Literature and Pedagogy celebrates and builds on the approach to reading literature that Bruce Gardiner pioneered at the University of Sydney and taught for over four decades. This book is not a how-to manual for teaching literature. Yet teachers would do well to heed its lessons, for it explores the ways that literary texts seek to instruct their readers; how they train, seduce and coerce readers into unique ways of knowing and distinct ways of understanding the world.

The inimitable Gardiner is affectionately referred to as “Bruce” by each of this volume’s contributors, consisting of his former students and colleagues, and so it seems fitting to engage with him on a first-name basis here as well. “Bruce” is synonymous with a signature teaching style, spellbinding lectures and dazzling erudition; with a singular devotion to students, upon whose work he lavished commentary that, according to Rodney Taveira in his chapter, was “legendary […] Copious, trenchant and eloquent”; with transformational, meticulous supervision and extreme generosity as a colleague; and with one of the most intransigent defences of academic independence in the face of management hostility that the University of Sydney has ever seen. Bruce refused to publish – on management’s terms – and he did not perish. Even though his career at the University of Sydney was under threat – a challenge he faced while suffering health complications due to contracting HIV/AIDS in the 1980s – he continued to inspire multiple generations of students, many of whom have become professionals in the humanities. A collective impulse led to this project, yet it would have been infinitely diminished without Nick Riemer, who not only formed the initial editorial committee but who remained a tireless editorial partner and source of inspiration and wise counsel throughout the whole project. I am indebted also to Alex Houen for his editorial work, particularly for his expertise in sourcing, peer reviewing and editing submissions, and to Peter Banki for his valuable intellectual support. This book was inspired above all by a shared sense of urgency, firstly, to honour Bruce’s scholarly ethos, an ethos at risk of disappearing, and secondly, to celebrate his unique approach to reading literature, a sample of the fruits of which are on display in the chapters of this book.

When I was an undergraduate, one research student, now Professor of English, relayed to me – with a twinkle in his eye – advice once passed down to him, “Follow thy Bruce”. Bruce’s teaching invited students to put the conventions of scholarly rigour to creative use, for both intellectual and aesthetic ends. The method of this approach was taught through modelling, like sowing a potentiality in the mind of a receptive listener. For this reason, the first section of this book, entitled “Bruce Gardiner en acte”, alludes to the ancient distinction that Aristotle forged between the potential and the act, between dunamis (δύναμιϛ) and energeia (ἐνέργεια), where what is actus – or en acte, as the French say – is that which either is in the process of becoming (energeia) or has already been fully actualised (entelechia [ἐντελέχεια]). In Part I of the book, the potentia of Bruce’s method is rendered en acte through critical witnessing, which details the history and significance of this pedagogy, including its effect on the learning, researching subject. These testimonials also pay subtle tribute to Bruce’s famous performativity while teaching, his affection for playing the dandy, and the strength of his convictions in his own scholarly opinions and in the value of his work.

Contributors to Part I draw on their inspiring encounters with Bruce to reflect on the intersections between pedagogy and literary studies. How does a unique pedagogical style change the evolution of a discipline? How does intergenerational transmission between teacher and student play out both within and beyond disciplinary boundaries? Many contributors to this section explore these questions in relation to efforts to resist the neo- liberalisation and neo-conservatism of contemporary academic culture. The four works contained in Part II, entitled “Imagined Pedagogies: Poetry and Play”, respond to Bruce’s pedagogy through different literary forms: poetry, the lyric essay, and prose translation.

Bruce resisted arriviste academia, publishing his work not for the sake of promotion but when it made sense personally and professionally. As discussed in the subsequent chapters, he took great pleasure in contributing written work to collegial projects, and the three jewels in the crown of this book are found in “Part III Bruce Gardiner, Original Teachings”, which consists of material by Bruce himself.

In Part IV of this book, “The Poetics of Pedagogy”, the reader is introduced to Gardinerian perspectives on literary texts and other cultural phenomena. These chapters are attuned to the emergence of pedagogical voices and hermeneutic issues in subjects as diverse as ancient Australian fauna, sacred writings, queer texts, Renaissance poetry, Romantic prose, decadent and modernist literatures, and modern American poetry.

Part I. Bruce Gardiner en acte

In Chapter 1 “The Antimanager”, Nick Riemer affirms that Bruce is “the quintessential antimanager”, one who incarnates resistance to the neoliberal university and its ascendent cadre of “market hierophants”, whom he defines as managers who dictate and constantly redefine the terms of academic work. Riemer argues that Bruce’s triumph over an attack on his character and work sets the standard for a necessary defence of university culture, scholarly rigour and modes of professional conduct, all of which remain invisible to management’s battery of metrics but are, in fact, the very heart and soul of any university’s mission.

