Benang : From the Heart
Fremantle
:
Fremantle Press
,
1999
Z135862
1999
single work
novel
(taught in 31 units)
'Oceanic in its rhythms and understanding, brilliant in its use of language and image, moving in its largeness of spirit, compelling in its narrative scope and style, Benang is a novel of celebration and lament, of beginning and return, of obliteration and recovery, of silencing and of powerful utterance. Both tentative and daring, it speaks to the present and a possible future through stories, dreams, rhythms, songs, images and documents mobilised from the incompletely acknowledged and still dynamic past.' (Publisher's website)
The Slap
Crows Nest
:
Allen and Unwin
,
2008
Z1739894
2008
single work
novel
(taught in 40 units)
'At a suburban barbecue, a man slaps a child who is not his own.
'This event has a shocking ricochet effect on a group of people, mostly friends, who are directly or indirectly influenced by the event.
'In this remarkable novel, Christos Tsiolkas turns his unflinching and all-seeing eye onto that which connects us all: the modern family and domestic life in the twenty-first century. The Slap is told from the points of view of eight people who were present at the barbecue. The slap and its consequences force them all to question their own families and the way they live, their expectations, beliefs and desires.
'What unfolds is a powerful, haunting novel about love, sex and marriage, parenting and children, and the fury and intensity - all the passions and conflicting beliefs - that family can arouse. In its clear-eyed and forensic dissection of the ever-growing middle class and its aspirations and fears, The Slap is also a poignant, provocative novel about the nature of loyalty and happiness, compromise and truth.' (Publisher's blurb)
Transgression and subversison are often cited as characteristics of avant-garde literary and other artistic practices. These art forms, it is said, transgress and subvert not only social codes, but aesthetic ones. In western art, ‘avant-garde’ aesthetics have not only pitted themselves against the prevailing values of ‘polite society’ but have transgressed the borders of art; they have challenged artistic genre and modes of representation; they have sought to unsettle received notions of beauty, transcendence, and the sublime; they have sought a ‘revolution in feeling’. This subject studies some exemplary moments in English-language literary history since 1900 up to the present, in Australia and elsewhere, and organises its investigations around the questions: what are transgression and subversion in the literary arts, and what are their effects?
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