Judith Ryan

Novels began to incorporate literary theory in unexpected ways in the late twentieth century. Through allusion, parody, or implicit critique, theory formed an additional strand in fiction that raised questions about the nature of authorship and the practice of writing. Studying this phenomenon provides fresh insight into the recent development of the novel and the persistence of modern theory beyond the period of its greatest success. In this book, Judith Ryan opens these questions to a range of readers, drawing them into debates over the value of theory. Ryan investigates what prompted fiction writers to incorporate and respond to theory nearly thirty years ago. Designed for readers unfamiliar with the complexities of theory, Ryan’s book introduces the discipline’s major trends and controversies and notes the salient ideas of a carefully selected set of individual thinkers. Ryan follows novelists’ adaptation to and engagement with arguments drawn from theory as they translate abstract ideas into language, structure, and fictional strategy. At the core of her book is a fascinating microstudy of French poststructuralism in its dialogue with narrative fiction. Investigating theories of textuality, psychology, and society in the work of Don DeLillo, Thomas Pynchon, J. M. Coetzee, Margaret Atwood, W. G. Sebald, and Umberto Eco, as well as Monika Maron, Alain Robbe-Grillet, Marguerite Duras, Marilynne Robinson, David Foster Wallace, and Christa Wolf, Ryan identifies subtle negotiations between author and theory and the richness this dynamic adds to texts. Resetting the way we think and learn about literature, her book reads current literary theory while uniquely tracing its shaping of a genre.

The Novel After Theory

Marcia Langton

65,000 Years: A Short History of Australian Art stares into the dark heart of Australia's brutal colonial history and offers new insights into the first art of this country. Long before Britain's invasion of Australia in 1788, First Peoples' cultural and design traditions flourished for thousands of generations. Their art shaped the continent as we know it today and the societies that thrived here; but these continuing artistic practices and new art forms were disregarded by the settlers, and not considered to be 'fine art' until the late 1980s. In this publication, twenty-five writers urge us to reconsider the art history that is unique to the Australian continent and to acknowledge its rise to prominence in modern times. Featuring new writing by leading thinkers across generations and disciplines, it celebrates Indigenous Australian art across media, time and language groups. Today Indigenous art and artists are at the forefront of contemporary art practice. In very real and tangible ways, this publication reveals the artistic brilliance of Australia's First Peoples and stands as a testament to their resilience. This book is published in association with a major exhibition at the University of Melbourne's revitalised Potter Museum of Art, opening in 2025. Also titled 65,000 Years: A Short History of Australian Art, the exhibition, curated by Professor Marcia Langton AO, Ms Judith Ryan AM and Ms Shanysa McConville, features over 400 artworks that celebrate the longevity and brilliance of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander art despite a difficult history of colonialism and scientific racism.

65,000 Years: A Short History of Australian Art

Postwar German Novels and the Third Reich

The Uncompleted Past

Chris Wallace-Crabbe

Introducing about Australia: Literature and culture.

Literature and Culture in the New New World

Imagining Australia

National Gallery of Victoria

This book celebrates Aboriginal art of the 'New Wave': the daring and visionary use of colour by indigenous artists throughout Australia. It encompasess work by a diversity of outstanding artists and represents indigenous art-producing communities around Australia.

Aboriginal Art Post 1984 in the Collection of the National Gallery of Victoria

Colour Power

Bonnie B. Thurston

Bonnie Bowman Thurston

"With updated bibliography"--Copyright page.

