Can literature make it possible to represent histories that are otherwise ineffable? Making use of the Deleuzian concept of "the powers of the false," Doro Wiese offers readings of three novels that ...deal with the Shoah, with colonialism, and with racialized identities. She argues that Jonathan Safran Foer'sEverything Is Illuminated, Richard Flanagan'sGould's Book of Fish, and Richard Powers'sThe Time of Our Singingare novels in which a space for unvoiced, silent, or silenced difference is created. Seen through the lens of Deleuze and his collaborators' philosophy, literature is a means for mediating knowledge and affects about historical events. Going beyond any simple dichotomy between true and untrue accounts of what "really" happened in the past, literature's powers of the false incite readers to long for a narrative space in which painful or shameful stories can be included.
Richard Flanagan: Critical Essays is the first book to be published about the life and work of this major world author. Written by twelve leading critics from Australia, Europe and North America, ...these richly varied essays offer new ways of understanding Flanagan’s contribution to Tasmanian, Australian and world literature.
This article explores how the different forms of heterotopias present in Richard Flanagan’s Wanting (2008) and Lloyd Jones’s Mister Pip (2006) articulate problematic identity politics and cultural ...memory. In Wanting, the collocation of Mathinna’s story with that of the lost Franklin expedition offers a form of reclaiming. This article argues that Flanagan’s novel moves from heterotopias of deviation to a crisis heterotopia, displacing and debunking the compensation function of the colonial heterotopia to highlight the crushing of Aboriginal identity. This shifting heterotopia is doubled by Mathinna’s heterotopic carceral body, that is, body as confined space, which qualifies the act of reclaiming. In Mister Pip, heterotopias concern cultural memory as the island of Bougainville, secluded from the rest of the world, turns into the repository of the villagers’ culture juxtaposed with the reading of Charles Dickens’s Great Expectations (1860–1861). This article argues that Jones’s creation of a palimpsestic heterotopia allows him to resist Eurocentric views as well as to actualize postcolonial concepts. Jones’s novel calls for a dynamic appropriation of literature. Matilda’s ‘Pacific version’ of Pip’s story reflects the cracks in the Victorian and contemporary exploitations of the island. Readers’ immersions in these heterotopias do not provide an escape from but a thoughtful commitment to the past.
A contextual analysis of the conditions that support gendered violence is central to Australian literature which has focused on the idea of men's complicity as a social category rather than ...individual deviance, allowing for more hopeful contextualisation of men as individuals. In work foundational to the field of narrative-based practices with men who abuse, social worker Michael White sought to externalise male power and abuse as a way of identifying the beliefs individual men hold that stand against this violence. Resonating with the development of narrative therapy as a distinctly Australian discipline, some contemporary Australian literary authors have explored the dual realities of complicity and resistance in individual men, while still focusing on the devastating effects of violence on women and children. Laguna's The Eye of the Sheep and Morrison's Music and Freedom are examples of contemporary tests that focus on the contradictions in individual men who show the capacity for love and connection, but also frequently practice violence and contempt.
According to Romei, Flanagan "does not see literature in terms of homeland or nationality" (11), while the Australian's chief reviewer, Geordie Williamson, commented that "Flanagan has broken through ...to a global readership" (17). According to Rooney, "Eliot's appropriation of the pilot's trauma functions . . . as an inverted mirror of Carroll's own fictional capture and recoding, across time and space, of Eliot's high modernist poetics for his own vernacular-modernist prose" ("View"). ...insofar as a work of art completes the existing order of European or English literature by inter- acting with it, Iris's short story completes Eliot's canonical modernist poem by providing another, more "personalized" interpretation of it-a communication from below-just as Jim's presence in London as an Australian at the heart of empire, like Eliot's as an American, "alters" its identity. According to Lever, "the POW experience in Changi and on the ThaiBurma railway has become the dominant legend of Australia's World War II."
Moseley talks about the 2014 Man Booker Prize, which was surrounded by the fears of automatic American dominance or Australian helplessness. The major talking point around this historic award in 2013 ...was the decision of its organizers to admit American novels to the competition, when previously it had been limited to any novel published in England and in English by nearly anybody, so long as the author was not from the US. However, the fears of automatic American dominance proved empty. The winner, announced on Oct 14, was the Australian novelist Richard Flanagan, for The Narrow Road to the Deep North.
