371 research outputs found
Different Shades of Shame. The Responsibilities and Legacies of a Shameful History in Australian Fiction
No full textStarting from the premise that shame has been central to the definition of white Australian identity since early white settlement, due to the association with convictism and to “cultural cringe”, the essay investigates the literary representations of shame as specifically related to the history of atrocities and rights violation committed against the Indigenous people of Australia. In particular, it analyses some short stories by K.S. Prichard and the novel Sarah Thornhill by Kate Grenville. The critical reading of Prichard’s stories focuses on the internalized experience of racial shame and on the analysis of the counter-shaming rhetorical strategies aiming at restructuring the relations of self/Other and subverting the colonial hierarchical assumptions of white superiority and black inferiority. The analysis of Grenville’s novel, on the other hand, shows that shame involves a process of self-awareness and self-transformation that is not meant to relieve or absolve the sense of shame, but to denounce what has been concealed and needs to be uncovered. The essay aims to prove that the literary representation of the two emotional paths of the shame of the oppressor and the pain of the oppressed may go in the direction of a political responsibility in the process of reconciliation
J.M. Coetzee, Le origini ideologiche dell'Apartheid/Emergere dalla censura (a cura di A. Righetti, traduzione di A. Pes)
No full textDamnation or salvation? Journeys into madness in Henry Lawson and Patrick White's short stories
No full textThe essay investigates the representations of madness in the short fiction of two Australian literary icons, considering them on the background of the ambivalent historical and cultural specificities of a (former) settler colony. In this context the issues of “place/displace-ment”, “identity”, “otherness”, “belonging/un-belonging” are further problematized by the destabilizing liminal position of a country trapped between
its filiative relationship with imperial power and its struggle to free itself from the European legacy. Considering displacement as a centrifugal process ingrained in the history of Australia, madness
as an ex-centric physical and psychic condition appears to be enrooted in the colonial past of Australia as a “schizoid nation” with a “doubled form of consciousness”(Hodge and Mishra, 1990). And yet, the recurrent literary representations of dis-located identities can be considered as a strategy of resistance to, and contestation of, a fixed centre of discursive and political power, and as a means of re-appropriation of a marginalized identity excluded from European hegemonic formations of the self.
In both Lawson’s and White’s stories madness becomes the metaphor for a problematic, non-conforming,
struggling identity that does not accept to be stereotyped into an anonymous “Other”, thus acquiring the meaning of a subversion of the “reasonable” and the “normative”. The world of imagination and folly in
which Lawson’s and White’s characters seek refuge in their mental derangement represents indeed a challenge and a threat to the over- emphasized importance given to rationality and pragmatism in the
construction of an Australian national, central, authority
THE BOREDOM AND FUTILITY OF WAR IN PATRICK WHITE’S FICTION
No full textThis article investigates the representation of war in terms of uselessness and waste in the fiction of Patrick White, with a particular emphasis on the short story “After Alep”, written in 1945 when the writer was enrolled in the RAF as an Intelligence Officer. By analysing the story in the light of White’s approach to the war as to “the most horrifying and wasteful period” of his life (Marr 1992: 493), the article attempts to demonstrate how the narrative devices used by White contribute to demythologize the rhetoric of the war and of war heroes in a way that may be instrumental in conveying a message of peace out of the ultimate sense of futility transmitted by any war
"Introduction"
No full textThe concern with place/dis-placement, with identity and belonging, is a major feature of postcolonial literature and the theme of alienation cannot but be ‘topical’ in the literatures of the countries that have experienced the cultural shock and bereavement, and the physical and psychic trauma of colonial invasion. While giving contextual specifics their due, the chapter asserts that the ex-centric experience/vision of reality always distorts and makes the allegedly ‘central’ representation of reality strange/estranging. When perceived through the anamorphic lens of madness, the theme of alienation is magnified and charged with an excruciatingly questioning and destabilizing power, laying bare political, as well as existential and moral, urges. It is from the ex-centric, broadly exilic or displaced position that the ideology and practice of colonialism – as, exemplarily, in the case of Apartheid – demands to be rubricated under the sign of psychopathology. More broadly, in fiction the freak or mad character’s ex-centric vision is a continuous warning against the temptation to believe in those discourses that pass themselves off as reflecting or bearing the given, ‘natural’, order of things
