Australian Literature Honours D: Australian Postmodernism (ASLT4014)
Semester 1, Semester 2 / 2009

Texts

y separately published work icon Dead Europe Christos Tsiolkas , Milsons Point : Vintage Australia , 2005 Z1186455 2005 single work novel (taught in 14 units) 'The novel comprises two separate narratives. The first, told in the style of a fairytale, is set in a traditional Greek peasant village during and after World War II. Its world is still magical. ... The second narrative is set in the present time. The narrator is a 36-year-old gay, Greek-Australian photographic artist named Isaac. We meet Isaac at a time when he has travelled to Greece for what turns out to be a rather dismal officially funded exhibition of his works.'

Source: Manne, Robert. 'Dead Disturbing'. The Monthly. (June, 2005)
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y separately published work icon Black Mirror Gail Jones , Sydney : Picador , 2002 Z969430 2002 single work novel (taught in 1 units)

'Victoria Morrell was once a great artist. She led the high life - living and working in Paris, mixing with the artists of the Surrealist movement. Her work was largely forgotten in the fifties and sixties, but was rediscovered in the seventies when she became something of a cult figure on the London art scene. She now lives as a recluse in Hampstead, London. And she is dying.

'Anna Griffin is the young woman commissioned to write a biography of Victoria's life. In many ways their lives strangely intersect, since they grew up in the same mining town and share preoccupations with underground spaces, deserts and the many forms of grief.

'In a compelling double narrative, Gail Jones tracks Victoria's past as it intertwines with Anna's life. The stories Victoria tells enable both women to enter into new forms of sympathy and understanding.

'Elegant, enthralling, and emotionally charged, Black Mirror is both a novel of love and family mystery, and a meditation on the nature of artistic vision and obsession.' (Publication summary)

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y separately published work icon My Life as a Fake Peter Carey , Milsons Point : Random House Australia , 2003 Z1045776 2003 single work novel (taught in 8 units) Sarah Wode-Douglas is an aristocratic woman who has made her living as the editor of the poetry magazine "First Proof", until she impulsively follows a friend to Kuala Lumpur. She meets Christopher Chubb, an enigmatic wreck of a man whose terrible secrets Sarah is compelled to discover and pursue. (Source: Trove)
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y separately published work icon Due Preparations for the Plague Janette Turner Hospital , Pymble : HarperCollins Australia , 2003 Z1029013 2003 single work novel thriller (taught in 2 units)

'Lowell tries not to think about the past, about the hijacking that killed his mother. Samantha, on the other hand, cannot let go. As a child she survived the hijacking of Air France 64, and as an adult she obsessively digs for answers, seeking a man called Salamander whom she believes holds key information.

'It is the death of Lowell's father, and his legacy of a blue sports bag crammed with documents and videotapes, that finally brings Lowell and Samantha together and unravels the interconnections between victims and perpetrators, saved and damned.

'But in this murky world of endless aliases and surveillance, who can be trusted? When does the quest for truth become a dangerous obsession? And what difference can the truth make?

'Janette Turner Hospital has crafted a taut and confronting novel that propels us into the chaos of terror and the cruelty - and unexpected hope - of survival. ' (Publication summary)

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y separately published work icon Versary Kate Lilley , Applecross : Salt Publishing , 2002 Z979488 2002 selected work poetry (taught in 1 units)
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y separately published work icon Shanghai Dancing Brian Castro , Artarmon : Giramondo Publishing , 2003 Z1011730 2003 single work novel (taught in 5 units)

'After 40 years in Australia, António Castro packs a bag and walks out of his old life forever. The victim of a restlessness he calls "Shanghai Dancing," António seeks to understand the source of his condition in his family's wanderings. Reversing his parents' own migration, António heads back to their native Shanghai, where his world begins to fragment as his ancestry starts to flood into his present, and emissaries of glittering pre-war China, evangelical Liverpool and seventeenth-century Portugal merge into contemporary backdrops across Asia, Europe and Australia. A "fictional autobiography," Shanghai Dancing is a dazzling meditation on identity, language and disorientation that combines photographs and written images in the style of W.G. Sebald. ' (Publication summary)

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y separately published work icon The Monkey's Mask Dorothy Porter , South Melbourne : Hyland House , 1994 Z528794 1994 single work novel crime (taught in 31 units)
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Description

This seminar examines a range of Australian texts in the light of postmodern theory and questions. Among the issues to be explored are: unwriting meta-narratives; writing and/as re-writing; the death of the author/birth of the reader; alliances of textuality, truth and power; discursive (de)constructions of the subject; relations between postmodernism and modernism and between the postmodern and the postcolonial.

Assessment

Each semester option is assessed by a 4000 word essay.

Other Details

Offered in: 2008, 2007, 2006, 2005, 2004
Levels: Undergraduate - Honours
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