Prof Julian Murphet

Overview

http://empa.arts.unsw.edu.au/staff/julian-murphet-448.html

Research Summary

My research concentrates on the interface between literature and other media, on the history of US literature, and on the ethical dimension of cinema.
My current large project is a study of the multimedia and transportational dimensions of William Faulkner's work.

Teaching

I teach into Modernism: Text and Screen; American Literature: Past and Present; Introduction to Film; Film in the Media Landscape; and I contribute lectures here and there to other film and literature courses.

Publications

Coming Soon:
• Modernism and Masculinity, co-edited with Natalya Lusty (Cambridge University Press, 2012); including sole-authored chapter "Towards a Gendered Media Ecology"
• “Gertrude Stein’s Cinema,” in Gertrude Stein in Europe, eds. Sarah Posman and Laura Schultz (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2012)—solicited, 6000 words
• “France, Europe, The World: 1945-89,” Beckett in Context, ed. Anthony Uhlmann (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012)—solicited, 4000 words
• “The Media of Diaspora,” in Ato Quayson and Girish Daswani (eds.), The Blackwell Companion to Diaspora and Transnational Studies (Oxford: Blackwell, 2012)—solicited, 6000 words

Already out:
Books
• Styles of Extinction: Cormac McCarthy's The Road, co-edited with Mark Steven (London & New York: Continuum, 2012)
• Strong Opinions: J.M Coetzee and the Authority of Contemporary Fiction, co-edited with Chris Danta and Sue Kossew (Continuum Press, 2011)
• Multimedia Modernism: Literature and the Anglo-American Avant-Garde (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009)
• Narrative and Media, with Helen Fulton, Rosemary Huisman and Anne Dunn, ed. Helen Fulton (Melbourne & New York: Cambridge UP, 2005)
• Literature and Visual Technologies, edited with Lydia Rainford (Houndmills: Palgrave Press, 2003)
• Bret Easton Ellis’ American Psycho (New York: Continuum, 2002)
• Literature and Race in Los Angeles, Cultural Margins Series (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001)

Chapters and articles
• "‘Events listening to their own tremors’: Zukofsky and objective anachrony," Textual Practice Special Issue: The Uses of Anachronism, eds. Helen Groth and Paul Sheehan, Volume 26, Issue 4, (2012): 707-727
• "The Cave and The Road: Styles of Forgotten Dreams", in Styles of Extinction: Cormac McCarthy's The Road, co-edited with Mark Steven (London & New York: Continuum, 2012), pp. 109-131.
• 'Late Coetzee', Special Issue of Twentieth Century Literature, co-edited with Chris Danta, 57.1 (2012); including sole-authored article "Coetzee and Late Style: Exile within the Form”: 86-104
• “Postcolonial writing in Australia and New Zealand,” in Ato Quayson (ed.), The Cambridge History of Postcolonial Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012)
• “The Novel amidst New Technology and Media,” in Robert L. Caserio and Clement C. Hawes, (eds.), The Cambridge History of the English Novel (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012)
• "The Mole and the Multiple: A Chiasmus of Character," New Literary History, vol. 42, no. 2 (Spring, 2011): 255-276
• "Diary of a Bad Year: Parrhesia, Opinion and Novelistic Form," in Danta, Murphet and Kossew (eds), Strong Opinions: J.M Coetzee and the Authority of Contemporary Fiction, co-edited with Chris Danta and Sue Kossew (Continuum Press, 2011)
• "The Wire and Realism," Sydney Studies in English, vol. 36 (2010)
• Review of Michael Wutz, Enduring Words: Literary Narrative in a Changing Media Ecology, Review of English Studies (October, 2010)
• “Literature of Urban Rebellion,” in Kevin R. McNamara (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Los Angeles Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010)
• “Beckett’s Televisual Modernism,” Critical Quarterly, Special Issue on Modernism and New Media History, ed. David Trotter, vol. 51, no. 2 (2009): 60-78.
• “Whither Cultural Studies?” Continuum: Journal of Media and Cultural Studies, 23:3 (2009): 418-422.
• “Eliot’s Mechanism of Sensibility: poetic form and media change,” Literature and Aesthetics, 18:1 (June, 2008): 31-42.
• “The Visibility of the Hidden,” antiTHESIS, vol. 19 (2009): 30-40.
• “P. T. Anderson’s Dilemma,” Sydney Studies in English, vol. 34 (2008): 63-85.
• “Pitiable or Political Animals? Some notes on the ‘last humans’,” SubStance, Vol. 37, no. 3, Issue 117 (December, 2008): 97-116.
• “Film and (as) Modernity,” in James Donald and Michael Renov, eds., Handbook of Film Studies (London: Sage, 2008), pp. 343-360.
• “Voice, Image, Television: Beckett’s Divided Screens,” Scan: journal of media arts culture, Vol.5, no.1 (May, 2008)
• “Character and Event,” SubStance, Vol. 36, no. 3, issue 113 (September, 2007): 106-125.
• “Hard Drives?” Writing Technologies, Vol. 1, no. 1 (April, 2007)
• “Introduction: Refusal,” in Caroline Hamilton, Will Noonan and Michelle Kelly, eds., The Politics and Aesthetics of Refusal (Cambridge: Cambridge Scholars Press, 2007), pp. vi-xii.
• “Postmodernism as American Studies,” Australasian Journal of American Studies, Vol. 25, no. 2 (December 2006): 65-76.
• “Alain Badiou and Cultural Studies,” in Gary Hall & Clare Birchall, eds. New Cultural Studies: Adventures in Theory (Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP, 2006), pp. 147-160.
• “Behind the Scenes: Animation and Postmodern Value,” Sydney Studies in English 34 (2006): 143-165.
• “Postmodernism and Space,” in Stephen Connor, ed., The Cambridge Companion to Postmodernism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), pp. 116-135.
• “Fiction and Postmodernity,” in Laura Marcus and Peter Nicholls, eds., The Cambridge History of Twentieth-Century English Literature (Cambridge University Press, 2004), pp. 716-735
• “Introduction,” and “Toward the Rhythm of the Visible World: Gertrude Stein’s Machinery of Perception,” in Literature and Visual Technologies, Murphet & Rainford, eds. (Palgrave Press, 2003), pp. 1-11, 61-81.
• “The Mulatto: an unspeakable concept,” Working Papers on the Web, Volume 5 (2003)
• “Multiculturalism and All That Jazz” with Desmond King, in Robert Singh, ed., American Politics and Society Today (Polity Press, 2002)
• “Grounding Theory: Literary Theory and the New Geography,” in McQuillan et al, eds., Post-Theory: New Directions in Criticism (Edinburgh University Press, 1999), pp. 200-208.
• “Film Noir and the Racial Unconscious,” Screen 39:1 (Spring 1998): 22-35.
• “Identity and Difference in Anna Deavere Smith’s Performance Art,” Wasafiri 27 (Spring 1998): 29-33.

