articles by Melissa Hardie
Textual Practice, 2020
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Textual Practice, 2020
The celebrity novel seeks to cordone a ground of protected or heightened speech by demarcating th... more The celebrity novel seeks to cordone a ground of protected or heightened speech by demarcating that speech as literary and formal, with the privileges that literary form provides. A novel genre such as Bildungsroman serves this purpose especially well since its generic affordances both bolster claims to literary distinctiveness and arguably mechanise or at least facilitate the reorientation of historical events and facts into literary plot and character. I focus on Ivana Trump’s 1992 celebrity novel object For Love Alone and the telemovie made of it several years later. Trump’s storyline centres on the novelistic ‘private’ experience of adultery and the reaction to it registered in public action. As such, its calculation of the formation of identity is an important registration of what Corey Robin describes as the ‘reactionary mind’. The novel object offers ‘bad Bildung’ in generic, psychical and political terms. The mise-en-scene of the telemovie motivates and expresses the formation of ‘bad’ character and a more social conceptualisation of Bildung as shared enterprise. That sharing is mediated through the article as a variety of social media, televisual collaboration, and the financialisation of the family.
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Australian Humanities Review, 2020
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Film Quarterly, 2019
Can You Ever Forgive Me? adapts Lee Israel's 2008 memoir of the same name to offer a biographical... more Can You Ever Forgive Me? adapts Lee Israel's 2008 memoir of the same name to offer a biographical portrait that challenges conventional ideas of ‘psychological ‘insight and development. In their place the film offers a celebration of the aesthetic labour of creating and being a fake. Lee Israel's success as a biographer sees her absent herself in favour of the voice of her subjects but this means she is perversely well-placed to begin their impersonation when financial hardship strikes. Melissa McCarthy's galvanising performance as Lee translates the comic gestures of heist and buddy movie into a more subtle meditation on the performative nature of identity, its fakery as well as its attachment to craft and profession. The film is similarly interested in crafting mises-en-scene of detailed period style, evoking the cinematic scene itself as the product of a style of fakery aligned with queer style and sensibility.
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Journal of Language, Literature and Culture, 2019
These three short papers were initially formulated as contributions to a roundtable discussion on... more These three short papers were initially formulated as contributions to a roundtable discussion on The Novel and Media held at Harvard University’s Mahindra Humanities
Center in May 2018. Their brief was to contribute to the recent project of methodological reflection set in train by a resurgence of formalist analysis in literary criticism by thinking about the intersection of the novel form, novel theory, and media studies; at the most general level our challenge was to reflect upon the relation between the medium and the form of the literary text, and beyond that about the relation between the print medium in which the novel originated and the other media which form its environment and on which it frequently reflects. We start, then, with a
reading of one of the most influential recent attempts to rethink formalist analysis,
Caroline Levine’s Forms; John Frow contrasts her project with Jonathan Grossman’s
Kittlerian reading of The Pickwick Papers in terms of the relation between two
media of communication (coaching and the postal service) and the two novelistic
forms that ‘correspond’ to them, in order to open up some questions about the limits
and the appropriate focus of an analysis of novelistic forms. Melissa Hardie then moves to a consideration of the novelistic medium at its most material, taking the ‘queer materiality’ of Alvin Lustig’s 1948 jacket design for Djuna Barnes’s Nightwood as an index both of the ‘pulp’ presentation by which modernist texts acquired a wider readership and of the ‘queer ekphrasis’ of the novel itself. And Kelly Rich reads Zadie Smith’s NW as offering a robust account of the encounter between the novel as a narrative genre and various forms of digital media. In Alan Liu’s words, the novel is engaged in and works to illuminate the ‘thick, unpredictable zone of contact … where (mis)understandings of new media are negotiated along twisting, partial, and contradictory vectors’.
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Cultural Studies Review, 2018
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Angelaki: Journal of the Theoretical Humanities, Feb 1, 2018
This article considers the case for a theory of the queer object that focuses on its pliability –... more This article considers the case for a theory of the queer object that focuses on its pliability – an object which operates queerly to amplify and elaborate the context in which it appears. It looks at the case of the altered book covers that Kenneth Halliwell and Joe Orton circulated through the Islington Public Library, activities for which the men were convicted and incarcerated. It considers their activities as versions of “trolling” and of otaku database fixation. It argues that rather than simply disrupt the circulation of library books the men introduced queer objects to the library that facilitated and fostered new and more engaged understandings of the library’s collection of book objects. It reads the covers for the ways in which they connect otherwise disparate and neglected instances of texts with a virtual database of images and concepts that foster new readings of them and advance a new meaning for queer engagement with archives, libraries, and databases.
