speculative questions

Experimental Writing 1

Vivienne Glance, UWA

Performing the politics of science

Rachel Funari, Monash University

Intention, Presence and Multiplicity: A Complementary Reading of Michael Frayn's Copenhagen

Assoc Prof Paul Brown (UNSW) and Dr James Arvanitakis, UWS

Theatrical knowledge experiments at the arts-science interface

The Geological

Dr Michael Christie, Independent

Understanding the geological sublime? Andrew McGahan’s Wonders of a Godless World and Ian McEwan’s Solar

Laura Olcelli, USyd

Postcards from the Grand Tour: Sublime Geological Change and Curious Natural Disaster

Dr Shé Mackenzie Hawke, USyd

Water: A missing link in Darwinism recovered in eco-criticism

12.30 - 1.30

Lunch
RWB, Landing, Lvl 2

  RWB137 RWB138 RWB251 RWB256
1.30 - 3.00

Ian McEwan

Susan Green, Macquarie University

Ian McEwan: A New Kind of Science Fiction

Suzanne McDonald, UQ

“Physics was free of human taint”: A Darwinian Exploration of Science and Ethics in Ian McEwan’s Solar

Hannah Courtney, UNSW

Science ‘versus’ Literature in Ian McEwan’s Saturday

Science Fiction 1

Christopher Palmer, La Trobe University

Nature as Agent in Recent Australasian Science Fiction

David Large, USyd

Omega Points: The Guiding Principle of Hybridity in Dan Simmons' Hyperion Cantos

Ms Radhiah Zaman Chowdhury, USyd

Constructing Heroes out of Killers: Militaristic Science Fiction as Morality Play in Orson Scott Card’s Ender’s Game

Monsters

Kay Rozynski, UWS

Diving into the monster: excursions into evil with Jennifer Maiden’s hierophanic theory of poetry

Evelyn Tsitas, RMIT

Posthuman evolution in science fiction: development of a unique lifecycle for cyborgs and scientifically created human monsters.

Dr Chris Danta, UNSW

Anatomy of the Fable: Dr Moreau and the Aesthetics of Monstrosity

Australian and
New Zealand Ecology

Frances Kelly, University of Auckland

Of Weasels and Magpies: Ecological Awareness in Recent Neo-Victorian New Zealand Fiction

Alison Jeffreys, University of Auckland

Ecosemiosis and Women’s Poetry of New Zealand, Australia and New Zealand, 1920s to 1940s

Emma Joel, University of Newcastle

Eatdirtzian Geosophy: Exploring the interface between Geography and Literary Criticism

3.00 - 3.30 Afternoon tea
RWB, Landing, Lvl 2
  RWB137 RWB138 RWB251 RWB256
3.30 - 5.00

Poetics 2

Dr Bryan Walpert, Massey University

Poetry and Science: Knowledge as Intervention

Assoc Prof David G. Butt, Macquarie University

 “Reductio ad absurdum”: the ‘EPR’ experiment as method in physics and poetry

Stephen Lawrence, University of Adelaide

Conflict and union: Science in recent Australian poetry

Tragic Weather

Jennifer Hamilton, UNSW

Literary Meteorology: the performativity of a storm           

Mehran Mortezaei, UWS

The Structure of Classic Tragedy within a Thermodynamic Framework

Thomas Ford, Monash University

The climate of Romantic culture

Psychoanalysis and Psychiatry

Dr Ehsan Azari, UWS

Science in Lacan’s literary theory

Josh Mei-Ling Dubrau, UNSW

Russian Futurism and the Lacanian Real: Formulating a Psychopoetics of Zaum

Dr Judith Seaboyer, UQ

Border Raiding: The Intersection of Psychotherapy and Neuroscience in Pat Barker’s Another Worldand Border Crossing

 

 Neuroscience

Nicole Heber, UMelb

The Novel, the Neuroscience, and the Two Cultures

Zachary Norwood, University of Auckland

Neurocriticism and Divergent Reader-REsponse to Shakespear's Coriolanus: Nature, Nurture, or B

Prof Julian Murphet, UNSW

Characterology and Neuroscience: a loose democracy in the skull

 

5.30 - 6.00

Keynote: Prof Claire Colebrook
Theory After Vitalism
Macauley Theatre, Quad Building

6.30 - 6.45

Australasian Association for Literature Annual General Meeting
Macauley Theatre, Quad Building

7pm

Drinks and Dinner
at the Doncaster Hotel, 268 Anzac Pde, Kensington

 

Literature and Science Programme      Day 2:  Tuesday, July 6

09.00 - 10.00 Keynote: Prof Paul Giles
Ontologies of Time Travel: History, Literature, and Science
Macauley Theatre, Quad Building
10.00 - 10.30 Morning tea
RWB, Landing, Lvl 2
  RWB137 RWB138 RWB251 RWB256
10.30 - 12.00

Experimental Writing 2

Prof Stephen Muecke, UNSW

A Metaphysics of Writing: Reproduction and Vitality

Carol Jenkins, Independent

Literature—An ongoing experiment with 26 variables.

