AustLit
The Ruin of Time and the Temporality of Belonging : Journey to the Stone Country and Landscape of Farewell
single work
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First known date:
2012...
2012
The Ruin of Time and the Temporality of Belonging : Journey to the Stone Country and Landscape of Farewell
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AbstractHistoryArchive Description
'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)
Publication Details of Only Known VersionEarliest 2 Known Versions of
Last amended 11 Jul 2012 14:53:18
201-216
The Ruin of Time and the Temporality of Belonging : Journey to the Stone Country and Landscape of Farewell
Subjects:
- Landscape of Farewell 2007 single work novel
- Journey to the Stone Country 2002 single work novel
- Intimate Horizons : The Post-Colonial Sacred in Australian Literature 2009 multi chapter work criticism
- The Dirt That Lies Within Our Blood 2007 single work review
- Uncanny Australia : Sacredness and Identity in a Postcolonial Nation 1998 selected work criticism
- In the Company of Ghosts 2007 single work review
- Shadows That Cross Our Souls 2007 single work review
- Settler Post-Colonialism and Australian Literary Culture 2010 single work criticism
- Prochownik's Dream 2005 single work novel
- The Solitariness of Alex Miller 2004 single work criticism
- Agamemnon's Edict 2007 single work review
- Old Testament Prophets and New Testament Saviours : Reading Retribution and Forgiveness towards Whiteness in Alex Miller’s Journey to the Stone Country 2012 single work criticism
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