Poetics and Politics of Shame in Postcolonial Literature
No full textPoetics and Politics of Shame in Postcolonial Literature provides a new and wide-ranging appraisal of shame in colonial and postcolonial literature in English. Confronting the obscenity of the in-human, both in the colonial setting and in aftermaths that show little sign of abating, it entails the acute significance of shame as a subject for continuing and urgent critical attention. The essays included in it tackle shame and racism, shame and agency, shame and ethical recognition, the problem of shamelessness, the shame of willed forgetfulness. Linked by a common thread of reflections on shame and literary writing, they consider specifically whether the aesthetic and ethical capacities of literature enable a measure of stability or recuperation in the presence of shame’s destructive potential. Cogently (see the Introduction, in particular), the question of how the relation of postcolonial literature to shame is to be qualified with respect to all other literature is given due emphasis. Chapters contributed (in their order) by David Attwell, Susanna Zinato, Rita Barnard, Sue Kossew, Annalisa Pes, Dolores Herrero, David Callahan, Angelo Righetti, Vincent Van Bever Donker. Afterword by Timothy Bewes
Memory and identity in the landscape of Kate Grenville's The Secret River
No full textThe article analyses the spatial dimension and the relationship between landscape, memory and identity in Kate Grenville’s colonial novel The Secret River where the landscape is a space inscribed with signs of violence that are covered by silence and secrets. It will be argued that the space of colonial encounters, the contact zone where Grenville’s Indigenous and European protagonists meet and clash, is not only a place from which memory is intentionally removed in a process of national dis-remembering, but it is also a place in which scars are left on the ground as well as on the minds, in such a way that memory, both individual and historical, cannot be completely suppressed. It will be pointed out how the discriminating treatment and dispossession of Indigenous people by white settlers, the occupation of a territory that is deliriously claimed to belong to nobody (through the legal fiction of terra nullius) and the rise of violent attacks are articulated through the lure of colonial ownership in terms of a space that is occupied and appropriated in an attempt to claim social ransom and racial superiority. In this sense, the colonial space is a place scattered with historical memories that shape a new geography of the landscape. But at the same time, it is also a space in which the memory of places is suppressed into what W.H. Stanner defined “a secret river of blood”, that runs hidden in the womb of history, surrounded by “The Great Australian Silence”. However, in this mutual relationship between places and memory, the topography of violence draws a landscape on which the spatial inscription of the past cannot be completely erased: its signs are indelible and are overwritten like in a palimpsest
Sermoni, amori e misteri. Il racconto coloniale australiano al femminile (1845-1902)
No full textIl volume ripercorre le tappe dell’evoluzione, sviluppo e metamorfosi del genere breve nel contesto coloniale australiano ad opera di autrici (tra cui Mary Vidal, Tasma, Rosa Praed, Ada Cambridge) che, nel confronto/scontro con una tradizione patriarcale e misogina, affrontano problematiche legate all’universo femminile. Attraverso l’utilizzo originale di tipologie narrative già consolidate in Europa, quali il moral tale, il romance e la detective story, i racconti presi in esame mettono in discussione la “nuova” identità australiana fortemente maschile e mascolina plasmata nella colonia alla fine del XIX secolo e, nel contempo, segnano l’inizio di una tradizione femminile della short story che si radica nel contesto di una man’s land che ne vorrebbe escludere o marginalizzare il contributo
Marginal Genre/Marginal Gender: australian Women Writers and the Short Story
No full textThe article investigates the contribution of Australian women writers in the field of short fiction. By going through some representative short stories by nineteenth- and twentieth-century women writers, it explores and examines the narrative techniques and problematic concerns of a distinctively female literary tradition which develops and asserts itself in a patriarchal society and in a male-dominated literary context
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