Martin Harrison, UTS

Figure, Thought, Writing

 

Writing Science

Michaela Spencer, UMelb

Of Forests and Farmland: Holding nature writing and scientific method in an informative relation

Dr Clare Archer-Lean, University of the Sunshine Coast

The Human as Story: The Literary in Popular Science Writing

 Dr Julie Robert, UTS

Fractured Bodies: Flawed Tropes of Québécois Nationhood

The Body

Jacinta Kelly, UNSW

"A Trickle of Saliva": Excavating the body in Mina Loy's poetry

James Gourley, UWS

Beginning to       Re-think Cannibalism Without the Abject

Dr Russell Smith, ANU

'Perhaps it is liquefied brian': The physiology of tears in Samuel Beckett's post-war writing

 

Poetics 3

Dr Robert Phiddian, Prof Ian Gibbins and Assoc Prof Haydon Manning; all Flinders University

Recognition, Disgust and the Effects of Political Satire

Assoc Prof Anthony Uhlmann, UWS


Ethics, Ethology and Art

Prof Chris Ackerley, University of Otago

An Unbearable Thereness of Being: the Problem of Validity

12.00 - 1.00

Lunch
RWB, Landing, Lvl 2

  RWB137 RWB138 RWB251 RWB256
1.00 - 2.30

Modernism

Dr John Attridge, UNSW

Four Types of Secret Agency: Conrad, Causation and Popular Spy Fiction

Fiona Burrows, UWA

“Street Lamps like Fatalistic Drums”: Poetry and Synesthesia in the Early Twentieth Century

Andrew Yerkes, Nanyang Technological University

The Biological Grotesque in Sherwood Anderson’s Winesburg, Ohio

 

Media Bodies

Jan Jamieson, ANU

Metaphor and the Language of Infertility

Dr Olivia Harvey, UNSW

Mass media and the regenerative subject: How reading Althusser might illuminate the future of the market for new medical technologies

Casimir MacGregor, Macquarie University

Engaging the Public’s Scientific Identity: Fantasies of Human Cloning in the Australian Human Embryonic Stem Cell and Cloning Debate in an Age of Mediapolitik

 

Classification

Lindsay Tuggle, USyd

The Afterlives of “Specimens”: The Intersection of Surgical and Medical Practices in Whitman’s Civil War Texts

Dr Julieanne Lamond and Dr Mark Reid; both ANU

Reading the stats: tackling library loans records with statistical machine learning

Tiffany Hambley, UNSW

Where Science and Literature Collide: A Literature of Taxonomies, and the Impulse to Collect, Sort and Classify

The Neurotic

Annette Upfal, UNSW

The intersection of Literature and Science: Jane Austen’s The History of England and the problematic issue of her relationship with her mother

Luke Johnson, UTS

The Neurotic in Nana

Naomi Stekelenburg, University of Sunshine Coast

Gestaut-Geschwind Syndrome and the Nature of Literature

 

2.30 - 3.00 Afternoon tea
RWB, Landing, Lvl 2
  RWB137 RWB138 RWB251 RWB256
3.00 - 4.30

Evo-Devo

Dr Michelle Smith, Deakin University

On the Origin of Men: Boyhood, Darwinism and Tarzan of the Apes

Gustavo Generani, Macquarie University

The Island of Doctor Morean by H.G Wells: a Political Fiction on a Political Use of Science

 

 

Modernist Aesthetics

Pauline Farley, UWA

A boy’s own paradigm: ‘scientists’ in the 20th century English children’s annual

Mark Steven, USyd

The Poetry of Science: On William Carlos Williams’ Paterson

Tom Lee, UWS

The Period of Critical Periods: A reading in relation to Alfred North Whitehead’s philosophy and W. G. Sebald’s prose

 

Science Fiction 2

Elizabeth Hayes, University of Newcastle

Cyberpunk and Dystopia in William Gibson’s Virtual Light

Joy Wallace and John O’Carroll; both Charles Sturt University

Challenging the Present in Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow

Dr Phoebe Poon, UNSW

The Quest for Immortality in Doctor Who (2005-present) 

Material Minds

Assoc Prof Helen Groth, UNSW

Magical Optics and the Science of Reading Scott's 'Letters on Demonology and Witchcraft' and David Brewster's 'Letters on Natural Magic'

Dr Charles Wolfe, USyd

Materialism and dreams in Diderot's D'Alembert's Dream

Prof John Sutton, Macquarie University

Anachronism in the cognitive life of things: early modern distributed cognition 

 

4.30 - 6.00

Victorian Science

Dr Chris Worth, Monash University

Ruskin Renames Nature

Heidi Logan, University of Auckland

The Representation of Sensory Disability in two novels of Wilkie Collins

Patrick Marland, USyd

"Hard Facts": Scientific Discourse, Nineteenth-Century Fiction and Dickens 

Film

Christine Yu-Ting Hung, UWS

To See is to Believe? The Relationship between Popular Memory and Technology in Hou Hsiao-hsien’s Good Men, Good Women

Scarlett Somlo, UWS

Self-Destruction and Self-Construction: The Search for Personal Identity in Fight Club

Assoc Prof Anna Gibbs, UWS

Mimesis as a Mode of Knowing: the Aesthetic Practice of Jean Painlevé

Astronomy

Michael Buhagiar, USyd

Aeschylus and Astronomy

Elizabeth Treep, University of Auckland

Star Finder and Moon Raker: astronomy and the astronomer in Eve Langley’s Land of the Long White Cloud.

Meegan Capsopoulos, USyd

“Things Mysterious, Immortal, Starry”: John Keats and the Herschelian Universe

Meta-Polemics

Assoc Prof Roslynn Haynes, UNSW

Re-presenting Darwin: The Elephant in the Room

Dr Paul Sheehan, Macquarie University

Continental Drift: The Clash Between Literary Theory and Cognitive Literary Studies

Prof James Franklin, UNSW

Explaining science for the humanities crowd: try a 'clash of the titans' script