Scenes Of Instruction And Experience: Teaching Modernism, Modernist Teaching

10am-4:30pm Wednesday 1 July
William Macmahon Ball Theatre, Old Arts
University of Melbourne, Parkville Campus

Modernism was a revolution in education. Who was taught, by whom, with what means, and for what purposes all became urgent questions of thought and action. Not only was education a vital theme of intervention, but the problematic of education became an inspiration for radical experiments with the form of education, with the genres, styles, and topics appropriate for the future — if indeed there was to be a future at all. As Walter Benjamin famously noted in the context of World War I, the shock of the new had immediate and unprecedented consequences for the transmission of experience and knowledge. For his part, Raymond Williams called modernism a ‘terminus,’ not only in the sense of an end point, but also in the sense of a rerouting onto new tracks. This symposium takes up the issue of the afterlives of modernism today — whether enlivening or toxic — in order to reopen questions of contemporary pedagogy, its aims and ends, its personnel and institutions.

Program

10:00-10:30 Welcome
Introduction by Justin Clemens and Beth McLean

10:30-12:00 Session 1: Instruction
Professor Stephanie Trigg, Virginia Woolf, Feminist Pedagogy and the Form of Thought
Dr Jessica Marian, Instruction/direction/demand: James Joyce's letters to Sylvia Beach
Dr Sarah Balkin, Pedagogical Patter in Comic Striptease

12:00-1:30 Lunch

1:30-2:30 Session 2: Discipline and Difficulty
Dr Alicia Byrnes, Joyce Chopra and the "Disciplining" of Women’s Creativity
Professor Justin Clemens, We’re all on the dream of instruction: Sigmund Freud and education

2:30-3:00 Break

3:00-4:30 Session 3: Experience and Modernist Legacy
Dr Ryan Johnson , “the new life, the new existence, the new culture”: Hotta Yoshie’s Troubled  Modernism (zoom)
Dr Sarah Fantini, Disciplining Modernism
Dr Beth McLean, “Briefly and brokenly”: Difficult Sex, Jamesian Style