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Novel: A Forum on Fiction., 2017
Across three women's films, the status of the literary novel in the midst of changing media envir... more Across three women's films, the status of the literary novel in the midst of changing media environments is melodramatically plotted through the figure of “old acquaintance.” Vincent Sherman's 1943 Old Acquaintance pits the meager output of celebrated writer Katherine “Kit” Marlowe (Bette Davis) against the stream of popular, lowbrow novels written by her friend Millie Drake (Miriam Hopkins). This contest of literary style and production is closely adapted in George Cukor's 1981 film Rich and Famous. In Pedro Almodóvar's 1995 La flor de mi secreto, friction between literary styles and markets is subdued through melodrama's focus on affective rather than taste-making practices, appearing as a viable metaphor of the fate of book-objects in a zero-sum marketplace. This article focuses on Rich and Famous, which explores the question of affinity between women, lowbrow and highbrow, and the fate of the novel circa 1980. The particular and volatile experience of “alikeness” that founds friendship and the possibility that literary value is volatile—that high- and lowbrow are alike—are imagined in its nuanced representation of what Ronald Britton termed “publication anxiety” and in its use of cinematic space to stage the possibility of amicable if incongruous contemporaneity.
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Modernism/Modernity , 2016
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Southerly, Dec 2012
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This article examines how history is represented in Mad Men and how anxiety about period is regis... more This article examines how history is represented in Mad Men and how anxiety about period is registered in the series' documentation of the relationship between pleasure and aesthetic experience. The author argues that the series re-animates mid-century debates about the relationship between low and middlebrow culture and does so by demonstrating the middlebrow's self-conscious representation of processes of mechanical reproduction. She shows that Mad Men's representation of historical period is intimately tied to its own status as "quality tv", and that this alliance is made available in the series' representation of gendered pleasure. Svetlana Boym's notion of the "off-modern" is considered as a way to think about Mad Men's historical detours and revisions, and its reckoning with questions of gender, identity, and aesthetic experience.
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Australian Feminist Studies, Jan 1, 2010
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In Media Res , 2007
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In Media Res, 2008
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Southerly, 2001
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articles by Melissa Hardie
Center in May 2018. Their brief was to contribute to the recent project of methodological reflection set in train by a resurgence of formalist analysis in literary criticism by thinking about the intersection of the novel form, novel theory, and media studies; at the most general level our challenge was to reflect upon the relation between the medium and the form of the literary text, and beyond that about the relation between the print medium in which the novel originated and the other media which form its environment and on which it frequently reflects. We start, then, with a
reading of one of the most influential recent attempts to rethink formalist analysis,
Caroline Levine’s Forms; John Frow contrasts her project with Jonathan Grossman’s
Kittlerian reading of The Pickwick Papers in terms of the relation between two
media of communication (coaching and the postal service) and the two novelistic
forms that ‘correspond’ to them, in order to open up some questions about the limits
and the appropriate focus of an analysis of novelistic forms. Melissa Hardie then moves to a consideration of the novelistic medium at its most material, taking the ‘queer materiality’ of Alvin Lustig’s 1948 jacket design for Djuna Barnes’s Nightwood as an index both of the ‘pulp’ presentation by which modernist texts acquired a wider readership and of the ‘queer ekphrasis’ of the novel itself. And Kelly Rich reads Zadie Smith’s NW as offering a robust account of the encounter between the novel as a narrative genre and various forms of digital media. In Alan Liu’s words, the novel is engaged in and works to illuminate the ‘thick, unpredictable zone of contact … where (mis)understandings of new media are negotiated along twisting, partial, and contradictory vectors’.
Center in May 2018. Their brief was to contribute to the recent project of methodological reflection set in train by a resurgence of formalist analysis in literary criticism by thinking about the intersection of the novel form, novel theory, and media studies; at the most general level our challenge was to reflect upon the relation between the medium and the form of the literary text, and beyond that about the relation between the print medium in which the novel originated and the other media which form its environment and on which it frequently reflects. We start, then, with a
reading of one of the most influential recent attempts to rethink formalist analysis,
Caroline Levine’s Forms; John Frow contrasts her project with Jonathan Grossman’s
Kittlerian reading of The Pickwick Papers in terms of the relation between two
media of communication (coaching and the postal service) and the two novelistic
forms that ‘correspond’ to them, in order to open up some questions about the limits
and the appropriate focus of an analysis of novelistic forms. Melissa Hardie then moves to a consideration of the novelistic medium at its most material, taking the ‘queer materiality’ of Alvin Lustig’s 1948 jacket design for Djuna Barnes’s Nightwood as an index both of the ‘pulp’ presentation by which modernist texts acquired a wider readership and of the ‘queer ekphrasis’ of the novel itself. And Kelly Rich reads Zadie Smith’s NW as offering a robust account of the encounter between the novel as a narrative genre and various forms of digital media. In Alan Liu’s words, the novel is engaged in and works to illuminate the ‘thick, unpredictable zone of contact … where (mis)understandings of new media are negotiated along twisting, partial, and contradictory vectors’.
