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Stan Cross's "For gorsake, stop laughing: this is serious!" (Smith's Weekly, 1933) is the symbol and bellwether of the Australian cartooning tradition. It is often lionised as a national treasure, but its archival history has been perilous in a way that shows a lack of care amounting almost to national negligence. The original of this most famous cartoon of the Depression era was lost for 80 years before being rediscovered in 2014, and this article notes for the first time that Trove Newspapers lacks a record of its initial publication. We use this troubled material history of one significant cartoon to raise a range of issues about the quality and purpose of collecting and presenting Australian cartoons as a resource for Australian studies in fields ranging from media and humour studies to cultural and political history. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Metrics-based approaches to understanding the value of culture imply homogeneity of artistic purpose, invite political manipulation and demand time, money and attention from cultural organisations without proven benefit. The system retailing as Culture Counts, a dashboard approach to quality measurement that emerged from Western Australia and is currently trialling in Australia, the US, the UK and Asia, serves to further abstract assessment processes. Cultural policy-makers across international domains need a more robust appreciation of the limits of metrics. Statistical data, well channelled, may provide useful ancillary information. But, where questions of value are concerned, it cannot replace critical judgment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Adelaide Festival of Ideas (AFOI), is a biennial festival of public debate on issues ranging from cosmology to art to public policy. It is one of the earliest of its kind, and the author has been involved on programming committees and as chair since its inception in 1999. This paper is an analysis of the sorts of public engagement the AFOI elicits from those who come to listen and engage. The sessions are largely free and well-attended, and the passive model of audience entertainment seems a very poor explanation of the civically active mode of engagement that actually occurs. This paper briefly maps the historical trajectory of the festival, and then uses Michael Warner’s framework of publics and counterpublics to explain how the AFOI is both more and other than a simple addition to the entertainment industry. Understanding different qualities of engagement is a crucial issue for a broad appreciation of the public humanities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Much has been written about the complicated intertextual relationships between J. M. Coetzee's novels and previous works by writers such as Franz Kafka, Fyodor Dostoevsky, Samuel Beckett, and, especially, Daniel Defoe. Relatively little has been written, in comparison, about any relationship between Coetzee and Defoe's great contemporary, Jonathan Swift. We claim no extensive structural relationship between Coetzee's novels and Swift's works--nothing like the formal interlace between Robinson Crusoe and Foe, for example. We do claim, however, a strong and explicitly signalled likeness of narrative stance, marked especially by the ironic distance between author and protagonist in Gulliver's Travels and Elizabeth Costello. We rehearse the extensive evidence of Coetzee's attention to Swift (both in novels and criticism) and suggest that there is a Swiftian dimension to Coetzee's oeuvre that is evident in several books, including Dusklands, Youth, Elizabeth Costello, and Diary of a Bad Year. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses the formation of the literary theory of satire and its limitations. Topics include the satirical practice in the poststructuralist era, the capacity of satire to moralise and simplify, and the works of satire between individuals and cultures. It also explores the classification of the genre as a rhetorical strategy to provoke emotional and intellectual reactions.

Examines the essay `A Modest Proposal,' by Jonathan Swift. Gap between the narrator's meaning and the text's; Difference between Swift's voice and the Proposer's; Essay's abiding power to discomfort; Swift's positioning of the readers among the eaters.

Examines the similarities between parody and deconstruction. Information on the arguments put forth by Gregory L. Ulmer on the works of Derrida; Discussion on the interpretation methods of deconstruction; Information on the subject contents of deconstruction.

Elaborates the structural and rhetorical coherence of Jonathan Swift's parody in Book III of the book 'Gulliver's Travels.' Genre of the language used in 'Gulliver's Travels'; Analysis of the animosity of Gulliver toward materialist scheme; Number of the appearance of the term 'hope' in Book III; Presentation of visionary cynicism in the book.

Focuses on the book `Foucault's Pendulum,' so entitled because the pendulum was invented by Leon Foucault. Connections between the book and the text of Theory; Examples of many imitations of hermetic-deconstructive method; Book's advocation of a stubborn Piedmontese minimalism.