In “Revolutionary Tradition” (Chapter 2), Andy Carruthers finds in Bruce’s “prophetic mode” an alternative to the market-driven culture of the modern university. While emphasising that Bruce refused to follow a single critical trend or methodology, Carruthers situates Bruce’s analytic orientation and pedagogical style in a tradition that sees the prophet performing social criticism, and criticism itself constituting a form of prophecy. Bruce’s teaching extends this history of divinatory hermeneutics, which stretches from Friedrich Schleiermacher’s modern philology to ideas by more contemporary critics such as Frank Kermode and Tilottama Rajan. Here, divinatory criticism, or visionary reading, is an antidote to “the stupor and confusion of our time”, and Bruce’s visionary pedagogy is a truth expressed as the “gift” of reading (Carruthers evokes Frank Kermode’s terminology here), a legacy that is passed along from one reader to the next. Of course, Bruce was conscious of this lineage, and Carruthers – with access to Bruce’s unpublished lectures on Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass – finds that Gardiner’s Whitman “comes closest to the prophetic Voice”, a voice that also speaks to the revolutionary traditions of Spiritualism, from Swedenborg to the Shakers to Blake, as Bruce observed. Yet the prophetic tradition is not limited to a specific epoch or medium, and Carruthers calls on each of us, as potential prophet–poets and prophet–critics, to share Bruce’s gift.

This legacy is also the subject of Chapter 3, “They Danced by the Light of the Moon: Edward Lear, Bruce Gardiner, and Learning Ways to Mean” by the author of fiction for children and young adults, Christopher Richardson. He recalls Bruce awakening him to the horizons that open up when children’s writing is taken seriously. In one of the many contributions evoking Edward Lear – the nineteenth-century Englishman famous for his linguistic ingenuity and stylised nonsense verse, a fact which speaks volumes for Bruce’s mischievous genius – Richardson quotes W.H. Auden’s poem “Edward Lear”, which pays respects to the great poet: “children swarmed to him like settlers. He became a land.” For Richardson, as for so many students drawn to Bruce’s lime green office, its door always open, Bruce also “became a land”. In this chapter, Richardson’s pea-green boat ranges far and wide, from Stefan Zweig to Lewis Carroll, from Jorge Luis Borges to Jean Baudrillard, and returns to shore with a mindful lesson: “At a time when reading and writing are increasingly reduced to the technology of neoliberalism – assessed in Australian schools through the microscope of standardised testing such as NAPLAN1 – a Gardinerian re-enchantment is urgently required.”

During his career, Bruce applied his extensive knowledge of the history of rhetoric by contributing to courses in Writing and Rhetoric Studies in the English department. Three of his former colleagues, Adam Gall, Benjamin Miller and Susan E. Thomas, bear witness to the extraordinary impact of his research-led teaching in this field. In “Navigating, Networking, Nurturing: The Research, Teaching, and Leadership of Bruce Gardiner” (Chapter 4), they underscore how Bruce’s collegiality and engaged teaching epitomised the traditional values of a humanities education. Inspired by his pedagogy, which drew on different modes of storytelling within its argumentation and exegesis, they integrate autoethnography techniques, each offering a personal account of Bruce’s method. First, Gall draws a parallel between Bruce’s approach to textual scholarship and the classical myth of the maze and the minotaur, simultaneously evoking many of the qualities that made Bruce’s teaching so unforgettable: his “metatheoretical confidence”, his “willingness to be certain (or almost certain) on some questions”, and his “confidence in disagreement”, to name a few. Secondly, Miller attests to Bruce’s awareness of relational epistemologies within the field of rhetoric studies – which was on full display when, for instance, Bruce dissected the assigned textbook during a guest lecture he gave in Miller’s course – and how this informed his professional sociability, the sense he gave students and colleagues alike of the role they play in the networking and production of ideas, each person being “a vital point in a constellation of knowledge”. In the third part of the chapter, Thomas reinforces this view in her testimonial of Bruce’s steadfast dedication to guiding colleagues and students through the intricacies of international and interdisciplinary traditions. His selflessness is evident in Thomas’ moving account of how Bruce reacted to a hate crime that left him hospitalised.

The next four chapters explore the autoethnographic mode, extending it in different directions and combining it with reflections on intellectual history, bibliography, and archival scholarship, three fields for which Bruce had a particular predilection. The first of these contributions, “Human Voices, and a Bruce Gardiner Lecture” (Chapter 5), hearkens back to 1982, when the philosopher Peter Godfrey-Smith was a high school student who had come to the University of Sydney to hear a lecture about T.S. Eliot. The return journey to this seminal encounter was made possible by the fact that – some forty years later, with the impeccable orderliness and utmost care for teaching materials for which he was renowned – Bruce was able to retrieve the script of his lecture from his personal archives. Godfrey-Smith rediscovers Bruce’s unconventional critical style and surprising juxtapositions, with a case in point being a comparison between Eliot and Lear in terms of the nonsense found in each author’s verse. Reflecting on the 1982 lecture and his evolving relationship with his erstwhile lecturer, Godfrey-Smith finds a common spirit between Bruce’s approach to philosophy and that of the philosopher Richard Rorty, for whom philosophy was “a kind of writing”, a mode of inquiry which, however fruitful, cannot ultimately offer answers to the questions it poses. If Godfrey-Smith came to demur from this view, Bruce’s elegant demonstration of it nonetheless remains ingrained in the philosopher’s thinking as a foil against his own potential follies, illusions and overzealousness.