Research Grants
• ARC Discovery Grant, 2009-2011 ($165,000): ‘William Faulkner Between Cinema and Literature’
• USyd Faculty of Arts Research and Discovery Grant, 2006 ($20,000)
• USyd Faculty of Arts Seed Funding Grant, 2005 ($5,000)
• ARC Discovery Grant, 2004-2005 ($75,000): ‘Cinematic Imaginations’
• USyd Faculty of Arts Start-up Grant, 2003 ($5,000)
• Sesqui Postdoctoral Fellowship, University of Sydney 2002-2005 (declined)
• Junior Research Fellow, St John’s College, Oxford, 1998-2002 (£21,000 per annum)
• Senior Rouse Ball Scholar, Trinity College, Cambridge, 1997-98 (£8,000)

Affiliations and Memberships

Member: Australian Modernist Studies Network
Member: Modernist Studies Association

Contributions

I am Director of UNSW's Centre for Modernism Studies in Australia.
http://empa.arts.unsw.edu.au/centre-for-modernism-studies-in-australia/
I am a member of the Modernist Studies Association, and a member of the national advisory board for the Australian Modernist Studies Network.
I peer-review critical work for numerous journals (including New Literary History, Textual Practice, and the Journal of Modern Literature) and presses (including Cambridge and Oxford University Presses, Polity Press, and Ashgate Press).

Other Information

I have worked and taught at the Universities of Cambridge, Oxford, and Sydney.
I was a Visiting Professor in African-American Studies at the University of California at Berkeley in 1999-2000.
I was Associate Dean (Research) in the Faculty of Arts, University of Sydney in 2007.
I was an Invited Visiting Summer Scholar at St. John's College, Oxford, in 2009.

Personal Links

CMSA
Murphet on Academia.edu

Interests

I am particularly interested in the situation of literature within a rapidly evolving and unevenly developed “media ecology,” dominated by electronic systems of communication. I have explored the archaeology of this situation in the era of the second industrial revolution, and am increasingly animated by the question of the very future of something called “literature” today.

I am interested in what parallel lessons can be drawn from the current situation of the film medium in the era of its digitalisation, and in particular what specific filmmakers (such as Gus van Sandt, David Lynch and Todd Solondz) have to teach us aesthetically about media shock, obsolescence and survivability. It is thus that I understand cinematic 'ethics'.

I have abiding interests in the tradition of literary expression in the United States of America, from the so-called “American Renaissance” right down to the novels and poems of today’s most technically accomplished exponents; and in the history and current state of “critical theory” as a dialectically adapting corpus of concepts and language games driven critically to reflect on itself as the best means of reflecting on the contradictory social object.