Reading the Ruins

Abstract

From fires to ghosts, and from flowers to surrealist apparitions, the bombsites of London were both unsettling and inspiring terrains. Yet throughout the years prior to the Second World War, British culture was already filled with ruins and fragments. They appeared as content, with visions of tottering towers and scraps of paper; and also as form, in the shapes of broken poetics. But from the outbreak of the Second World War what had been an aesthetic mode began to resemble a proleptic template. During that conflict many modernist writers – such as Graham Greene, Louis MacNeice, David Jones, J. F. Hendry, Elizabeth Bowen, T. S. Eliot and Rose Macaulay – engaged with devastated cityscapes and the altered lives of a nation at war. To understand the potency of the bombsites, both in the Second World War and after, Reading the Ruins brings together poetry, novels and short stories, as well as film and visual art.

Reading publics and a curriculum in literature

“…Far from literature being cast out of the classroom, it was to be directly critiqued for its ideological predilections. Many concerned with creating ‘critical, resistant readers’ were doing so very much in the context of the traditionally literary (Martino & Mellor, 1995; Mellor, 1989; Mellor et al, 1987; Worth & Guy, 1998)—hence, perhaps, the place of contesting complex and challenging ideas in the AC:E course, Literature . This very reality of ‘critical, resistant readers’ being created in Literature classrooms was, in fact, central to the ‘culture wars’ background to Australia's national curriculum—that it was actually the study of literature that was turning away from ‘appreciating’ the aesthetic and turning too far towards creating ‘resistant’ readers (Gannon & Sawyer, 2015).…”