Rhizomes: Connecting Languages, Cultures And Literatures
Editor: Nathalie Ramière and Rachel Varshney
Date Of Publication: Oct 2006
Isbn13: 9781847180544
Isbn: 1-84718-054-X
This volume, Rhizomes, is a challenging path into a very multidisciplinary set of papers. Papers range across cultural studies and film, to applied linguistics to sociolinguistics; and as gathered in this one volume - the result of postgraduate student research of a very high order - they 'force' readers to think critically of disciplines, their assumed boundaries and most importantly, the usefulness of assuming the enduring value of such boundaries. This is not to say that ‘anything goes’, but the diversity of areas under scrutiny means that sharper re-thinking of one’s own comfort zones is necessarily one key outcome when confronted with a volume like this. This is one advantage of the selected papers – besides the obvious one of having at your finger tips a simple way of delving into a challenging diversity.

Brian Ridge, Campion College, Sydney

This is a wonderful collection of papers, which demonstrates the power and vitality of contemporary literary and cultural research. The scope of the papers, the diversity of the subject matter, and the willingness of their authors to work across disciplinary boundaries work together to create an exemplary collection of research for the twenty-first century – multidisciplinary, multigeneric, and multimodal, like 21st century texts and media.

Greg Hainge’s opening paper sets the stage for the diverse and engaging papers that follow. With his own examples of rhizomatics drawn from music, Greg immediately has the reader acknowledging the multidisciplinary – and multimodality – of contemporary texts – and so the need for research that can address the richness and complexity of these texts.

In Part 1 we have two papers that address the issue of the limitations of conventional research methodology in their own fields (language acquisition, film studies) – and propose alternative and more productive methodologies. The exciting thing about this section is that these are fields normally considered very different and without much to say to one another – and yet the combination works to create a dialogue that extends across these and many other fields of research. Most importantly, both challenge the dichotomising of research and analytical methods that has worked to impoverish their fields and the research on which it is based.

Part 2 presents papers on a range of marginalised social positionings and experiences – and in the process demonstrates both the power of research to uncover what has been ignored or elided in contemporary histories (how many westerners know of the long history of Chinese women in film? Or of an Aboriginal Taiwanese literature?) as well as the power of new perspectives, new ways of thinking the research subject, to open up areas of study such as dating manuals and country music, both conventionally dismissed as inherently trivial and/or sexist.

In Part 3 the papers all play brilliantly with the notion of connectivity, demonstrating for readers the inextricability of texts and meaning systems (verbal, visual and other) with the cultural contexts in which they operate – and so the diverse ways they may be deployed. These papers banish forever any reliance on a formalist reading or methodology for the analysis of text and meaning! And, again, the range of subject-matter is breath-taking and argues the need for cross-disciplinary, transdisciplinary and multidisciplinary research practice.

Part 4 takes the reader into the realm of transformations, challenging the ways in which textual and systemic changes articulate profound cultural changes in the societies that produce them. So we learn about grammatical interventions in the Chinese language as feminine and neuter pronouns are added to the gender-free Chinese language – and consider the major cultural change that both caused this change and is subsequently produced by it. We consider the ways in which cinema has evolved as an art-form, under the influence of its material and verbal technologies. And we consider the ways in which Chinese poetry has entered a range of cultural practices in the west and the east, and again consider how its traditional meanings and significance are maintained and communicate to these new contexts – and the nature of the transcultural experience this generates.

For the academic, student, or interested reader this collection offers a breath-taking scope of subject-matter and a vital and engaged approach to the material, that makes this collection a research ‘page turner’!

Professor Anne Cranny-Francis, Department of Critical and Cultural Studies, Macquarie University, Sydney

Nathalie Ramière holds qualifications in English Literature and Culture from the Université de Bourgogne, France. She has taught in Canada, where she also completed a Master’s degree in Translation (2002) at the University of Alberta, and currently teaches at the University of Queensland, Australia. Her current PhD research focuses on the question of cultural transfer in dubbing and subtitling.

Dr Rachel Varshney (PhD) holds both a PhD and a doctorate completed in cotutorship between the University of Queensland and the Université de la Sorbonne Nouvelle, Paris 3. She lectures in Academic and Professional Communication in the Department of Linguistics at Macquarie University, Australia. Her research interests lie in second language acquisition, with particular emphasis on first language(s) use in foreign and second language classrooms. In addition, she has research interests in plurilingualism and language contact in the electronic media.

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