AustLit

'[...]most predictably, the European experience of Australia affirms the fundamental uncanny qualities of the landscape. [...]that obviously covered my mistakes. Because if I tried to write Deadman Dance, it better be damn perfect, or I would deserve everything I get. Filippo Menozzi has identified an intersection between colonialism and ecology in postcolonial fiction, which can be applied to Mitchell's narratives of Australia: "The literary figuration of biological invasiveness is a site where the legacy of colonialism is shown at work on multiple levels or planes, from politics to nature" (182). Modernity is threatening the planet through the excessive exploitation of natural resources and the creation of world-destroying technologies such as nuclear weapons.' (Introduction)

'According to Said, exile is a condition of terminal loss, "an unhealable rift forced between a human being and a native place, between the self and its true home," which involves "the crippling sorrow of estrangement" (173). According to Homi Bhabha, "colonial mimicry is, among other things, the desire for a reformed, recognizable Other, as a subject of a difference that is almost the same, but not quite" (86). [...]Ovid needs to integrate himself with the other to experience a meaningful life and sense of belonging. According to Robert Massey and Khawla Abu-Baker, "The I of each person actively coordinates the me into a self-image based on past and present experiences and future anticipations of self with others" (14).' (Publication abstract)

'When the French edition of my book came out in 2009, Simon Caterson argued "that only an outsider can fully appreciate the big cultural picture". When the Australian edition was released in 2016, Nicholas Jose also observed that “The outside gaze illuminates what the insider cannot see, especially when that gaze focuses on what most distinguishes the inside, what makes it what it is.” There seems to be two distinct assumptions meshed into one observation: that as an outsider I would have a vantage point to discuss Australian fiction, and that my ringside view would be specifically informed by my French background.

'In this article I discuss whether I actually have a French view on Australian novels and whether my outsider’s perspective gives me an unquestioned vantage point to discuss Australian fiction.'

Source: Abstract.

'Andrew blinks, head down, eyes locked on his breakfast plate and the expressionist blur of pink bacon and bright yellow split fried egg, bleeding a toxic cadmium pool of yolk into his toast. In an attempt to curtail any further chaos, Andrew makes two easy phone calls: one to work to inform them he needs a week of sick leave, one to Chrissy's school for the same; digging through school notes before realising he has a smartphone, flicking through web results to find the office number, stumbling through voice options-on a state school reception board, really? "Dad, do pigs have tiny brains?" Andrew has thrown peanut butter toast on Chrissy's plate and is staring at his own bacon and egg breakfast, already cooling because school lunch needs to be done and homework is due today, maybe tomorrow. "Yes, pigs are cute!" Andrew has trouble imagining a pig in the wild, until a strangely vivid image of a boar from an Asterix comic springs to mind, followed by cartoon roast pig ribs.' (Publication abstract)

'By 1871, he had retired from the post office, put his beautiful house at Waltham Cross on the market, abandoned his parliamentary ambitions, and resigned as editor of the miscellany Saints Pauls. The reasons for her presence are not explained in Trollope's Australian memoir; possibly the plain fare at the sheep station had something to do with it-but I am inclined to think there was another reason, one that this essay will explore shortly. The only previous visitors of note to Australia were Charles von Hügel, botanist and explorer (a limited tour in 1833-34); Charles Darwin, the naturalist, who spent two months in Australia in 1836 as part of his voyage on the Beagle, but this was twenty years before publication of On the Origin of Species; Charles Dilke (1867), later to achieve fame and notoriety as an English politician, who included some brief Australian experiences in a book titled A Record of Travel in English-Speaking Countries; Prince Alfred, Duke of Edinburgh, fourth child of Queen Victoria, who called at major ports during his naval service on HMS Galatea; and Lola Montez, the exotic and erotic dancer who left California for a tour in 1855 of the Australian goldfields. Subsequently he (at the age of fifty-six) descended mines, spent a month with shearers and wool-shed workers, rode his horse into the loneliness of the bush, penetrated the opium dens of the goldfields, and slept rough (on the ground) during a long cross-country trek in Western Australia.' (Publication abstract)

'Mobilizing Jacques Derrida's concept of the "trace" and Funder's reference to trains in the text, we position Funder as a moving vessel, traversing geographies (both physical and psychological) as she seeks to contain memory. Since the initial publication of Stasiland in 2002, it has attracted a great deal of praise and aroused some controversy. Funder tells the story of East Germans affected by the Ministry for State Security, commonly known as the Stasi (an acronym for the German Staatssicherheit), effectively the "secret police" wing of the GDR government, an organization whose name has become shorthand for an insidious, totalitarian form of surveillance and punishment (Grieder xvii ). Funder speaks with the harassed and the harassers, years after the reunification of Germany, immersing herself within the narrative, creating a work that is equally about the lives of Germans as it is about Funder's experience: her day-to-day life in the country researching the text and her writing process. Brison suggests in her work that when "trauma narratives" are "witnessed," or listened to, they become "speech acts of memory," which work as "re-making the self' (39). [...]these fictions that have previously been destructive to one's psyche can be reworked and effectively reclaimed:'  (Publication abstract)

'[...]the uncanny is from its beginning linked to a confusion between the recognizable and unrecognizable, as well the narrator's confusion over the true state of the world. If an attempt to "see properly" is signaled in the beginning and end, then the contents of the novel drives the filmmaker from searching the landscape for a "meaning behind appearances" to the final scene, where the filmmaker offers this image: "my finger poised as if to expose the film in its dark chamber that was the only visible sign of what I saw beyond myself' (Plains 174). Murnane's return to publishing fiction began with Barley Patch (2009), in which the unnamed narrator says that it would suit his purpose to report learning while young that "a work of fiction is not necessarily enclosed within the mind of its author but extends on its farther sides into little-known territory" (71). Gelder and Jacobs use the idea of the uncanny as a means to explore a history of disquiet happenings in postcolonial society, and a feeling of disquiet does seem to exist in The Plains, in its examinations of exploration and changing landscapes.'  (Publication abstract)

'Graham held the phone away from his head as Claudia ran the cold water. When the back tire of the car hit the cat they both felt the soft bump but they didn't hear the screams on account of the garage door. [...]it was Nicholas again, and Graham let him go on until he'd got the car door open and was sitting in the car and the doors were closed and his seat belt was on.' (Publication abstract)

'The novel is peopled by artists, art dealers, critics, patrons of art, forgers, and curators. For this novel, there were three essential "informants": Stephen Gritt, the head of restoration at the National Gallery of Canada; Frima Fox Hofrichter, an art historian who specializes in Judith Leyster and women painters of the seventeenth century; and Ken Perenyi, a master forger who wrote a fascinating memoir called Caveat Emptor. [...]I think the opposite-that Australians understand they are playing on the world stage, and often at the top tier, across all the artistic fields. [...]the moral forgery at the center of the book is much more interesting to me dramatically, as a fiction writer-and it's also the bigger moral failure, in my view.' (Publication abstract)