Current Issues in Australian Writing (ENGL3620)
Semester 1 / 2008

Texts

y separately published work icon Rose Boys Peter Rose , Crows Nest : Allen and Unwin , 2001 Z915485 2001 single work autobiography (taught in 1 units) At twenty-two Robert Rose faced a rare choice. He could devote his talents to cricket or he could follow the path of his father, Bob Rose, one of the great Australian Rules footballers. Then on St Valentines Day 1974 Robert became a quadriplegic following a tragic car accident. He lived for another twenty-five years, totally dependent on others. Now his brother Peter, a leading literary figure, has written Robert's life story. The result is a family memoir of rare candour touching themes of family, disability, loyalty, masculinity, physical and emotional dependence--above, all mortality. (Source: Trove)
y separately published work icon Friendly Fire Jennifer Maiden , Artarmon : Giramondo Publishing , 2005 Z1219373 2005 selected work poetry satire (taught in 2 units)
y separately published work icon The Great Fire Shirley Hazzard , New York (City) : Farrar Straus and Giroux , 2003 Z1076835 2003 single work novel (taught in 4 units)

'The year is 1947. The great fire of the Second World War has convulsed Europe and Asia. In its wake, Aldred Leith, an acclaimed hero of the conflict, has spent two years in China at work on an account of world-transforming change there. Son of a famed and sexually ruthless novelist, Leith begins to resist his own self-sufficiency, nurtured by war. Peter Exley, another veteran and an art historian by training, is prosecuting war crimes committed by the Japanese. Both men have narrowly escaped death in battle, and Leith saved Exley's life. The men have maintained long-distance friendship in a postwar loneliness that haunts them both, and which has swallowed Exley whole. Now in their thirties, with their youth behind them and their world in ruins, both must invent the future and retrieve a private humanity.

'Arriving in Occupied Japan to record the effects of the bomb at Hiroshima, Leith meets Benedict and Helen Driscoll, the Australian son and daughter of a tyrannical medical administrator. Benedict, at twenty, is doomed by a rare degenerative disease. Helen, still younger, is inseparable from her brother. Precocious, brilliant, sensitive, at home in the books they read together, these two have been, in Leith's words, delivered by literature. The young people capture Leith's sympathy; indeed, he finds himself struggling with his attraction to this girl whose feelings are as intense as his own and from whom he will soon be fatefully parted.'

Source: Publisher's blurb.

y separately published work icon Theft : A Love Story Peter Carey , Milsons Point : Random House , 2006 Z1244799 2006 single work novel humour (taught in 5 units) Michael 'Butcher' Boone is an ex-'really famous' painter now reduced to living in the remote country house of his biggest collector and acting as caretaker for his younger brother, Hugh, a damaged man of imposing physicality and childlike emotions. Together they've forged a delicate equilibrium, a balance instantly disarrayed when a mysterious young woman named Marlene walks out of a rainstorm and into their lives. Beautiful, smart, and ambitious, she's also the daughter-in-law of the late great painter Jacques Liebowitz, one of Butcher's earliest influences. She's sweet to Hugh and falls in love with Butcher, and they reciprocate in kind. And she sets in motion a chain of events that could be the making--or the ruin--of them all. (Source: Trove)
y separately published work icon The Garden Book Brian Castro , Artarmon : Giramondo Publishing , 2005 Z1211305 2005 single work novel (taught in 5 units)
y separately published work icon Carpentaria Alexis Wright , Artarmon : Giramondo Publishing , 2006 Z1184902 2006 single work novel (taught in 47 units) Carpentaria's portrait of life in the precariously settled coastal town of Desperance centres on the powerful Phantom family, whose members are the leaders of the Pricklebush people, and their battles with old Joseph Midnight's tearaway Eastend mob on the one hand, and the white officials of Uptown and the neighbouring Gurfurrit mine on the other. Wright's storytelling is operatic and surreal: a blend of myth and scripture, politics and farce. The novel is populated by extraordinary characters - Elias Smith the outcast saviour, the religious zealot Mozzie Fishman, leader of the holy Aboriginal pilgrimage, the murderous mayor Stan Bruiser, the ever-vigilant Captain Nicoli Finn, the activist and prodigal son Will Phantom, and above all, Angel Day the queen of the rubbish-dump, and her sea-faring husband Normal Phantom, the fish-embalming king of time - figures that stand like giants in this storm-swept world. (Backcover)

Description

The course asks what writing and the literary mean in Australia today. Students read very recent literary texts, and consider the conditions and formations of contemporary writing, the reviewing and reception of Australian literary texts, and the relations between current writing and social, political, and cultural issues and debates.

The course focuses on very recent Australian literature, published since 2000. The course examines what writing and the literary mean in Australia today; and considers the relation between current writing and social, cultural, and political issues and debates. Students consider the conditions and formations of contemporary writing, including literary commentary; and the promotion, reviewing, and reception of Australian literary texts and authors. The relationship of contemporary texts and critical practices to Australian literary and critical history is discussed.

The teaching and assessment modes in this course are designed to develop your skills in researching, understanding, and participating in debates about literature. The intensive study of a small number of texts aims to equip you with ways of understanding contemporary writing, and the critical debates it prompts.

Assessment

Attendance

Attendance and participation

10%

Paper

Seminar paper

20%

Annotated Bibliography

Research essay preparation

10%

Essay

Research essay

60%

Other Details

Offered in: 2007
Current Campus: St Lucia
Levels: Undergraduate
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