This article encounters two Tasmanian novels, Richard Flanagan’s Death of a River Guide (1994) and Carmel Bird’s Cape Grimm (2004). The novels each contain two soundscapes: one detailing the hidden ...histories of violence and genocide at the frontier meeting of Aboriginal people and colonialists in the 1820s, and a second, set in a contemporary timeframe, that echoes these past traumas within the lives of characters facing extinction of their own. Deploying a close listening approach in the analysis of these soundscapes, the essay charts the space of the island in the novels, arguing that the resonance between the soundscapes past and present constitutes a transhistorical continuum of sound that links the colonial to the present. While there are both similarities and differences between the soundscapes in Flanagan and Bird, in the novels the sonic continuum reconstructs colonial history and remaps the space of the island. The discussion is positioned in relation to discourses of sound in Australian gothic literature, haunting, and theories of space.
Notable Books List 2015 Phenix, Katharine; Kirchhoff, Liz; Caplinger, Victoria ...
Reference and user services quarterly,
06/2015, Letnik:
54, Številka:
4
Journal Article
Recenzirano
The Notable Books Council, a group of readers' advisory experts within the Reference and User Services Association (RUSA), a division of the American Library Association, has announced its selections ...for the 2015 Notable Books List. Since 1944, the goal of the Notable Books Council has been to make available to the nation's readers a list of about twenty-five very good, very readable, and at times very important fiction, nonfiction, and poetry books for the adult reader. A book may be selected for inclusion on the Notable Books List if it possesses exceptional literary merit, expands the horizons of human knowledge, makes a specialized body of knowledge accessible to the nonspecialist, has the potential to contribute significantly to the solution of a contemporary problem, or presents a unique concept. Navigating the dark of World War II, a German boy and a French girl survive using senses other than sight. Australian beaches, Burmese jungles, love and death permeate a story of World War II POWs. German spies collaborate to unleash a campaign of terror in the United States at the start of World War I. Bragg, Rick.
Celotno besedilo
Dostopno za:
BFBNIB, DOBA, IZUM, KILJ, NMLJ, NUK, PILJ, PNG, SAZU, SIK, UILJ, UKNU, UL, UM, UPUK
In Richard Flanagan’s novel, Death of a River Guide, the narrator, river guide Aljaz Cosini, occupies an unusual position; throughout the novel, he remains underwater, drowning in Tasmania’s Franklin ...River. Bringing postcolonial analyses of the novel form into conversation with ecofeminist critiques of rationalist constructions of the human, I contend that Flanagan uses the position of his narrator to deliver a critique of the imperial eye and the rationalist construction of the human that it manifests, revealing their complicity in reinforcing an illusion of human separation from non-human nature that has destructive environmental consequences. Affect scholarship provides a framework for studying the alternative model that Flanagan provides as he narrates Aljaz’s “visions” in ways that force a rethinking of the human in non-reductive, non-binary terms that preserve the relationality between mind and body, human and non-human nature. Attending to Flanagan’s narrative strategies in the context of Tasmanian environmental history and Flanagan’s environmental activism, I contend that his novel constitutes an environmentalist intervention that demands increased attention to the role that constructions of the human play in our relationships with non-human nature and to the role that novels can play in perpetuating or challenging destructive understandings of the human.
In world literature, the penal colony theme obviously has powerful ethical and political implications. Among the texts dealing with this theme are Kafka’s “In the Penal Colony,” A. Solzhenitsyn’s
The ...Gulag Archipelago
and Richard Flanagan’s
Gould’s Book of Fish
. This essay first looks at the history of the sublime object—Gould’s fish—in relation to Foucault’s critique of “technologies of the self” and “regime of truth.” Then, in the light of Benjamin’s concept of history and Agamben’s notion of “bare life,” the author argues that Flanagan’s diagnosis of progress in the modernity project—his use of panopticonism, the construction of a railroad and the Great Mahjong Hall in colonial Tasmania as symbols of modernization—offers us a window onto the past through which we might redirect the future. Based on a materialist view of the change that Flanagan anticipates in colonial Tasmanian social life, in its discussion of the questions of history and modernity—a colonial-imperial British modernity and a “glocal” modernity in Tasmania—this essay follows Benjamin in rethinking the boundary(-crossing) between world literature and national literature.
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