Bruce Bennett: Homing In Essays on Australian Literature and Selfhood

Bruce Bennett: Homing In Essays on Australian Literature and Selfhoo

The Poetics of Dissolution: The Representation of Maori Culture in Janet Frame's Fiction

This essay examines Janet Frame's early short story "The Lagoon", and argues that the story alludes to Maori experience, albeit tangentially, in a way which anticipates similar evocations in novels such as A State of Siege and The Carpathians. A close reading shows that cultural imperialism in Frame runs parallel to, or is a side-effect of, interpersonal appropriations. These, in turn, seem to be rooted in human beings' reluctance to accommodate otherness. Recurrently Janet Frame points to a model of cultural and interpersonal interaction which is detached from proprietorial forms of appropriation, but which entails nothing less than the dissolution of the ruling ego. Selfdissolution shall emerge in this reading as the key to a utopian state consisting of the total permeability between the self and the remainder of the world. In this state, transactions become reciprocal since the divisions between self and non-self no longer exist

Queer Nation?

Robarts Lecture delivered March 4, 1997

A Connection of Images: the structure of symbols in The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born

Ayi Kwei Armah\u27s first novel, The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born, has presented problems for most readers. There has been a general admission that it is a work which deserves high praise but most have been decidedly uncomfortable with Armah\u27s obsession with filth and decay. Yet it is precisely this obsession which shows Armah\u27s technical abilities and which helps to define the full meaning of the novel

Signifier Resignified: Aborigines in Australian Literature

If the image of Aborigines in Australian literature is analyzed in semiotic terms, the signifier, the literary image, does not lead back to the implied signified, the Aborigines of‘real life’, but rather to other images. This could be seen as simply another version of Jacques Derrida’s analysis of semiosis, which might be termed the cereal box view of the sign. The person on the box is holding a box with a picture of the same person holding a box with a picture of the same person holding a box... etc. The root image cannot exist for there must always be another image on the box being held, no matter how small. In the same way, each signifier can refer only to another signifier. Any implied signified is unreachable