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English
Program
La Trobe University
Victoria 3086
AUSTRALIA
Tel: +61 3 9479 2412
Fax: +61 3 9479 3637
E-mail: english@
latrobe.edu.au |
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School of Communication,
Arts & Critical Enquiry
English - HASU: Introduction to
Academic Discourse
Week 1
Many of you will be taking English as part of your first year of tertiary
study, and are discovering that University study is unlike your previous
schooling in some important ways. The Director of La Trobe Faculty of
Humanities and Social Sciences Academic Skills Unit, Dr Kate Chanock,
has written a terrific booklet, Getting Your Head around the BA, which
you were given a copy of when you enrolled. Read it through, and have
a look around the Academic
Skills Unit Home Page where there are lots of useful links and valuable
information.
The Academic Skills Unit has also prepared
a five week program of academic skills to be undertaken by all first year
students. Week One concerns the transition to University study. English
students will work through this material over the first weeks of semester.
Please read the first week's readings, Transition
to University, and reflect on your English Subject Guide in the light
of this. You can find the entire program here.
Week 2
Primary source material in English consists of a great variety of writing,
from purely literary kinds, such as poetry, plays short stories and novels,
through to autobiography, essays and other kinds of non-fiction. Such
writing forms
a literary critic' s primary source material. Read HASU's discussion of
primary sources.
Week
3 & 4
This workshop uses two articles published by John Wiltshire. When you
read articles like this, you are of course working with a primary source,
and you should, of course, take notes. Read the articles
Mrs
Bennet's Daughter (from Introductions and Interventions, (Macmillan,
Delhi, 2003, 46-56).
Pride
and Prejudice, Love and Recognition (from Recreating Jane Austen,
Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2001, 99-124).
Please read HASU's discussion of Secondary
Sources
Read the first three paragraphs of 'Mrs
Bennet's Daughter' down to the middle of page 3. How does the author
present his thesis? Does he refer to other work in order to do this?
What is the thesis? What evidence does he marshal? Try to summarise
the evidence for his main point here in one sentence.
Then read HASU's discussion of Taking
Notes.
Week 5
Critical reading. Please read
this material, and then consider the following passage from Annamarie
Jagose's book, Queer Theory, (University of Melbourne Press, 1996).
Whatever ambivalences structure queer, there
is no doubt that its recent redeployment is making a substantial impact
on lesbian and gay studies. Yet, almost as soon as queer established
market dominance as a diacritical term, and certainly before consolidating
itself in any easy vernacular sense, some theorists are already suggesting
that its moment had passed and that 'queer politics may, by now, have
outlived its political usefulness'. 2 Does queer become defunct the
moment it is an intelligible and widely disseminated term? Teresa de
Lauretis, the theorist often credited with inaugurating the phrase 'queer
theory', abandoned it barely three years later, on the grounds that
it had been taken over by those mainstream forces and institutions it
was coined to resist.
Explaining her choice of terminology in
The Practice of Love: Lesbian Sexuality and Perverse Desire (1994),
de Lauretis writes: "As for 'queer theory', my insistent specification
lesbian may well be taken as a taking of distance from what, since I
proposed it as a working hypothesis for lesbian and gay studies in this
very journal (differences , 3.2), has very quickly become a conceptually
vacuous creature of the publishing industry'. 3 Distancing herself from
her earlier advocacy of queer, de Lauretis now represents it as devoid
of the political or critical acumen she once thought it promised.
Summarise, in one or two sentences,
what the problem is here.
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