The University of Sydney has historically been the preserve of a socially and economically elite body of students. This is not uncommon in Australia, where students from socioeconomically disadvantaged backgrounds are persistently underrepresented in higher education (Gale & Parker 2013). For us this has led to a relatively homogenous student body. Although it is a mandatory subject in the secondary curriculum English has a particularly poor track record in attracting students from more diverse backgrounds. This leads to a self-reinforcing problem, where this discipline (core due to its importance in forging citizenship and cultural participation) is characterized by the values of its practitioners, and so further attracts and rewards achievement grounded in Anglo middle-class norms.
In 2012, the Department of English at The University of Sydney established The LINK Project, a discipline-driven ‘widening participation’ program that builds collaborative, sustainable partnerships with targeted low-SES schools in the Sydney area and across NSW to encourage students of diverse backgrounds to participate in higher education. Developed and driven by academics, the guiding principle for our program is to create links or form connections with our partner students through the texts we teach or study in our classrooms. Program feedback consistently demonstrates the various positive outcomes of this discipline-focused engagement strategy, with post-activity surveys indicating increased familiarity with the study of English at university level and teachers consistently evidencing increased student enthusiasm for classroom activity and improved achievement in students’ current secondary English studies. Open-ended responses to post-activity questionnaires also frequently elicit comments that the program helps students to “look at texts from a different perspective” (Year 10 student, 2015). Student confidence has also increased, with more than 85% of participants each year indicating that working with the Department of English has “helped [them] to feel more confident about [their] future”, more than 80% reflecting that the program helps them to “feel more confident about considering university” as an option for their future, and – crucially – more than two thirds suggesting that The University of Sydney “feels more accessible as a place for future study” as a result of the program.
Positioning our discipline at the center of our engagement presents us with challenges. That English is both compulsory through to the final year of secondary schooling in NSW and the National Curriculum places heavy focus on the teaching of ‘classic’ works of English literature is an obvious point of gross asymmetry when the competence of non-native speakers is considered: the object of assessment, skill in English, disproportionately displaces other skills in our program’s target students. Learning outcomes for the high school English curriculum also tend to be shaped by historical scholarly frameworks and attendant expectations that further challenge the teaching of ‘classic’ or ‘canonical’ texts to such diverse bodies of students.
Taking as its case study a learning module developed on one ‘classic’ text, To Kill a Mockingbird, delivered to students in Western Sydney (a key demographic for The LINK Project), this paper considers what it means to conduct ‘effective teaching’ and ‘effective engagement’ in the context of such cultural and institutional incongruence (Devlin 2013). It reviews our first experience of using this particular module, which brought an opportunity to learn more about the ways in which students in these classrooms make complex interpretative associations between their experience and the discipline. This example poses as critical the seeking of “spaces where multiple knowledges can co-exist” (Sefa Dei 2008), for while the novel’s contextual history of the civil rights struggles of African-American citizens of the US would be almost entirely invisible to them, they are astute and sophisticated unravellers of stories regarding systemic bias and oppression. Where To Kill a Mockingbird is set on the NSW curriculum to assist students in thinking about diversity (a diversity distinct historically and culturally from their own environment) in the case of our students from the highly diverse and multiply disadvantaged demographic of Western Sydney structures of empathic identification were readily available to help facilitate a new reading of the text. This empathic identification and the resultant reading of Mockingbird, based on its own interest in the performative and ‘play’ itself as a pedagogical tool, reveals a potential framework for productive engagement that anchors our paper: establishing what Jacques Rancière (1987) terms "the minimal link of a thing in common".
Celebrate, Collaborate, Create: Positioning Equity for the Future.
The University of Sydney has historically been the preserve of a socially and economically elite body of students. This has led to a relatively homogenous student body largely derived from private and selective metropolitan schools. English—although it is a mandatory subject in the secondary curriculum—has a particularly poor track record in attracting students from more diverse backgrounds. This leads to a self-reinforcing problem, where this discipline (which is core due to its importance in forging citizenship and cultural participation) is characterised by the values of its practitioners, further attracting and rewarding achievement grounded in Anglo middle-class norms. We believed we needed to do better.