Traces of Bruce’s work, from a separate archive, also emerge in Rodney Taveira’s “‘My Wretched Dragon Is Perplexed’: Scenes of Submission and Response” (Chapter 6), a piece featuring four examples of Bruce’s inimitable feedback on work submitted during Taveira’s fourth year in the English honours program. If these were the lowest marks Taveira received that year, the teacher’s deliberated responses remind Taveira of the extent to which he relished such exchanges and the intellectual ferment of Bruce’s classroom. Taveira thinks through various modes of pedagogical influence (the amanuentic, the disciplinary, the intellectual, the maieutic, the resisted, the unrecognised) before turning to perhaps two of Bruce’s most relevant works in this regard. The first is “Christ’s Parable of the Sower: Intellectual Property Rights in Gossip and Testimony”, a 2018 article published in Literature and Aesthetics.2 In this piece, Bruce establishes the difference between gossip and testimony, and Taveira draws on that distinction not only to situate the nature and evolution of his own opinions, between his time as one of Bruce’s students and now, but also to assess the originality of these contrasting perspectives. The second work is Bruce’s “Theaetetus’s Complaint, or Sadomasochism and Your Supervisor: A Select Bibliography”, which scaffolded his rather notorious lecture on the supervisor–supervisee relationship, where Bruce conceives the roles of sadist (supervisor) and masochist (student) to gradually inverse over the period of the PhD candidature. He also surveys the literary representation of pedagogical motifs, from Socrates to Joyce, and psychoanalytic attitudes to the scene of instruction, from Sigmund Freud and Jacques Lacan to Shoshana Felman and her contemporaries. For Taveira, Bruce’s scholarly but creative approach to genealogical reading prepared him for a career in American Studies, “an interdiscipline, a transdiscipline, even an antidiscipline […that] demands a willingness to forge historical and geographical bridges, to interrogate and undo borders, to ford aesthetic and generic boundaries, and to attend to scenes of cultural and spiritual discord”. “Theaetetus’s Complaint” was taught during a seminar for research students embarking on a PhD, and over the years it evolved into a performance that (if gossip is to be believed and shared) became increasingly provocative; in its later iterations, no sooner had Bruce mapped out his genealogy than he would don a leather waistcoat and ask a stunned audience if they had any questions.

Chapter 7 (“Marks in the Margin: Reading Benjamin Reading Baudelaire”) sees Brett Neilson remembering what he calls Bruce’s “knight’s move”. When approached by the young Neilson, who had just begun his doctoral studies, Bruce lent his new supervisee his personal copy of Walter Benjamin’s Charles Baudelaire: A Lyric Poet in the Era of High Capitalism. This book was hardly the most obvious text to give someone embarking on a PhD about the twentieth-century, Paris-based English publisher Nancy Cunard; yet for Neilson, the intellectual encounter was transformational. In this chapter, he recalls his intimate relationship with this particular copy of Benjamin’s book, how he pored over Bruce’s marginal inscriptions, divining the thoughts of his master in their obscure hieroglyphs. Thinking back to that process offers the author the opportunity for metareflection on Benjaminian themes of memory and experience. The intimate and the political become inextricably entwined in this account of witnessing, as Neilson evokes also Bruce the private citizen who conducted unassuming acts of activism and solidarity. He cites such examples as when Bruce wrote letters to the Sydney Morning Herald – including his 5 September 1985 reproach to the NSW government for legislation displaying “prejudice against homosexuality and misogynistic hypocrisies about prostitution” – or when he and his partner sheltered young and otherwise homeless HIV-positive men for extended periods of time in their Darlinghurst home.

Peter Banki’s personal account of learning from and befriending Bruce reinforces an understanding of how Bruce’s commitment to the humanities was not only a professional principle but indeed an ethos he lived beyond the bounds of academia. With its allusion to the title of Hopkins’ famous poem, “The Windhover in Him” (Chapter 8) speaks of a spiritual resource that permeates Bruce as much as it inspires Banki. We first glimpse Bruce walking with an “energetic, upbeat” stride to catch a bus, with Banki watching admiringly and thinking to himself: “[T]he work is giving you energy. You have found a relationship to it that is healthy and joyous.” Many will recognise this bounce in Bruce’s step, his capacity, no matter what the trial, to seemingly transcend the prosaic and the mundane. Banki reminds us also of Bruce’s playful erotics of pedagogy, of the teacher who sought not to repress but to acknowledge, with the utmost professionalism, the libidinal dynamics that animate the pedagogical encounter, and to find therein a means for understanding how authors and texts seduce and convert us to their unique ways of knowing. Banki’s reflections on the honesty of speech acts lead him to Paul Celan’s famous 1967 meeting with Martin Heidegger at the philosopher’s cabin in the Black Forest. While Banki felt he could not speak of this scene in his monograph The Forgiveness to Come: The Holocaust and the Hyper-Ethical (2017), he turns to it here, through Celan’s poem “Todtnauberg” (1970), which bears witness to the meeting and to the unspeakable.

Part II. Imagined Pedagogies: Poetry and Play

Toby Fitch’s poem “Triptych” (Chapter 9) responds to Bruce’s lecture on Gertrude Stein’s two poems “Picasso” and “If I Told Him: A Completed Portrait of Picasso”. Fitch’s note contextualises his own poem by explaining that, for Bruce, the second of Stein’s poems in particular re-envisages the essence and purpose of poetry, with Stein “savouring” three distinctive possibilities for the art: the Platonic (where poetry is representational and mimetic, concerned with achieving precise resemblance – even if, for Socrates, poets ultimately do not live up to such standards and should be banned from the state); the Freudian (where poetry is symbolic, operating through signs, sign systems and their significance); and the Wittgensteinian (where poetry is ludic, engaging in social and intellectual play, albeit a kind of play that is bound by rules). If Bruce’s Stein is especially hostile to the first two perspectives, Fitch’s poem sets up a dialogue between these views and numerous other influences that are refracted throughout his triptych, such as Marianne Moore’s “Poetry”, John Ashbery’s “And Ut Pictura Poesis Is Her Name”, and Stein’s own Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas.

