'Romulus Gaita fled his home in his native Yugoslavia at the age of thirteen, and came to Australia with his young wife Christina and their infant son Raimond soon after the end of World War II.
'Tragic events were to overtake the boy’s life, but Raimond Gaita has an extraordinary story to tell about growing up with his father amid the stony paddocks and flowing grasses of country Australia.
'Written simply and movingly, Romulus, My Father is about how a compassionate and honest man taught his son the meaning of living a decent life. It is about passion, betrayal and madness, about friendship and the joy and dignity of work, about character and fate, affliction and spirituality.'
Source: Publisher's blurb (Text Publishing).
Romulus, My Father
( dir. Richard Roxburgh
)
Australia
:
Arenafilm
,
2007
Z1308732
2007
single work
film/TV
(taught in 1 units)
Film adaptation of Raymond Gaita's biography.
Unit Suitable For
AC: Year 11 (English Unit 2)
Themes
Australian country life, belonging, identity, migrant experience, migrating to Australia, morality, overcoming adversity, suffering, the impact of the past upon the present, truth
General Capabilities
Critical and creative thinking, Information and communication technology, Intercultural understanding, Literacy, Personal and social
'When Raimond Gaita’s memoir, Romulus, My Father, was published in 1998 it made an immediate impact across the country.' (Introduction)
The Self in Moral Space : Life Narrative and the Good
Ithaca
:
Cornell University Press
,
2007
Z1378660
2007
selected work
criticism
All of us take our moral bearings from a conception of the good, or a range of goods, that we consider most important. We are in this sense selves in moral space. Building on the work of the philosopher Charles Taylor, among others, David Parker examines a range of classic and contemporary autobiographies - including those of St. Augustine, William Wordsworth, Friedrich Nietzsche, Edmund Gosse, Roland Barthes, Seamus Heaney, and J. M. Coetzee - to reveal a whole domain of life narrative that has been previously ignored, one that enables a new approach to the question of what constitutes a 'good' life narrative. Moving from an ethics toward an aesthetics of life writing, Parker follows Wittgenstein's view that ethics and aesthetics are one. The Self in Moral Space is distinctive in that its key ethical question is not What is it right for the life writer to do? but the broader question What is it good to be? This question opens up an important debate with the dominant postmodern paradigms that prevail in life writing studies today. In Parker's estimation, such paradigms are incapable of explaining why life writing matters in the contemporary context. Life narrative, he argues, faces readers with the perennial ethical question How should a human being live? We need a new reconstructive paradigm, as offered by this book, in order to gain a fuller understanding of life narrative and its humanistic potential. (From the publisher's webpage at http://www.cornellpress.cornell.edu/cup_detail.taf?ti_id=4669.)
