AustLit

'Since the end of the 20th century, particularly after the Cold War ended, national borderlines have been redrawn many times in the areas of the Eastern Europe, the Middle East, and a wide range of Asia, and people started crossing national borderlines to immigrate to other countries. As a result, the definition of a modern nation with one ethnicity, one language, and one culture collapsed. Under the policy of multiculturalism, Australia accepts immigrants from all over the world, and Australian literature at present is characterized as being ethnically, culturally, and linguistically hybrid. In this paper I look at Australian writers such as Brian Castro and Nam Le and compare them with other writers who are considered post-colonial writers, such as Salman Rushdie, V.S. Naipaul and Kazuo Ishiguro. I focus on how these writers attempt to present their identities along with their subjectivities. I also compare them with a Japanese writer, Haruki Murakami, whose literary works are widely read throughout the world, crossing cultural, ethnic, and language barriers, even though he writes in Japanese and has a mono-cultural background. I investigate the reason why Murakami’s works are accepted by many contemporary readers worldwide. I finally explore the meaning of national identity and subjectivity in the globalizing world, and clarify the transformation of modern literature.' (Author's abstract)

'Australian writing has been discussed in the context of Postcolonialism since the mid-1970s when the Australian government introduced "Multiculturalism" as an immigration policy. The binary structure of the Anglo-Celtic as central and the non-Anglo-Celtic as marginal was dissolved and cultural diversity and pluralism were celebrated in Australia. The Australian cultural identity therefore would be defined not as a unified or homogenous identity but as fluid representations of identity such as "differences and others," given the mix of dominant and marginal cultures. However, the post-colonial is sometimes burdened by the discourse of the colonized and is inexorably fissured.

In the mid-1990s Helen Darville, a young Australian writer, created a sensation in the Australian literary scene by writing a novel in the guise of a Ukrainian immigrant (Darville is of Anglo-Celtic origin). The Hand That Signed the Paper was awarded several important Australian literary prizes. But the book became controversial among historians with special interest in twentieth century European history as well as Jewish people whose families had been destroyed in the Holocaust. For the book suggests that Jews and Bolsheviks are to blame for the man-made famine of 1932-33 during which several million Ukrainian peasants starved to death. Some historians said this was not factual and some Jewish Australians criticised the novel as anti-Semitic.

The author's real identity was then revealed; Helen Demidenko was not a Ukrainian immigrant but an Australian of Anglo-Celtic origin, Helen Darville. The resulting debate highlighted the division between literary critics infatuated with the free play of texts and commentators who emphasize the ideological power of politics or history. It seems that the run of prizes for Demidenko's novel largely reflects the triumph of the critics' detached aestheticism, but the judges of the Miles Franklin prize were accused of ignorance or lack of understanding of the historical events. It is also assumed that the author's ethnic identity in the multicultural society weighed with the judges more heavily than it should have. The judges might have leaned more or less toward "political correctness." In fact, it may even be possible to argue that Demidenko pretended to be a Ukrainian knowing the judges' tendency toward "political correctness".

Moreover, those who have paid a great deal of attention to the literary works written by authors with ethnic identities are usually Australians of Anglo-Celtic origin and are not migrants with ethnic identities. This trend signifies that Australian literature in the multicultural context is still controlled by Anglo-Celtic Australians. And so the Australian cultural identity is not really defined as fluid representations but is still the binary structure of the Anglo-Celtic and non-Anglo-Celtic.

The debate has also highlighted the increasingly problematic status of national and international literary projects. The judgement of the Miles Franklin Award exposed a weakness or crisis in the nationalist literary project which the Award represents. It might be said that the increasingly rapid globalization of cultures and cultural production via multinational information technologies through immigration and exile, tourism and trade has made the notion of a bounded national literature increasingly problematic.

Demidenko's case appeared initially to support Australian cultural identity as fluid, but a deeper examination still reveals the binary structure which represents Australian society before multiculturalism was introduced in the mid-1970s.' (Source: Gengo bunka)

'The history of White Australia is only about 200 years old while the history of Aboriginal Australians has run for more than forty thousand years. One Australian historian remarked that the white Australian people were not sure of what they were until as recently as the 1950s so lacked confidence in themselves as Australians. He remarked that this was supported by the fact that white people did not have their own legends or myths. The Aboriginal people already had their own legends and myths when the English people came to live in Australia. Australian historians strongly felt that white Australians needed to have their own legends in order to be sure of what they were. Legends could give them reasons why they live there and therefore they could have a meaningful bond with the Australian land.

Russel Ward wrote in his The Australian Legend in 1958 that the novels written by Henry Lawson and Joseph Furphy in the 1880s and 1890s successfully portrayed the real traits of Australia, since they dealt with life in the Australian bush. Ward held that the Australian bush had features not found in the English environment. It is true that the works of Lawson and Furphy about the bush life attracted many Australian readers because they show genuine Australian colonial life. It is said that their works established a tradition of Australian literature called social realism.

Although the works written by Lawson and Furphy were concerned with bush life, they reflected only white male characters and no female characters nor Aborigines. Also they dealt with day-to-day life in the bush but never tried to render the deeper levels of life.

In this paper, I intend to discover a new legend of Australia through the work of Christina Stead's Seven Poor Men of Sydney in support of the historians who claimed that Lawson and Furphy did not fully represent the Australian legends. It is commonly acknowledged that no novels before Seven Poor Men of Sydney rendered spiritual or psychological life, and this is the very first novel that escapes the Australian tradition of social realism.

This novel is about the people of Sydney and portrays the harsh lives they endured during the economic recession of the 1920s. Employing modern techniques, Stead depicts Australians' experiences of this period and also goes deep into the characters' inner life in their search for what they are. Stead successfully portrayed Australians' struggle for identity in severing the cultural bond with their mother country. I show this through the central characters of Michael and Catherine Baguenault and also show that their struggle to find their places in Australia becomes a legend for Australians represented in the character of Joseph Baguenault, the only survivor in the novel.' (Source: Doshisha Daigaku Eigo Eibungaku kenkyu)

'Patrick White's first five novels reveal much of the writer's personal struggle to resolve the dilemma of his dichotomous perception of self. This dichotomy is founded on circumstances of his life which placed him in a situation of cultural conflict. Having spent his formative years in Australia,White then received the bulk of his formal educa­ tion in England, and this seems to have had a profound effect on his sense of identity. Consequently, his early novels show signs of this difficulty, as if they were written mainly for the purposes of understanding and resolving it. That is the view expressed in this thesis, which traces White's progress from an uncertain sense of self to the point at which he embraces his Australian identity as a wholly acceptable fact. This progression can be seen most clearly in the treatment of landscape exhibited in his five novels. Landscape seems a particularly important source of inspiration to Patrick White, since he uses it not merely as a means of expressing his feelings about a place, especially about Australia, but as a sounding board for theen ­tangled, disparate emotions of his many characters. Through landscape, White explores such human responses to life as alienation, capitulation, indifference, receptiveness and acceptance. In addition, he uses the same point of reference to examine the relationship be­tween man and _God. The author's quest for a sense of place is paralleled by his equally personal search for some religious faith. His characters progress from exhibiting subliminal desires to look beyond the concrete realities of life, for an indefinable presence they only suspect exists, to the point of acknowledging the existence of God in every thing they see. Yet this twofold preoccupation, with a sense of national identity and a sense of God, does not end there.In the last of these novels, Voss, White synthesizes his views of man's place in things and man's relationship with God in a final statement that evidences strong feelings towards both. For White, it would seem, the end of a personal quest can only be proclaimed by the adoption of a stringent code of beliefs.'  (Thesis description)