In 2012, the Department of English at The University of Sydney established a discipline-driven ‘widening participation’ project that has begun to build collaborative, sustainable partnerships with targeted low-SES schools in the Sydney metropolitan area and across NSW to inspire achievement, foster aspiration and encourage students of diverse backgrounds to participate in higher education.
Through extensive consultation with partner schools, the project has established a program of discipline-centred learning modules to support the teaching of literature and to encourage pathways for students to university. The program includes the delivery of these learning modules in the students’ own classrooms, as well as at annual ‘campus visits’ at which partner school students engage with each other and with Department academics, postgraduates and undergraduates in university-modelled learning. Our paper will showcase one such module, on To Kill a Mockingbird, that was delivered to students in Western Sydney, a key demographic for our project.
While the project is engaged in a long-term strategy to diversify participation, feedback suggests that the program is already working to satisfy its key outcomes and in 2015 the Nelson Meers Foundation entered into a three-year funding partnership to further the program’s development.
identified by Barthes: the problem of 'Power,' identified as disrhythmy or heterorhythmy (9), and the problem of contemporaneity as one that is implicit in the notion of 'Living -Together,' though one not best elucidated through co-temporality per se but rather in the chronological coincidence of novelistic 'simulations.' My paper will explore these problems through the 1977 Richard Brooks film, Looking For Mr Goodbar. Goodbar pivots its narrative around precisely such a problem: how to live together without su ch structures as the couple
or the community? The status of cinema in the 70s as an evolving 'novelistic simulation' guides and structures my analysis of the problem of 'contemporaneity,' a term that will be used to explore how contesting genres provide distinct opportunities to 'model' and 'let loose' topics and situations.
This paper argues that the recirculation of images and content through the doctored books constitutes a micro-archive where acts of circulation and promiscuous assemblage take place on page and cover. Almost as interesting are the assiduous tasks taken on by their self-styled opponents, who both carefully laid a trap for the pair, and later documented the extensive catalogue of defaced and altered books. My paper will consider these two species of archivists in terms of the conceptual liberties of ‘trolling’ (cruising as mode of mischief and détournment, after Bersani) and the ‘database animal’ (in Azuma’s work a way to describe obsessive cataloguing in terms of the post-human).
Garrett Stewart describes the 'bibliobjet' as 'demediated,' by which he means 'the undoing of a given form of transmission, now blocked or altered, in the medium of its secondary presentation.' For Stewart 'book-works, blocking discourse, substitute for any and all verbal pleasure a reading of their shape as such.' My paper will consider how 'transmission' was 'blocked' by the altered books, within the context of the circulating library as a form of mediation. Do 'close' or 'distant' readings of surviving bibliobjets differently situate the proto-postmodern work executed by both Orton and Halliwell, and by the librarians and officials who formally organised a forensically significant 'catalogue' of this encrypted archive within the circulating library? What kinds of disciplinary protocols serve an object-led account of the extant collection of covers? And how might these different contexts amplify an historical account of the 'successful prosecution' and incarceration of Orton and Halliwell?
So the entirely predictable revelation that John Karr did not kill JonBenet Ramsey has broken to nearly as much fanfare as his preposterous "confession." Ariana Huffington has written here of the JonBenet addiction that afflicts mainstream media; People magazine has excerpts of his emails, in which he describes his passion for dolls and himself as a "dashing prince," "Daxis," in love with JonBenet. Elsewhere we find that Karr imagined Johnny Depp as the dashing prince Daxis in the movie -- Depp of Willy Wonka fame, not Libertine, of course.
So what is it about this case that so thoroughly confounds good sense -- not the medias' (as if!) but, for example, the legal team that sought Karr's extradition, rather than filing his "confession" with the no doubt countless others that the case elicited. You tell me.
If it fell to a comic postmodern to allegorise the collective American obsession with law and order and with paedophilia, sometime shortly after she had devised Law & Order: SVU she would have concoted a secret suspect in the JonBenet Ramsey case, one who might have something to do with children and education, an historical association with kiddie porn and mullets, and an answer to the riddling acronym "SBTC," initials which closed the ransom note found shortly before the murdered JonBenet herself at the Ramsey house Boxing Day 1996.
