'Analysing one of Peter Carey’s hallmarks—fact vs fake or fiction, truth vs untruth —, this article explores the wide-ranging implications and ramifications of the Ern Malley affair in Peter Carey’s My Life as a Fake, a story published in 2003, but which still resonates in 2020 given the current global attention for “fake news” and “fake truths” often used in Donald Trump’s toxic propaganda. This timely recovery of a debate in Australian literature that started in the 1990s is instrumental in making a case for rigorous textual analysis while tying it up with questions of legitimacy which have always haunted colonial and postcolonising Australia. By probing the text/context issue and linking it to the critique of New Criticism’s isolation of the text from contemporary circumstances as insufficient to capture textual meaning fully or appropriately, Vernay’s analysis attempts at reconciling the word and the world.'
Source: Abstract.
'This article explores the politics of memory and identity in Beatriz Copello’s novel Forbidden Steps Under the Wisteria (1999). Copello was born in Rosario, Argentina, and emigrated to Australia in the early 1970s. Her semi-autobiographical novel explores the lives of three generations of women through a long migratory journey from Russia via Europe and America, coming to an end in Australia. The main plotline follows the story of Gabriela from her birth to her father’s death in a car crash during her teenage years. The novel’s experimental character and peculiar writing style moves from the symbolic and imaginary world of oneness with nature to the real world of prohibitions and the loss of innocence, and to becoming a woman. It also intertwines issues of identity, place, and time. Through her depiction of traumatic as well as inspiring memories, Copello finds a voice of her own which emerges through her ancestors’ experiences of war and her own exile to a new sense of reconciliation and belonging. Copello’s novel will be discussed within the context of Jacques Lacan’s approximations on language, identity and the symbolic realm.'
Source: Abstract.
