EN221 Literary Theory and Criticism B
In second semester 1993 I started the last subject in my cobbled together Arts degree done over eight years while working full time in medical practice. This theory subject would allow me to continue studying English in a Postgraduate Diploma after getting my BA.
The lecturer was local legend Dr Dan O’Neill. He had been prominent in radical politics and the resistance to the undemocratic, authoritarian and corrupt Queensland governments in the past. He is still listed as an honorary lecture although he retired some time ago. He now runs a reading group at the University. I found this extract from an interview on the ABC from 2011:
When I retired at the age of 65, I wanted to keep doing something like what I’d done before. You know, I’d spent a hell of a lot of time giving lectures and tutorials. Particularly the tutorials was something I really enjoyed, you know, contact with people and stimulation of questioning things and hearing people’s opinions and cross-questioning people and being cross-questioned and so on. I really enjoyed all that and it was a way of life I just didn’t want to give up. And so I thought that the way to continue this would be to convene reading groups and collaboratively read through works of literature, fairly slowly, with a lot of discussion about what it all meant. So I decided I’d convene a number of reading groups. I suppose for me it was sort of like dying and going to teacher heaven because you no longer had to do any marking and trying to grade people against one other. And so I thought that this would be pure enjoyment. And that seems to me to be the way it has turned out.
This brief appreciation gives a flavour of his influence at UQ on students over a very long time. I was briefly one of them.
Once again on Wednesdays, I was leaving General Practice in the afternoons and this time spending two hours trying to keep up with literary theory.
We were kindly given a left over book of his Subject Materials from the old external honours course in Literary Criticism that also included material on Plato to Coleridge from Lit Crit A.
The subject we were doing, however, was a survey from that time forward – Arnold/Pater/Wilde/Eliot/Leavis/Williams/Marxism/Feminism/Structuralism/Post-Structuralism/Deconstruction.
We were offered a pass for attendance and showing we had read the voluminous handouts, or a graded assessment if we also submitted an assignment.
As the semester went on I found the material more and more head spinning. I didn’t take a lot of notes as I recall the sessions were more conversational and interactive than I had been used to. It was great.
Years later I saw Dan O’Neill’s name pop up in a collection of Clive James articles. Dan had been quoted in a book about expat Australians that had got under Clive’s skin and James let him have it with a bit of sneering invective. I am a great admirer of James’s writing style, and I own just about everything he ever published, but he has his blind spots and although Dan was only collateral damage in a take down of another author it struck me as unnecessary.