Michelle Kelly’s “Street Library (A–Z)” (Chapter 10) is a poem that guides the reader through the contents and character of street libraries in her local area and further afield. Kelly completed a doctoral thesis under Bruce’s supervision on libraries, where she explored the textual phenomena produced by library books, library patronage and fiction classification. In her poem, Kelly continues her conversation with Bruce’s teaching, which was ever attentive to the infrastructure of books and the contingencies of the reading experience, by turning her gaze to the adjacent field of textual infrastructure, in particular to the micro-scale sometimes spontaneous sometimes ephemeral community structures designed to house books for sharing. The poet dialogues with these books’ patrons and admirers via the social networks that connect and animate these spaces. Comments on Twitter (now X) and Instagram about these street libraries undergird the poem, their italicised words forming a curious abécédaire that nods to Bruce’s interpretation of Djuna Barnes’ Creatures in an Alphabet.3

In her lyric chapter “Bruce Gardiner’s Emily Dickinson” (Chapter 11), Monique Rooney meditates on what it has meant for her both to read and to teach works of Emily Dickinson after experiencing Bruce’s masterful classes on the poet. Bruce once wrote to Rooney that teachers are not, or are not only, authors; they are irritants. Her interest piqued, through a series of aphoristic vignettes, Rooney retraces etymologies of pedagogical praxes in Dickinson’s work, from the mimetic to the maieutic, and gauges their affects, such as the aesthetic shocks generated by the poet who relives the epileptic “gunshots” that her brain fired at her own body. Dickinson’s poetry is, Rooney surmises, “tasked with the military duty of guarding and protecting a body hostage to a cognitive disorder”. Her reading of Dickinson escapes the critical conventions that entrap the female body – epitomised as waif or maid – in order to proffer it redemption or defence. Rather, Rooney draws on a critical symbology and on an attention to variations of metaphor and metonymy indebted to Bruce’s instruction; she unearths Bruce’s unpublished papers “Where Did That Penis Go?” and “Judith Butler. The Lesbian Phallus and the Morphological Imaginary. A Commentary”. Rooney’s Gardinerian synapses lead her to attribute to Bruce an idea which is quite possibly her own – namely that the poet Susan Howe’s Emily Dickinson “is the [Lacanian] phallus of American Literature”. They also lead her to a sense of the contemporary iterations of this idea, an example of which being Louise Bourgeois’ impish smile in Robert Mapplethorpe’s 1982 portrait of the artist, where Bourgeois is shown from the waist up, wearing a fur coat and cradling Fillette, her poodle-sized sculpture of a phallus. The invention of this beguiling trope, with its spectral sower of the seed, underscores the prescience of Bruce’s insight, this time cited verbatim from Rooney’s correspondence with him: “I’d say that despite their extraordinary power, Heidegger’s lecture notes reveal much less about his teaching than do his students’ transformation of them, including Lacan’s.” That’s a key performance indicator no managerial metric could measure! In these poetics of irritation, Rooney finds not so much evidence of annoyance that is “minor” and “noncathartic”, according to Sianne Ngai’s definition of the emotion, as a Gardinerian “structure of transmission through which unwritten knowledge is passed from teacher to student” (my emphasis).

The coda for this section is a reflection on the nature of play itself: the novelist Jack Cox offers his translation of Émile Benveniste’s 1947 essay “Le jeu comme structure” (Chapter 12). The work makes its English-language publication debut here, as “Play as Structure”. In his chapter, Benveniste explores myriad connotations of the French jeu (play, game) that foreground structural understandings of play (versus player) as form, as opposed to sociological understandings of play as function. The project is simple enough at the start: “I shall call play all ordered activity that has its end in itself and does not aim to usefully modify reality.” Yet it quickly brims with complexity and paradox. Benveniste retraces the displacement of the Latin ludus (a form of training connoted with “competition; game for the arena”) by jocus (wordplay, a frivolous remark) – so that “play” is now located in words, not only in acts – and the legacy of each notion in the French jeu. He considers the relationship of play to “reality”, practical vocation, ritual and myth, finding a profound dialectic with the sacred. If Benveniste’s play-as-form inhabits politics, religion, war and courts of law as much as it resides in poetry, it is nonetheless “bound up with the predominance of subconscious life […] it frees up spontaneous activity”. As such, it induces in us “a beneficial abandon to forces that real life reigns in and injures”, and above all, it awakens our childlike “native representation of things”, that “magical understanding, which the real world disappoints at every turn”. This incursion from the great linguist offers a wry counterpoint to many of the themes, and indeed forms, of playful reading contained within this book. That all of these acts have been inspired by one person testifies to the power of Bruce’s own form, the living heritage of the playful master.

