AustLit

Bourke analyses Gary Crew's Strange Objects using Michel Foucault's idea of 'history as archive' as a way of effectively 'decentering' subjectivity (42). Bourke suggests that Strange Objects 'does not tell one particular story so much as recreate an archive which contains a number of possible stories' and in which the reader's task is 'to recover the novel's various possible narratives. Describing the novel as 'postmodernist' (42), Bourke discusses the novel's subversive strategies which includes the readers possible interpretations of the various stories, cross-referencing and checking one story against another. While fantasy in novels - like Stange Objects - can be 'a politically conservative mode' (42), Bourke posits that the most subversive element in this novel is 'its use if history as the social ground for subjectivity' (42), which functions as a decentering device, '...dissolving the unitary subject into a collection of documents which together constitute the novel' (48).