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AbstractHistoryArchive Description
'This essay begins by mapping the place of settler postcolonialism in postcolonial studies, and its relevance to the Australian context. It then moves to demonstrate the applicability of settler postcolonial reading practices for Australian texts and contexts through two paradigmatic tropes: land and textuality.' Source: Modern Australian Criticism and Theory (2010)
Publication Details of Only Known VersionEarliest 2 Known Versions of
Works about this Work
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The Ruin of Time and the Temporality of Belonging : Journey to the Stone Country and Landscape of Farewell
2012
single work
criticism
— Appears in: The Novels of Alex Miller : An Introduction 2012; (p. 201-216) 'At first glance, Landscape of Farewell (2007) appears a simpler, more streamlined story than its predecessor, Journey to the Stone Country (2002). In the first person, Max Otto, a widowed German professor specialising in the history of massacres, tells of his journey to Mount Nebo in Central Queensland, a journey precipitated by his encounter with visiting Aboriginal Australian academic Vita McLelland. His journey is conducted in the context of his not yet assuaged grief for his wife, and of his haunted suspicions about his father's complicity in the horrors of wartime Germany. Peter Pierce (2004) has identified some of Miller's enduring preoccupations: 'solitariness', 'artful evocations of the visceral', tensions between ancestry, freedom and exile, and the indeterminacy of memory. While many of these recur in Landscape, I focus in this paper on how the theme of time is exercised in this novel, with its spare but concentrated prose and apparently straightforward narration. How does Landscape of Farewell draw us inwards as well as onwards, into an intricately nested set of temporalities that speak to selfhood, truth and reparation, to cross-cultural translation, to mortality and relinquishment, and to the intractable terrain of moral debate about the past? What does Miller's mode of narration bring to familiar questions, in Australian culture, of place and belonging?' (Source: http://sydney.edu.au/arts/australian_literature/images/content/conferences/miller_abstracts2.pdf)
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The Ruin of Time and the Temporality of Belonging : Journey to the Stone Country and Landscape of Farewell
2012
single work
criticism
— Appears in: The Novels of Alex Miller : An Introduction 2012; (p. 201-216) 'At first glance, Landscape of Farewell (2007) appears a simpler, more streamlined story than its predecessor, Journey to the Stone Country (2002). In the first person, Max Otto, a widowed German professor specialising in the history of massacres, tells of his journey to Mount Nebo in Central Queensland, a journey precipitated by his encounter with visiting Aboriginal Australian academic Vita McLelland. His journey is conducted in the context of his not yet assuaged grief for his wife, and of his haunted suspicions about his father's complicity in the horrors of wartime Germany. Peter Pierce (2004) has identified some of Miller's enduring preoccupations: 'solitariness', 'artful evocations of the visceral', tensions between ancestry, freedom and exile, and the indeterminacy of memory. While many of these recur in Landscape, I focus in this paper on how the theme of time is exercised in this novel, with its spare but concentrated prose and apparently straightforward narration. How does Landscape of Farewell draw us inwards as well as onwards, into an intricately nested set of temporalities that speak to selfhood, truth and reparation, to cross-cultural translation, to mortality and relinquishment, and to the intractable terrain of moral debate about the past? What does Miller's mode of narration bring to familiar questions, in Australian culture, of place and belonging?' (Source: http://sydney.edu.au/arts/australian_literature/images/content/conferences/miller_abstracts2.pdf)
Last amended 5 Dec 2011 10:03:39
28-40
Settler Post-Colonialism and Australian Literary Culture
Subjects:
- The Empire Writes Back : Theory and Practice in Post-Colonial Literatures 1989 single work criticism
- In the Wake of First Contact : The Eliza Fraser Stories 1995 single work criticism
- Jack Maggs 1997 single work novel
- Settler Romances and the Australian Girl 2004 multi chapter work criticism
- Drylands : A Book for the World's Last Reader 1999 single work novel
- Journey to the Stone Country 2002 single work novel
- Carpentaria 2006 single work novel
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