Part III. Bruce Gardiner, Original Teachings

The first of Bruce’s three chapters is an unpublished essay entitled “‘To entertain this Starry Stranger’: Jane Taylor, William Blake, Edward Lear and Mem Fox in Martha Nussbaum’s Classroom” (Chapter 13) in which Bruce analyses the curious quartet of Taylor, Blake, Lear and Fox with respect to Nussbaum’s ethical paradigm for reading and assessing children’s literature. He dissects the way the contemporary philosopher mobilises Taylor’s “Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star” as a vehicle for her own moralistic didacticism on how to read literary works. Nussbaum claims that, when channelled by the benevolent tutelage of a reading parent, the infant’s wonder at the star’s preternatural sparkle and fancy guides the child’s moral imagination. Bruce challenges Nussbaum’s affirmation that this reading scene offers an ethical lesson in how to nurture sympathy, where the child is led to understand the little star through prosopopoeia (“How I wonder what you are”), and where the sparkling adamant becomes a lodestar for cultivating the child’s emotional palette, from fear to anger to love. For Nussbaum, learning the way of the star will educate the child to empathise with any living creature. However, for Bruce – whose poetic riposte passes through the likes of Blake, Charles Dickens and the bestselling contemporary Australian author of children’s literature, Mem Fox – what engages the child’s imagination in “Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star” is not the lullaby’s “moral meaning” but rather its “mortal meaning”. Bruce’s star becomes a “brilliant entelechy” for the child’s contemplation, a focus for the consideration of essential human qualities – mortality, mystery, wonder. He interprets Taylor’s poem not sociologically, as Nussbaum does (how you are) but ontologically (“what you are”).

“Lectures on Oscar Wilde’s Aesthetics in The Picture of Dorian Gray” (Chapter 14) comprises two lectures which set out a core thesis that Bruce advanced in seminars he taught on Wilde’s novel from 2007 to 2011 and in lectures he gave on the same book between 2016 and 2020. In both contexts, Bruce brought Dorian Gray into a dialogue with Immanuel Kant’s Critique of the Power of Judgment, G.W.F. Hegel’s Aesthetics, Walter Pater’s The Renaissance, John Ruskin’s Modern Painters, and Henry James’ “The Last of the Valerii”. The script offered here covers two lectures delivered in November 2020. “Lecture 1” considers the status of the aesthetic for Wilde and his characters, with Bruce examining their beliefs, conscious or otherwise, against the aesthetic theories of Kant, Hegel, Schopenhauer and Ruskin. Bruce draws our attention to the novel’s textbook quality, writing that “[w]e as readers are addressed as the fellows of this star-pupil Dorian, as aesthetic novices no less in need than he of elementary lessons in aesthetics”. Bruce leads us to perceive the lessons – both avowed and unavowed – contained within the novel’s discourse on the art object’s relationship to the body and time, the senses and the sensual, and the social order.

“Lecture 2” pivots towards the overlooked, or rather unappreciated, figure of Sibyl Vane, the object of Dorian’s sentimental devotion and betrayal. Bruce highlights how Sibyl challenges the misogynistic prism within which she is set by her coterie of male aesthetes and even by Wilde himself. She is defiant of aesthetic expectations in her performance – presented here as a coup de théâtre of anti-acting – when she plays the eponymous female lead in Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet, exhorting Dorian “to make the finest distinctions between the artfulness and artlessness of her performance, which he proves incapable of doing”. In Bruce’s conception, Sibyl emerges in her role as the master, drawing Dorian into “a Shakespearian-cum-Dickensian world of her own making to teach him a lesson about art, specifically her art”. This inversion bears the signature of Bruce’s critical dramaturgy, and Dorian – Wilde’s tragic hero – becomes “a puppet in the melodrama of Sibyl’s devising”.

“Luce Irigaray’s The Forgetting of Air in Martin Heidegger” (Chapter 15) was born from an experience no one could have anticipated. Between 2016 and 2020, in a course on twentieth-century literary theory initially required for admission to the English Honours program, Bruce taught seminars on the feminist philosopher Luce Irigaray’s 1983 work on Heidegger, each time following seminars on Heidegger’s “Language”, “The Thing” and “The Origin of the Work of Art”. With the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, and having no appetite for videoconferencing, Bruce spent a full semester conducting his course in a written online environment. He posted his reflections from week to week, and students were initially required to respond with two short critical commentaries, to which Bruce would reply individually before producing a compendium synthesising the different positions that would guide further discussion. Students found the process highly engaging, and despite the mountain of work it generated, Bruce responded with his hallmark attention to every single student commentary. Reproduced in this volume is sample material from this virtual classroom, beginning with Bruce’s exegeses of selected chapters of Irigaray’s book, followed by the relevant compendia.

