Past Programs
Language and Linguistics - 2008
A thousand years of The Tale of Genji
13/11/2008
It's believed to be the world's first modern novel, penned a thousand years ago. The Tale of Gengi by Murasaki Shikibu starts when a woman of lower rank in the court gives birth to a son called Genji. He is favoured by the emperor because he's so beautiful, talented and likeable. He goes on to have many love affairs, which allows Murasaki Shikibu to explore ideas of love, court politics, friendship, life and death. Ten centuries on, the popularity and influence of this ancient text has not diminished and this year to honour the millenium of The Tale of Gengi, Japan is celebrating.
The libraries of East Timor Read Transcript
02/06/2008
How crucial are libraries for the restoration of knowledge and culture in a new country working to build an identity? Kirsty Sword Gusmão and librarian Patti Manolis discuss the role of libraries in East Timor.
Rotten English: writing in the vernacular Read Transcript
18/05/2008
'A howl, a shout, or a machine-gun, or the wind or a wave', this is how Caribbean poet Kamau Brathwaite describes writing in the vernacular.
While dialect, creole, pidgin, broken English and patois have been thought of as corrupt versions of English, for writers who use the vernacular and who embrace the language of the street and the bars, the creative possibilities can be liberating and even revolutionary.
Each colonial outpost of the British empire created its own English and today many Man Booker winners have written in the language of the street.
While it may be paradoxical to anthologise writings that are often anti-institutional, Dohra Ahmad has put together an anthology called Rotten English—it's a term taken from the novel Sozaboy by Ken Saro Wiwa, the assassinated Nigerian writer.
In her collection of this 'rotten' English literature, she features works from Robert Burns, Irvine Welsh, Rohinton Mistry, and also from the African diaspora.
A Caribbean writer in the anthology is M. Nourbese Philip—known as Nourbese—and she joins me this morning from the CBC studios in Toronto, Canada, where she lives; and Dohra Ahmad joins me from a studio in New York.
Rotten English: writing in the vernacular Read Transcript
07/05/2008
'A howl, a shout, or a machine-gun, or the wind or a wave', this is how Caribbean poet Kamau Brathwaite describes writing in the vernacular.
While dialect, creole, pidgin, broken English and patois have been thought of as corrupt versions of English, for writers who use the vernacular and who embrace the language of the street and the bars, the creative possibilities can be liberating and even revolutionary.
Each colonial outpost of the British empire created its own English and today many Man Booker winners have written in the language of the street.
While it may be paradoxical to anthologise writings that are often anti-institutional, Dohra Ahmad has put together an anthology called Rotten English—it's a term taken from the novel Sozaboy by Ken Saro Wiwa, the assassinated Nigerian writer.
In her collection of this 'rotten' English literature, she features works from Robert Burns, Irvine Welsh, Rohinton Mistry, and also from the African diaspora.
A Caribbean writer in the anthology is M. Nourbese Philip—known as Nourbese—and she joins me this morning from the CBC studios in Toronto, Canada, where she lives; and Dohra Ahmad joins me from a studio in New York.
