Literary Theory (HEN301)
School of Humanities - University of Tasmania
Semester 1 / 2015

Texts

The Heart Is A Lonely Hunter
y separately published work icon The Childhood of Jesus J. M. Coetzee , Melbourne : Text Publishing , 2013 Z1908494 2013 single work novel (taught in 2 units) ''The child is silent. For a while he too is silent. Then he speaks. 'Please believe me—please take it on faith—this is not a simple matter. The boy is without mother. What that means I cannot explain to you because I cannot explain it to myself. Yet I promise you, if you will simply say Yes, without forethought, without afterthought, all will become clear to you, as clear as day, or so I believe. Therefore: will you accept this child as yours?'

David is a small boy who comes by boat across the ocean to a new country. He has been separated from his parents, and has lost the piece of paper that would have explained everything. On the boat a stranger named Simón takes it upon himself to look after the boy.

On arrival they are assigned new names, new birthdates. They know little Spanish, the language of their new country, and nothing about its customs. They have also suffered a kind of forgetting of old attachments and feelings. They are people without a past.

Simón's goal is to find the boy's mother. He feels sure he will know her when he sees her. And David? He wants to find his mother too but he also wants to understand where he is and how he fits in. He is a boy who is always asking questions.

The Childhood of Jesus is not like any other novel you have read. This beautiful and surprising fable is about childhood, about destiny, about being an outsider. It is a novel about the riddle of experience itself.' (Publisher's blurb)

Description

This unit examines the development of literary theory from the middle of the twentieth century to the present. It aims to provide students with the skills to read theory critically and to develop informed arguments in response to critical, literary and/or filmic texts. The unit focuses on a range of approaches to reading texts including structuralism, Marxism, feminism, post-structuralism, psychoanalysis, postmodernism and queer theory.

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