The awe that Bruce’s lecturing generated owed much to its rhizomatic surprise, when the invisible tendrils underlying ideas, language and tropes across media, cultures and genres emerge before the listener. Bruce’s impeccable scholarly genealogies furthermore set a standard against which to reject, as Adam Gall notes in Chapter 4 of this volume, “a hazy historicism that can justify almost any connection via nebulous lines of influence and connection”. This quality is on display when Bruce contrasts Irigaray, who is attracted to the physics of the universal ether and the biology of preformationism (specifically ovism), with Heidegger, who is drawn to the physics of the cosmic vacuum and the biology of epigenesis. He discusses Irigaray’s critique of what she believes to be Heidegger’s patriarchal phenomenology (she calls it “the him”), which denatures and dehumanises, as opposed to a feminine ideal (“the her”), which connects all beings to each other and their environment. Bruce challenges students to think about this gendering of aesthetic representations, and at one point, he tests three of Irigaray’s symbols of masculinist oppression – the bridge, the portico and the erection – against the way these figures emerge in the work of different authors. In the first instance, Bruce retraces the ontology of the bridge in “It Is Deep (don’t never forget the bridge you crossed over on)” (1969), a poem by the Black American writer Carolyn M. Rodgers. In Bruce’s reading, the mother’s umbilical cord winds metaphorically into a telephone cord, through which the mother continues, or fails, to reach her daughter before this filament (of the feminine?) is recast anew as bridges which connect the island boroughs of New York City and support her daughter’s movements through the metropolis. Second, Bruce discovers a depiction of the mother as portico in Pablo Picasso’s First Steps (1943), where “the child’s body, angular and tense with effort, bursts with energy it draws from its mother, whom it treats as a battery, a reliable source of power, and as a garage, a shelter to which it can return between trips toward an autonomy that imagines it can eventually serve as its own battery and garage”. If the mother is the focal point and passage – the portico – in Picasso’s painting, Bruce considers the third Irigarayan figure – the erection – in Wallace Stevens’ celebrated “Anecdote of the Jar”, from Harmonium (1923). Bruce discerns a “dialectic of erection and ejaculation” in the poem, and when the speaker seeks to order what he calls the “slovenly wilderness”, setting his jar atop the hill with “dominion everywhere”, Bruce draws attention to Irigaray’s account of “the effect of the architectonic, technocratic power of ‘his’ [the masculinist and patriarchal] thought and language on ‘her’ [the feminine, the natural] being”. Bruce extends these tropes and ideas with a reading of how Irigaray contrasts “his” and “her” modes of voyaging and self-projection. To be a student in this class is exhilarating, and in these lectures, we encounter Bruce initiating students into a new mode of reading, with this particular demonstration followed by an invitation: “Please read the poem by Constantine Cavafy titled ‘Ithaka’ (1911) … to determine if and how it exemplifies or contradicts Irigaray’s phenomenological description of the voyage.”

Bruce interprets Irigaray’s challenging notion of seeing as “her”, likened to a seeing that perceives beings as “equivocally distinct and yet indistinct in the dusk before sunrise, which is when we sense, through a kind of seeing that is indistinguishable from touching, the ‘ever-ajar’ interbeing of everything”. This kind of seeing leads Bruce as naturally to Plato’s Timaeus (51e–53d, the χώρα, chôra or khôra, receptacle) as it does to Julia Kristeva’s Revolution in Poetic Language (1974). He massages the mind one more time: “Please read the poem by Emily Brontë [Ellis Bell], ‘Stars’ (1846), to determine if and how it exemplifies or contradicts Irigaray’s phenomenological description of ‘her’ way of seeing as opposed to ‘his’.” No one else teaches like this, and in Bruce’s compendia devoted to his students’ responses, the intellectual ferment is palpable.

Part IV. The Poetics of Pedagogy

Inspired by Bruce’s lifelong interest in birds, and his own anthology of poems featuring hummingbirds that he once brought to class, Alexis Harley (Chapter 16: “Lyrebirds”) recalls the twenty-one lyrebirds from mainland Australia that were released in 1934, in Mount Field National Park, Tasmania. Thirty years later, descendants of this settler bird population were heard singing a song associated with the whipbird, a species unknown to the island. Harley considers how this story might attest to the multidimensionality of lyrebird learning and their retention of songs that were handed down from their parents or learned from many contemporary species. But for some ornithologists, Harley notes, the lyrebirds’ repertoire was dismissed as an utter absence of learning. This view extended nineteenth-century commentators’ descriptions of the lyrebird as “a mimic” (and sometimes “a mocker”): from one generation to the next, its imitation of an imitation of a birdsong, which no extant Tasmanian lyrebird had ever heard, exposed the semantic emptiness of lyrebird song. Harley details how, in writing about these birds, the human settler population of the early colony of New South Wales reproduced a suite of European cultural referents. In the earliest colonial vernacular, the bird was compared to European Phasianidae and referred to with names such as a “mountain pheasant”, “native-pheasant” or “wood-pheasant”. The name “lyrebird”, which by the 1830s had become the dominant English vernacular name for the bird, invoked the classical Greek stringed instrument which the bird’s tail was supposed to resemble. As the symbol of lyric poetry, the figure of the lyre brought the lyrebird into connection with a literary mode that, in the early nineteenth century, was strongly associated with originality, and often (controversially) defined against mimetic modes. This chapter explores both human and bird learning – as well as, of course, the refusal to learn – in the settler-colonial state. Harley builds on Bruce’s extraordinary reflections on the literary history of originality and plagiarism as she considers early nineteenth-century ideas about lyric and mimetic writing as epistemological devices and ways of learning; she elucidates the limitations of such ideas in contexts of cultural and interspecies encounter.

