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<TITLE>UNSW EMPA Seminar, Tues Oct 5, 1-2: Brigitta Olubas</TITLE>
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<FONT FACE="Calibri, Verdana, Helvetica, Arial"><SPAN STYLE='font-size:11pt'>Research Seminar for the<BR>
School of English Media and Performing Arts, <BR>
University of New South Wales, Kenisington<BR>
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Tues Oct 5, 1-2pm in Robert Webster Building 327<BR>
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</SPAN><SPAN STYLE='font-size:12pt'><B>Dr Brigitta Olubas</B> </SPAN><SPAN STYLE='font-size:11pt'>(UNSW)<BR>
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Writing about the UN: Shirley Hazzard’s Humanist Politic <BR>
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In her 1970 critique of the UN, <I>Defeat of an Ideal: The Self Destruction of the United Nations</I>, Shirley Hazzard writes: "Reason and Justice are kept alive in mysterious as well as obvious ways, and the fact that one may see no immediate result of a sacrifice for principle may be one of the best reasons for making it", proposing that obscurity and uncertainty may attend even the clearest of moral purposes. This paper will consider her UN writings in light of the logic of complication invoked here, as a way of particularising the sense of the human that underpins both the satirical short stories (<I>People in Glass Houses</I>, 1967) and the nonfiction works of political critique and polemic (<I>Defeat of an Ideal</I>, and<I> Countenance of Truth: the United Nations and the Waldheim Case</I>, 1989).<BR>
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<B>Brigitta Olubas</B> is a Senior Lecturer in the School of EMPA, UNSW. Her most recent publication is <I>Remembering Patrick White: Contemporary Critical Essays</I> (Rodopi 2010, co-edited with Elizabeth McMahon).<BR>
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