AustLit

'《深入北方的小路》是澳大利亚小说家理查德·弗兰纳根的第六部长篇小说,小说主体部分讲述了一群澳大利亚士兵在二战日本战俘营中的创伤故事,小说立足"死亡铁路"这一特定的背景,集中刻画了来自澳大利亚、日本和朝鲜的三组人物,充分表达了小说家对他们的态度和价值取向。在小说中,澳大利亚战俘不尊崇美德,不关心历史,更不需要尊严,表现出彻头彻尾的虚无主义;日本军士个个饱读诗书,身上承载着一种文化与精神,令人肃然起敬;相比之下,朝鲜人胸无点墨、缺少人性,是极恶的化身。《深入北方的小路》呈现的乾坤颠倒的创伤叙事背后暗藏着一种扭曲的后现代价值取向,本文结合小说的人物刻画针对其所传达的后现代伦理进行解读

'Richard Flanagan’s sixth novel, The Narrow Road to the Deep North, has attracted quite some criticisms in spite of all the celebratory rhetoric that came after it won the 2014 Man Booker Prize. This essay offers a critical reading of the novel’s treatment of trauma as a theme and the ethics it reveals by looking into the way in which three national groups of characters are portrayed. Flanagan portrays Australians as nihilistic creatures incapable of noble emotions. In the meantime, he depicts the Japanese as people with a special spirit that deserves understanding. And he presents the Koreans as demons capable of the most inhuman atrocities. Through such deliberate nullification of trauma, the novel communicates a set of values that one would associate with postmodern ethics. It is contended that what the story offers is perhaps a truly "narrow road" for Australia towards Asia.'

Source: CAOD.

'Gail Jones’ Sorry has since its publication been greeted with critical controversies. The novel has been read by some as a national allegory and a grand public narrative. This essay argues that Sorry attempts to tell a small story or a "petit récit". As a "petit récit", Sorry constructs a narrative( 1) about the fear of a white female child,( 2) that embodies a compromised counterdiscourse,and( 3) that uses a literary device that Jones calls "poetic indirection". As a postmodern novel,Sorry offers a kind of communication based on an understanding of and care for the other.'

Source: CAOD.

'Transcultural literary studies as advocated by Italo-Australian critic Arianna Dagnino claims to investigate writers who live transnational lives and write out of a border-crossing and transcendent sensibility. But, in arguing for indeterminacy and fuzziness in transcultural novels, it fails to explain how specifically different cultures should be dealt with in this type of writing. In this essay, [the author draws] on Per Aage Brandt’s cognitive semiotic definition of cultural “sedimentation” as opposed to Raymond Williams’ “analysis of culture” to help with a close reading of two Australian travel novels of the 20th century, i.e. Margaret Jones’ The Confucius Enigma and Nicholas Jose’s Avenue of Eternal Peace, with special attention to how the two books handle Chinese culture. Such a reading reveals that, while both novels are set in China, the former remains satisfied with minimum cultural representation, and the latter mainly focuses on certain areas of contemporary Chinese culture instead of others. Although Avenue of Eternal Peace does dig beyond the “iconic meanings” of the Chinese culture to reveal authorial knowledge of its “symbolic meanings”, the novel devotes too much of itself to the overwhelmingly “negative semiosis” of China, reflecting a complacent attitude on the part of the protagonist/narrator/author towards Chinese culture. For this reason, neither novel meets Dagnino’s criteria for transcultural writing. And the two novels start us thinking about Dagnino’s theorization of transcultural writing because her emphasis on “transcending” only implies an aloofness and detachment. Brandt’s definition of culture as sedimented symbolic meanings teaches us that genuine transcultural writers should perhaps be prepared not just to know and understand and stay at a distance from other cultures but to engage and heartily share and even partake of their sedimented symbolic meanings at all levels and learn to feel the same way about them as their native members. This is true of the third world diasporic/migrant writers living and writing in the first and second worlds that Dagnino’s theory of transcultural writing remains focused on, but even more of the first and second worlds writing about their transcultural experiences in the third world countries. I argue that part of the intention of Dagnino’s transcultural literary studies is to move beyond postcolonialism’s concern over cultural unevenness and asymmetry, but this study proves that postcolonialism is not and should not be taken as completely over.'

Source: Abstract.

'J. M. Coetzee’s fourth Australian novel The Childhood of Jesus (2013) has all signs of a realistic refugee novel with its use of simple language, lucid plotline and stock characters. But it is another of Coetzee’s postmodern projects with its striking contingent of metafictional devices. This essay uses Jean-Francois Lyotard’s theory of the postmodern and attends to three metafictional details in the novel——the naming of Novilla, the boy protagonist’s handover to an alleged mother, and his "magical cloak of invisibility"——to delve into Coetzee’s allusive representation of the experience of displacement of two refugees, Simon and particularly David. It is contended that The Childhood of Jesus, through a postmodern representation of the double traumas of a child refugee who has lost his home and loved ones in war, constitutes a testament to Coetzee’s penetrating engagement with the global refugee problem in the 21st century.'

Source: CAOD database.