Kate Lilley’s “The Queer Optimism of Ginsberg’s ‘Kaddish’ (for Bruce Gardiner)” (Chapter 17) celebrates “Kaddish”, Allen Ginsberg’s “big elegy” for his mother, Naomi (1894–1956). The poet revisits the “sunny pavement of Greenwich Village” and the downtown precincts he had recently sublimed in “Howl” (1955/6), to recast Manhattan as a scene of diasporic mourning that is at once apocalyptic and everyday. Guided by Shelley’s “Adonais”, the Hebrew kaddish, and the body of his errant, incarcerated, immigrant mother, Ginsberg retraces the interwoven histories of Naomi’s life and his own. What emerges is a transnational visio: a prophetic dreaming of the aftermath of the Holocaust, the Bomb, and what Ginsberg later called the “Fall of America”, all through the eyes of Naomi and, at second distance, through those of her scribe, true heir, and youngest son. A paean and valediction delivered three years after Naomi’s death, Ginsberg’s elegy narrates a crisis of coming out and coming after, staging a homecoming from afar: dateline “Paris, December 1957–New York, 1959”. Lilley zooms in on Ginsberg’s “Note” on composition, first published as the liner notes for a 1959 Fantasy album of Ginsberg reading from various texts, including “Howl” and “Kaddish”. In the note, Ginsberg described his desire to, in his own words, “write what I wanted to without fear, let my imagination go, open secrecy, and scribble magic lines from my real mind”. When Ginsberg then imagines different audiences for his prophecy – his “own soul’s ear and a few other golden ears”, as opposed to “ghostly Academics in Limbo screeching about form” – Lilley, in her fitting tribute (“(for Bruce Gardiner)”), explores two incompatible pedagogies: “the mirroring pleasures of coterie manuscript circulation” and “the colonisation threatened by these ungendered, inhuman bodysnatchers”. She writes about Ginsberg’s fantasy of poetic revenge on these predatory paternal ghosts, evoking Ginsberg’s “creeps [who] wouldn’t know Poetry if it came up and buggered them in broad daylight”, and the poet’s corollary of what he termed his “scared love” of feminised “forms in [his] own image”. In doing so, Lilley affirms, Ginsberg aligns queer poesis with the engulfing creator-mother; in the poet’s words, “a poem in the dark–escaped back to Oblivion”.

The topoi of hermeneutics remain front and centre in “Teaching Interpretation: The ‘Genuine Sense’ in Bruce Gardiner’s Lectures” (Chapter 18), where Marc Mierowsky revisits Bruce’s lecture “What Is Interpretation?”. Mierowsky recalls how, in characteristically wide-ranging fashion, Bruce begins with a focus on John Dryden’s knowledge of Biblical textual history – the variants, revisions, corruptions and aporias that Dryden accommodated in his vision of the Bible’s integrity – and his capacity to incorporate this knowledge into the radically different religious position that accompanied his conversion to Catholicism in 1685. Observing the evident shift between Dryden’s poems “Religio Laici” (1682) and “The Hind and the Panther” (1687), Bruce discovers a mode of reading that incorporates the chaos of a text’s composition, decomposition and afterlife. The “genuine sense” that Dryden identified as the basis for exposition becomes, in Bruce’s hands, a habit of noticing that looks beyond the poem as a hermetic object; it is a form of sustained attention that encourages one to read and cite ecumenically. Mierowsky builds on this analytic technique while picking up on Bruce’s claim that, from the Enlightenment onwards, “the resemblance of human and divine authorship grows ever variously closer”. He focuses on the problems that this confluence poses for two sets of critics as they attempt to define the function and purpose of criticism. First, Mierowsky contrasts Dryden with Christian Hebraists such as Robert Lowth, who had to contend with a Hebrew-speaking (read: Jewish) God. He then turns to two contemporary Jewish American critics, Cynthia Ozick and Geoffrey Hartman, who were faced with an interpretive tradition which was culturally theirs yet, at the same time, largely co-opted in Lowth’s wake by Christianity. Mierowsky therefore brings together two moments in the history of interpretation where, he writes, “the sacred vestiges of textual scholarship confront readers trying to negotiate the value of literature and its relation to their religious identity”. His comparative reading celebrates the rigorous generalism of Bruce’s method, for Dryden and Ozick each in their own way invoke the idea of a transmitted inheritance which places the past and future in the interpretative moment. Following Bruce’s guiding light, Mierowsky finds here “a way to read that resists the neatness of any one system, the limits of a single context, and (not so implicitly) the drive to specialisation that marks the teaching and practice of interpretation today”.

In “The Nonsense of Knowledge: A Reading of George MacDonald’s At the Back of the North Wind” (Chapter 19), Jessica Lim turns her attention to the Scottish novelist, poet and masterly precursor of modern fantasy literature. In MacDonald’s 1871 novel, the physically vulnerable protagonist, Diamond, and his mother encounter an abandoned book and are solicited by a nonsense poem found within it. Lim’s original reading of this scene integrates Bruce’s differentiation between testimony and gossip, and discovers fluid boundaries between these two notions and the ways of knowing that are depicted in MacDonald’s work. This discussion expands into a reflection on how Victorian nonsense poetry foregrounds uselessness and excess as central forces in the creative renewal of a capitalist world concerned with scarcity and the efficient allocation of resources; MacDonald’s novel explicitly challenges the idea that knowledge transference and skill training represent a sufficient and legitimate model of education. Lim argues that, in MacDonald’s work, pedagogy is more akin to twenty-first-century accounts of moral psychology, in which our propensity to agree or disagree with moral propositions is closely linked with modes of cognitive intuition that are grounded in affect and emotion (see, for instance, Jonathan Haidt’s The Righteous Mind); thus, MacDonald’s variety of pedagogy “becomes a reclamation of the origin of the paedagogium as a place of hospitality”. Here, the nonsensical poem that calls our assumptions of aesthetic value into question is linked to the “nonsensical mode of pedagogy” within MacDonald’s work. This mode, in turn, is viewed as a precursor to Makoto Fujimura’s “generative thinking”, which in Lim’s words, “enables creativity, enables the performance of and expectation of generosity, and has impacts that extend beyond one’s immediate generation”.

