Issue Details: First known date: 2017... 2017 The Beast in the Machine : Modernity, Aviation and the Legacies of Colonialism in Roger McDonald’s Slipstream
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AbstractHistoryArchive Description

'The expectation that a novel about a celebrity aviator will romanticise flight and glorify the pilot is a product of the mythologisation of aviation, which this essay understands is a response to the threat of technology and the alienating conditions of modernity. Roger McDonald’s novel Slipstream refuses to reproduce this mythology, expressing a literary aspiration to use the form of the modern novel to explore the entanglement of the subject under the conditions of postcolonial modernity. My argument will develop through three parts. The first section will explore the mythologisation of aviation as a symptom of modernity. The second will examine the ways in which the novel uses its modernist form to call into question the celebrity of the aviator and the spectacle of flight. This part of my argument is indebted to the critique by German philosopher Martin Heidegger of the technological mode of Being. Finally, I take up the postcolonial implications of the Heideggerian critique in a country in which many of modernism’s standard antidotes to the problems of its century are compromised by the legacies of colonialism.' (Publication abstract)

Publication Details of Only Known VersionEarliest 2 Known Versions of

  • Appears in:
    y separately published work icon Journal of Australian Studies vol. 41 no. 4 2017 12754792 2017 periodical issue

    'This issue of the Journal of Australian Studies carries eight articles, all of which, in their own way, deal with the representation of Australian culture and politics in literature, the media, and the arts. Collectively, they explore the ways in which Australia represents itself and its relation to the land and its people, highlighting some of the tensions and contradictions within these representations.' (Editorial introduction)

    2017
    pg. 435-449
Last amended 19 Jan 2018 14:29:41
435-449 The Beast in the Machine : Modernity, Aviation and the Legacies of Colonialism in Roger McDonald’s Slipstreamsmall AustLit logo Journal of Australian Studies
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