Dougal McNeill
Literary Studies
d.mcneill2@pgrad.unimelb.edu.au
Thesis topic: Forecasts of the Past: Some Contemporary Realisms
Supervisors
Dr David Bennett and Dr Mark Davis
Commencement date
1 March 2005
My thesis is something of an extended conversation with Fredric Jameson's ideas about the possibilities for realism in the age of globalisation. This has the advantage of allowing me to spend plenty of time reading, thinking and - occasionally - writing about some of the most exciting realists working today: Pat Barker and David Peace in Britain, the New Zealander Maurice Gee and German novelist Kerstin Hensel.
I've got a particular interest in the ways Brecht's arguments about realism and his "pedagogics" can be deployed in current debates, and in some of the technical and formal strategies contemporary realism mobilises to solve the representational problems facing the project today.
Professional Societies
- English Literary Society of Japan (www.elsj.org)
- International Brecht Society (www.brechtsociety.org)
- New Zealand Book Council (www.bookcouncil.org.nz)
Publications
Books
- The Many Lives of Galileo: Brecht, Theatre and Translation's Political Unconscious (Oxford: Peter Lang, 2005)
Book Chapters
- "One in the I for McCahon" in Ashley Remer (ed.), In View (Wellington: Adam Art Gallery, 2006)
- "Reading the Maps: Realism, Science Fiction and Utopian Strategies" in Andrew Milner, Matthew Ryan and Robert Savage (eds.), Imagining the Future: Utopia and Dystopia (Melbourne: Arena Publications, 2006)
Articles
- "Unfinished Episodes" (on Ian Wedde's Symmes Hole), Double Dialogues, no. 7 (forthcoming). www.doubledialogues.com
- "Sounding the Future: Marxism and the Plays of Terry Eagleton", Cultural Logic vol. 8, 2005. http://clogic.eserver.org/2005/mcneill.html
- 'Notes on "culture" ', Red and Green , vol. 4, 2004
- "McCahon's Gate III", Chartwell Trust Essays, 2003.http://www.chartwell.org.nz/startthinking/dougalmcneillessay.asp
Book reviews
- "Dwelling Poetically (Review of Michele Amas, After the Dance, Airni Beautrais, Secret Heart, Bernard Gadd The Unbelievable Lightness of Eggs and Anna Sanderson, Brainpark), New Zealand Books (forthcoming)
- "Infinite Last Gasps in Niu Sila (Review of Tusiata Avia, Wild Dogs Under My Skirt and Richard Reeve, The Life and the Dark)", New Zealand Books , December 2004
Conference presentations
- "Spaced Out: Ian Wedde's Symmes Hole and Innocent Places", Double Dialogues, University of Otago, 2 - 4 June, 2006
- "Courtenay Place and Other Fantasies: Symmes Hole at Twenty-One", SEFT Research Seminar, Victoria University of Wellington, 22 May 2006
- "Jameson, Cyberpunk and Exhausted Realism", Imagining the Future, Monash University, 6 - 7 December 2005
- "Birth and Other Non-Events in Beckett", antiTHESIS Symposium, University of Melbourne, 1 July 2005