Home and Away : Nostalgia in Australian (Migrant) Writing | AustLit: Discover Australian Stories

Home and Away : Nostalgia in Australian (Migrant) Writing single work criticism

Author:agent Sneja Gunew

Issue Details: First known date: 1988... 1988 Home and Away : Nostalgia in Australian (Migrant) Writing

The material on this page is available to AustLit subscribers. If you are a subscriber or are from a subscribing organisation, please log in to gain full access. To explore options for subscribing to this unique teaching, research, and publishing resource for Australian culture and storytelling, please contact us or find out more.

Latest Issues

VIEW ALL ISSUES (C743800)

AbstractHistoryArchive Description

'The question raised by this study is that if one sees the symbolic order as constitutive of subjectivitiy (the possibility of saying 'I' and 'you'), then what happens to the subject-in-process when passing from one actual language system to another? What kind of subjectivity is created and what form of repression takes place when the subject is forced to enter a new symbolic order? What happens to the other and prior language attached to a specific culture? Is the first language subsequently rendered alien, shameful, transgressive, praticularly if it is outside the acceptable repertoire of "foreign langauges"?' (p. 37). Gunew focuses the main part of her essay on the work of Anna Couani, which Gunew argues 'does not simply reproduce the discourses of nostalgia, but rather contrasts and dislocates the various forms of memory, desire, intimacy which play within them' (pp. 38-39).

Notes

Epigraphs:

The prevailing motif of nostalgia is the closure of the gap between nature and culture, and hence a return to the utopia of biology and symbol united within the walled city of the material. -- Susan Stewart, On Longing: Narratives of the Miniature, The Gigantic, The Souvenir, The Collection, Baltimore, John Hopkins University Press, 1984, p 23.

...the discovery that the mother does not have the phallus means that the subject can never return to the womb. Somehow the fact that the mother is not phallic means that the mother as mother is lost forever, that the mother as womb, homeland, source, and grounding for the subject is irretrievably past. The subject is hence in a foreign land, alienated. -- Jane Gallop, Reading Lacan, Cornell University Press, 1985, p. 148.

The diversification of personal histories that one would expect to result from the influx of migrants from many countries of the world has not yet become a marked feature of Australian writing. -- Leonie Kramer, 'Introduction', The Oxford History of Australian Literature, Oxford University Press, 1981, p. 8.