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Texts and Contexts: Contemporary Australian Writing (ENGL2064)
2009

Texts

y separately published work icon Seven Versions of an Australian Badland Ross Gibson , St Lucia : University of Queensland Press , 2002 Z1005706 2002 single work prose travel mystery (taught in 8 units)

'Part road movie, part memoir, part murder mystery, Seven Versions of an Australian Badland embarks on an enthralling journey through time, into the realms of myth and magic, narcissism and genocide.' (Back cover)

y separately published work icon Remembering Babylon David Malouf , London Milsons Point : Chatto and Windus Random House , 1993 Z452447 1993 single work novel historical fiction (taught in 48 units)

'In the mid-1840s, a thirteen-year-old boy, Gemmy Fairley, is cast ashore in the far north of Australia and taken in by Aborigines. Sixteen years later, when settlers reach the area, he moves back into the world of Europeans, men and women who are staking out their small patch of home in an alien place, hopeful and yet terrified of what it might do to them.

Given shelter by the McIvors, the family of the children who originally made contact with him, Gemmy seems at first to be guaranteed a secure role in the settlement, but there are currents of fear and mistrust in the air. To everyone he meets - from George Abbot, the romantically aspiring young teacher, to Mr Frazer, the minister, whose days are spent with Gemmy recording the local flora; from Janet McIvor, just coming to adulthood and discovering new versions of the world, to the eccentric Governor of Queensland himself - Gemmy stands as a different kind of challenge, as a force which both fascinates and repels. And Gemmy himself finds his own whiteness as unsettling in this new world as the knowledge he brings with him of the savage, the Aboriginal.' - Publisher's blurb (Chatto & Windus, 1993).

Description

This course provides a snapshot of recent developments and new directions in Australian writing, and will include fiction, poetry, essays and new modes of writing that blur these generic boundaries. We will examine texts in both literary and historical contexts, examining how contemporary writers have challenged the notion of a shared history and a common language as necessarily underpinning Australian identity. We will study writers whose use of language unsettles standard Australian English, and who seek to tell stories that have been forgotten or marginalised by the dominant versions of the Australian story. In short, the course probes the doubts and fears beneath the relaxed and comfortable image that Australians often seek to present about themselves, their language, their culture and their history.

Assessment

Two 2,000 word essays (100%).

Other Details

Levels: Undergraduate
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