Philippians and Philemon

Is thinking personal? Or should we not rather say, "it thinks," just as we say, "it rains"? In the late nineteenth century a number of psychologies emerged that began to divorce consciousness from the notion of a personal self. They asked whether subject and object are truly distinct, whether consciousness is unified or composed of disparate elements, what grounds exist for regarding today's "self" as continuous with yesterday's. If the American pragmatist William James declared himself, on balance, in favor of a "real and verifiable personal identity which we feel," his Austrian counterpart, the empiricist Ernst Mach, propounded the view that "the self is unsalvageable." The Vanishing Subject is the first comprehensive study of the impact of these pre-Freudian debates on modernist literature. In lucid and engaging prose, Ryan traces a complex set of filiations between writers and thinkers over a sixty-year period and restores a lost element in the genesis and development of modernism. From writers who see the "self" as nothing more or less than a bundle of sensory impressions, Ryan moves to others who hesitate between empiricist and Freudian views of subjectivity and consciousness, and to those who wish to salvage the self from its apparent disintegration. Finally, she looks at a group of writers who abandon not only the dualisms of subject and object, but dualistic thinking altogether. Literary impressionism, stream-of-consciousness and point-of-view narration, and the question of epiphany in literature acquire a new aspect when seen in the context of the "psychologies without the self." Rilke's development of a position akin to phenomenology, Henry and Alice James's relation to their psychologist brother, Kafka's place in the modernist movements, Joyce's rewriting of Pater, Proust's engagement with contemporary thought, Woolf's presentation of consciousness, and Musil's projection of a utopian counter-reality are problems familiar to readers and critics: The Vanishing Subject radically revises the way we see them.

Early Psychology and Literary Modernism

The Vanishing Subject

Carol Cooper

William Barak

Discussion and commemoration of the work and life of William Barak, leader and artist; articles by Murphy-Wandin, Ryan and Cooper annotated separately.

Remembering Barak

Geoff Bardon

Exhibition catalogue; history of Papunya art and myths behind the paintings; explanation of symbols used.

Aboriginal Art of the Desert : from the National Gallery of Victoria

Mythscapes

Vincent van Gogh

Christopher Allen

James Mollison

Wilfred Niels Arnold

Catalogue for the National Gallery of Victoria exhibition, 19 November 1993 - 16 January 1994.

Shell Presents Van Gogh, His Sources, Genius, and Influence

If the rise of modernism is the story of a struggle between the burden of tradition and a desire to break free of it, then Rilke's poetic development is a key example of this tension at work. Taking a sceptical view of Rilke's own myth of himself as a solitary genius, Judith Ryan reveals how deeply his writing is embedded in the culture of its day. She traces his often desperate attempts to grapple with problems of fashion, influence and originality as he shaped his career during the crucial decades in which modernism was born. This 1999 book was the first systematic study of Rilke's trajectory from aestheticism to modernism as seen through the lens of his engagement with poetic tradition and the visual arts. It is full of surprising discoveries about individual poems. Above all, it shifts the terms of the debate about Rilke's place in modern literary history.

Rilke, Modernism and Poetic Tradition

Novels began to incorporate literary theory in unexpected ways in the late twentieth century. Through allusion, parody, or implicit critique, theory formed an additional strand in fiction, raising questions about the nature of authorship and the practice of writing. Investigating theories of textuality, psychology, and society in the work of Don DeLillo, Thomas Pynchon, J. M. Coetzee, Margaret Atwood, W. G. Sebald, and Umberto Eco, as well as Monika Maron, Alain Robbe-Grillet, Marguerite Duras, Marilynne Robinson, David Foster Wallace, and Christa Wolf, Judith Ryan identifies subtle negotiations between author and theory and the richness this dynamic adds to texts. Resetting the way we think and learn about literature, her book reads current literary theory while uniquely tracing its shaping of a genre.

If the rise of modernism is the story of a struggle between the burden of tradition and a desire to break free of it, then Rilke's poetic development is a key example of this tension at work. Taking a sceptical view of Rilke's own myth of himself as a solitary genius, Judith Ryan reveals how deeply his writing is embedded in the culture of its day. She traces his often desperate attempts to grapple with problems of fashion, influence and originality as he shaped his career during the crucial decades in which modernism was born. Her book is the first systematic study of Rilke's trajectory from aestheticism to modernism as seen through the lens of his engagement with poetic tradition and the visual arts. The book is full of surprising discoveries about individual poems. Above all, it shifts the terms of the debate about Rilke's place in modern literary history.

Exploring traditional poems alongside new examples, this Introduction conveys the rich rewards that come with reading German poetry.

Judith Ryan

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