AustLit

In its retelling of the narrative of colonial settlement in Australia, Kate Grenville’s The Secret River (2005) resonates with debates over Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal relations in contemporary Australia, as its representational strategies can be seen as undermining the kinds of metaphysical oppositions identified by theorists such as Benita Parry, Frantz Fanon and Homi Bhabha as crucial to the structuring of colonialism’s discursive field. The question I take up in this essay is how successful Grenville’s novel is in “repossessing the signifying function appropriated by colonialist representation” that Parry identifies as a necessary, yet insufficient, strategy for laying bare the rhetorical underpinning of the colonial enterprise. How successful is the novel in reconfiguring these signifying relations even as it relies on them to retell a mythic narrative of nation-building? And what does this analytic framework reveal about the blindnesses and omissions of canonical postcolonial criticism with respect to settler-invader contexts? [Author's abstract]

Since its publication, J.M. Coetzee's Slow Man has been received unenthusiastically. Its relative neglect suggests its failure to interest its readers as either a narrative to be read for the plot or as a text to be analyzed according to the prevailing values guiding contemporary literary criticism. Anticipating its own reception, Slow Man asks readers to consider the meaning of the novel’s failure to interest us greatly. Focussing self-consciously on an uninteresting character living in unremarkable times, Coetzee’s novel eschews a critical paradigm that invests in political urgency to make the ethical point that there are alternative values for judging the worth of a novel or character. In its search for affirmative values, Slow Man responds to the dilemmas of postcolonial postsecularism by suggesting that there are worse things a novelist might do than write an uninteresting book.