The Melbourne School of Literature
MSL Semester 2: Enrolments now open
TheoryGirl™ goes to Canberra
Lecturer: Stephen Muecke
Wednesdays 6–8pm, 7 August – 4 September 2024, online (Zoom)
Course description: My title is a riff on Lauren Berlant’s 1997 book, The Queen of America Goes to Washington City, which was about the shrinking role of citizenship and public life in the US. Update: things have gotten worse. More recently she said, ‘We are theorists because we don’t have a world yet.
“Theory Girl” made an appearance in my Children’s Country book, visiting from Paris to go on a walking trail led by Goolarabooloo people out of Broome. At the end, she came up with the best line in the book: ‘Nature and God, opposite poles of the same fucked metaphysic.’ (p. 187). 23 years old, and a student of Bruno Latour, Héloïse d’Étanges is about to descend on Canberra to tell our political leaders how to recompose the world completely in five easy lessons. Turns out, after talking to the Goolarabooloo mob, there are some practical ways do Science, the Law, Economics, Politics and the Arts differently…
John Milton: Print, Poetry, Revolution
Lecturer: Ruby Lowe
Thursdays 6–8pm, 8 August – 5 September 2024, Kathleen Syme Library (in-person only, recordings uploaded each week)
Course description: This course will provide an introduction to the writings of John Milton by contextualising his major poetic and political works within the media and political revolutions that defined 17th-century Britain. We will begin with Areopagitica (1644), Milton’s famous argument for freedom of speech, and take a tour through his early poetry and prose to witness how Milton’s poetic voice was honed in the popular print culture that flourished during the English Civil Wars and Revolution.
We will then proceed to a close reading of Paradise Lost (1667), concentrating on how Milton’s experiments with religious, political, and literary form placed him at the center of the most important public debates of his period, and imbued his work with an intellectual liveliness and sense of immediacy.