The Last Magician
St Lucia
:
University of Queensland Press
,
1992
Z461943
1992
single work
novel
(taught in 1 units)
Charlie, a world-famous avant-garde photographer, is to all the world a successful adult. But deep within the fabric of his daily life float childhood memories that he cannot forget. He shares with three others knowledge of an act of ultimate cruelty–a childhood prank that ended in a murder. The state called it an accident, and the children remained silent. Until now. The story of Charlie’s hunt for one of his group, the mysterious Cat, is told by Lucy, a hooker living among the vast underworld that populates the quarry beneath the city of Sydney. This final journey, taken to exorcise the terrible past, will bring them face-to-face with power and betrayal, sexual obsession and social ostracism, and with the searing heart of themselves that they cannot and will not forget…
Our central theoretical writings will be drawn from writers including Linda Hutcheon, Umberto Eco, Richard Rorty, and Ihab Hassan. These readings will be positioned in order to render comprehensible the unwieldy theoretical debate that Postmodernism has become. Crucial concepts will include: the function and effects of intertextuality, the dissolving of conceptual boundaries between high art and low art, and the function of parody in social critique.
Comparative essay (2000 words, 70%)
