 | Pictured (left to right) at the joint launch of their new books are A... Pictured (left to right) at the joint launch of their new books are Associate Professor Chris Barker, Dr Mary Zournazi and Maureen Clark from the Faculty of Arts |
Faculty of Arts holds triple book launch
21 Dec 2007 | Renee Criddle
Three authors from the University of Wollongong’s Faculty of Arts converged at the Wollongong UniShop recently to officially launch their new publications on campus.
Associate Professor Chris Barker’s book, The Hearts of Men: Tales of Happiness and Despair, provides a fresh insight into the emotional lives of men through 100 conversations with a range of sportsmen, executives, retired Diggers, homeless drug users, Buddhists and men’s movement activists.
This refreshing collection of stories shows that men do talk about their feelings and with a surprising degree of insight. They are told by men in their own heartbreakingly honest words and are at the core of Professor Barker’s exploration of the striking divergence in the ways in which men’s emotional lives can generate personal happiness or despair.
The book is organised through themes that are regarded as generators of happiness or despair in contemporary life, family, sport, depression, alcohol/drug abuse, work, relationships and self-change.
Dr Mary Zournazi’s publication is a groundbreaking exploration of the way that everyday language use in the post September 11 2001 world has instilled a state of fear and war in our minds and communities.
Keywords to War: Reviving language in an age of terror shows how key words such as freedom, justice and trust have been misused, abused and misappropriated for narrow political ends draining them of meaning and seriously diminishing public life in the process. Her intent is simply not to analyse language but to revitalise it.
By tracing the threads of historical meaning and the competing values and ideas contained within words, Dr Zournazi believes it is possible to replenish their deeper meaning, to restore the link between language and moral conscience, and to evoke a compassionate and hopeful alternative to the current political environment.
Both Associate Professor Barker and Dr Zournazi teach in UOW’s School of Social Sciences, Media and Communication.
Honorary Fellow, Maureen Clark, also launched her new book called Mudrooroo: A Likely Story. The publication came from her PhD project that she completed at UOW in 2004.
It is the first in-depth critical study of the fiction of one of Australia’s most enigmatic literary figures since the public questioning, in 1996, of his claim to Aboriginal heritage. The book has been described as a controversial work of much courage, particularly in light of the cultural sensitivities it broaches.
Dr Clark’s text treads the dangerous ground of racialised passing and challenges many widely held credos about Mudrooroo and his fiction. It does so, however, in a way that demands the novels not be discarded but read again, if differently, thus opening up a brand new era of Mudrooroo scholarship.
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