I doubt the most adventurous mind could have added the flourish of Karr's own discovery lodged in a cheap apartment hotel in Bangkok in anticipation of gender reassignment. Ogling press reports of Karr's meals (King Prawns and Valrhona chocolate cake) entertainment (Dan Brown paperback, The Last Samurai on screen) are oddly reminiscent of the final scenes of Hannibal, where Anthony Hopkin's Hannibal Lecter claws open a Dean & DeLuca boxed meal to be shared with a new young friend on board the plane they ride to Buenos Aires.
These vignettes of gustatory excess and abject criminality are emblematic of the late nineties' post-OJ demarcation of a celebrity public sphere replete with both its own criminals and its own "better than fiction" mysteries, and this makes Karr a curiously nostalgic figure, the return of a certain late 90s moment nearly a decade on. John Karr can distract, at least momentarily, an adult audience otherwise mesmerised by the decline of the American Empire, otherwise alienated by popular culture aimed firmly away from them, otherwise fixated on the freefall anxiety of a future framed in terms of escalating temperatures, gas prices, and wars.
Julian's post asks "Who makes a better 'real'?" Right now, I think, it has to be said that we dwell in the realm of the better than real, the "truthy," but this designation might well be the gift the simulacrum can't return ... to explain.
The word "truthiness" was coined by Stephen Colbert on the very first show of his Colbert Report , a satirical take on the "pundit" shows that rule on US Cable -- Bill O'Reilly et al. "Truthiness" took off, and it came to be recognised as the Word of 2005 by the American Dialect Society, who so nominate a word every year. Here's their report on "truthiness." According to the ADS, "truthiness" is "the quality of preferring concepts or facts one wishes to be true, rather than concepts or facts known to be true. As Stephen Colbert put it, “I don’t trust books. They’re all fact, no heart.”"
Twenty years and more after Baudrillard, the simulacra precess. And so how to describe the flights of imagination enabled by the Real's Truthiness ... how about this one?
Not Callous, just American, says Frank.
There's been a bit of debate over a photo of young Americans watching (or not) ground zero burn from the shores of Brooklyn: you can see the photo, as well as an essay about it, here. Of all the ghastly pictures of that day this is the one too horrific to be seen? Too Real, perhaps? And anway, what do you see? A callous group of go-forward pragmatists? History, receding quickly? A circle of debaters recrafting the agora on the shores of the Hudson? A Coke ad replete with mountain bike and casual slouching?
I suppose I see something between the waning of affect and a perfect canvas for the projection of all kinds of views about the "reality" of a mediatised event. It's almost as if the event is unreal for the cluster precisely because it's unmediated, and in turn we can imagine "seeing" with them a spectacle that (in Baudrillard's terms) did not take place. And in the various slurs caste on these truly innocent bystanders? The rule of truthiness, gut feeling in place of data.
Hello, everyone. All this talk of malls and "junk spaces" has put me in mind of more positive ways to "be" in malls. Insert here my own retrograde, nostalgic memories of my first mall experiences at Wallaceway in Chatswood circa 1979 -- memories of an external escalator, cased in a plastic bubble, creeping up one side; a bizarre, conch-like spiral walkway defining the interior space; a definition otherwise gained by the pumping of "donut" [sic] smell from a doughnut shack near the entrance, all this long before the "malling" of Chatswood, when there was no such thing as "Chatswood Chase" or Westfield, or even shops above the station.
Meaghan Morris' wonderful essay on "Things To Do With Shopping Centres" reminds us that we're not just cast into a role of supine distraction or subjection when we are in shopping centres, but that there are things to do with them, be they pragmatic or theoretical. One thing she highlights is "the contrast between ... massive structural stability and the constantly shifting composition of its population ... [i]n this sense, a mall is like a theatre or a stage: a space demanding action and transformation" That's Stephen Harper's paraphrase located here, in his excellent analysis of George Romero's Mall Zombie Horror Extravaganza, Dawn of the Dead. In other words, don’t just be in the mall, do to it.
So, two movie suggestions to give Meaghan’s thesis some traction. First, of course, the above-mentioned Dawn of the Dead. Second, how about Amy Heckerling’s Fast Times at Ridgemont High? This 1982 film has many remarkable qualities, including “break out” performances from Sean Penn and Jennifer Jason Leigh, and tiny prophetic ones from Nicholas Cage (credited here under his real name Nicholas Coppola), Eric Stoltz, and Anthony Edwards. It also has a terrific soundtrack, righteous as Penn-as-Spicoli might say. But the star of the film you might reckon to be Ridgemont Mall, where the various characters hang out and/or work when not at Ridgemont High. It’s a space they transform with activity, networks of associations which might co-exist with the uber-consumerism of the precinct but are certainly not under its thumb.