Commentary

The British have landed, again

by Stephen Knight •

March 1988, no. 98

Commentary

The British have landed, again

by Stephen Knight •

March 1988, no. 98

Some institutions thrive on the blank signification of initials. As with NATO, ACT or indeed ACTU. Cultural items too can have the same austere vitality. OED is an English nonword of high authority (though also the Welsh for ‘age’). Like the American military, the new Australian bureaucracy is much enamoured of dehumanised acronyms and academic life bristles with technical crassness from CTEC to CRASTE.

How appropriate then (HAT) that the major literary journal of record in the Anglophone Literary World should by robotic consensus be known as the TLS. And how very gratifying (HVG) that this deverbalised wordthing should have just in a special issue (actually a special section squeezed between Rupert Brook and memories of the Raj) produced its authorised version of Australian culture — a version itself compounded largely of initial and inert responses.

Stephen Knight

Stephen Knight, a long-term British migrant, of Welsh family, is in retirement an honorary Professor of Literature at the University of Melbourne, having previously been at universities in Sydney, Canberra, Melbourne, and, finally, back in Cardiff. He specialised in medieval literature, writing books on Chaucer and Robin Hood, but he also reviewed crime fiction for the Sydney Morning Herald in the 1970s and 1980s, and has written several books on that topic.