Liz Shek-Noble’s “Virtue or Villainy? Mrs. Grose in ‘The Turn of the Screw’ and The Haunting of Bly Manor” (Chapter 20) resonates with Bruce’s readings of Luce Irigaray’s feminist philosophy and of Wilde’s Sibyl Vane, as it considers the figure of the governess in Henry James’ 1898 horror novella and its recent miniseries adaptation by Mike Flanagan released by Netflix in 2020. Inspired by Bruce’s 2018 lecture on “The Turn of the Screw”, Shek-Noble counters traditional readings of Mrs. Grose either as unintelligent and subservient or as a “villain” competing with the governess for the children’s affections. Shek-Noble builds on Bruce’s hypothesis that the governess and Mrs. Grose are “one joint investigative team”, the latter playing an essential role in assisting the governess to interpret the central “text” of the novella, namely the actions and words of the children, Miles and Flora. Indeed, Shek-Noble’s close reading demonstrates that Mrs. Grose has more than a few arms of rhetoric at her disposal. The chapter then focuses on how such relationships shift in The Haunting of Bly Manor (2020). Flanagan’s miniseries adaptation reframes the role of Mrs. “Hannah” Grose as a figure who propels an investigation into the reasons why the ghosts first perceive themselves as being alive, and who is tasked with determining the veracity of the governess’ account. Mrs. Grose’s fate changes dramatically in The Haunting of Bly Manor, causing Shek-Noble to reassess this mystery of hermeneutics. She concludes her chapter by returning to Bruce’s insight about how scholars should refrain from committing a kind of “critical narcissism” against the characters as much as against the narrator of a tale; we should, more specifically, resist being too readily swayed by “adverse findings” about their competence and reliability, findings which have caused so many to fail to see that Mrs. Grose is the first and sharpest “reader” in “The Turn of the Screw”.

In “Djuna Barnes’ Modernity: Addition, Subtraction, Failure, Fantasy” (Chapter 21), Melissa Hardie reflects on intersections between the queer and the adulterous in the modernist novel. She begins by considering the (im)possibility of separating “queer modernism” from “modernism”, and by contrasting the historical representation of the queer as repressed or closeted, with that of adultery, as visible public disruption and as a dereliction of contractual fidelity. Ultimately, she discovers in Djuna Barnes’ Nightwood a “queer adultery”. This potent, paradoxical conjunction animates Hardie’s exploration of what she sees as late modernism’s twin drive to historicise the novel and abate the pace of modernist experimentation. Hardie affirms that, for Barnes, history within this aesthetic becomes the site and pretext for formal experimentation, one that includes, ultimately, “unfaithfulness” to one’s own writing life, an errant praxis of re/living history. Hardie’s exploration of unavowed or indeterminate meanings through her analysis of the tropes and rhetoric associated with (in)fidelity advances a disciplinary precept, namely that hermeneutic strategies aspiring to disciplinary innovation are often faithful, even reducible, to established disciplinary conventions.

In a fitting conclusion to this section, Peter J. Hutchings offers a tribute to Bruce, the euphemistic “last Academic”, generating an encounter between Maurice Blanchot and Mary Shelley. “The Last Man: Literature and Survival” (Chapter 22) explores Shelley’s 1826 novel, The Last Man, the story of Lionel Verney who survives a plague that has killed all of humankind. Verney lives on in the libraries of Rome, dedicating himself to writing the history of the last living person, a book addressed to the dead. The Last Man is composed of multiple narratives of survival; indeed, it is introduced as a survival artefact, made up of texts from the past that have been translated in a present of writing which is itself a form of survival for their translator. The novel presents its origins as a process of deciphering and transcription, in keeping with Shelley’s presentation of the earlier Frankenstein as the outcome of a “waking dream”. Literature here is a project of reading and reinscription, of deep scholarship in the face of bereavement, plagues and disasters. The library becomes the site of survival, not only for the writer but also for the body of literature that the room contains, a body animated by the practices of scholarship and interpretation. This is a very particular understanding of literature and literary inheritance, and of a process of writing which is never distinct from reading. Hutchings’ beguiling tribute to Bruce intimates a mode of pedagogy which is understood as a practice of survival and endurance, erudition and imagination.

Appendices

Bruce himself has the last word in this volume, which is nothing less (and yet so much more) than a brief autobiography, and his “Record of Teaching and Supervision, 1981–2021”. A testament to Bruce’s unquenchable curiosity, these documents telegraph a narrative of intellectual adventure that transported students and colleagues alike for over forty years. Many of those who have contributed to this volume recall Bruce’s quiet but firm resistance to the corporatisation of teaching and research during this period, and Bruce’s record can be read alongside, for instance, Kate Lilley’s testimony (Chapter 17) to the transformation of the culture of the English department at the University of Sydney during Bruce’s tenure, a period which also coincided with the turbulent era of the culture wars and the wholesale questioning of the legitimacy of the English literary canon. It is likely that, at the University of Sydney, no other voice for the progressive reform of the canon was better acquainted with it, was so widely read, or was so profoundly committed to the flourishing of that tradition. As the premier literature department in this country – if not the southern hemisphere – over those four decades, the University of Sydney hosted its fair share of academic superstars and literati. None, it is evident, have had a greater or more lasting influence on students of literature than Bruce Gardiner.