123041 PS Literary Studies / Proseminar Literature (2019W)

In his by now classic study Inventing Australia (1981), Richard White has argued that Australia, as any nation, is an ‘invention’ that is neither uniform nor stable. Rather, since, as he continues, ‘national identity is continually being fractured, questioned and redefined’, Australia has meant different things to different people at different times. Taking this insight as our starting point, this Proseminar is designed to engage with the changing imaginaries of Australia present in its literature. We consider how different texts have conceived of the nation differently at different times. In this sense, we take a diachronic approach to examine the role of literature in inventing and constantly re-inventing the nation. To this end, we analyse literary texts that are highly diverse in many respects: in terms of genre (we consider both poetry and prose fiction), time of publication (we discuss texts from the late nineteenth century as well as contemporary ones) and authors (we read texts by Indigenous Australians and settlers, i.e. Anglo-Celtic and ethnic minority writers).

Central issues addressed in this Proseminar will include:
1. How did Australian writing participate in the formation of a distinctively Australian national identity in the late nineteenth century?
2. How does contemporary literature envision the nation and how have dominant narratives changed over time?
3. What versions of Australia do in particular texts by Indigenous and ethnic minority writers present, who have traditionally been excluded from dominant representations of the nation?
4. How do the texts under discussion negotiate concepts such as ethnicity, gender, class and sexuality and what effect does this have on their imagination of Australia?
5. How does contemporary literature respond to the growing significance of global, transnational connections that consciously extend beyond the confines of the nation?

Apart from addressing the primary texts in their form and content, this Proseminar is also designed to introduce you to basic academic skills, including academic writing, thesis formulation and the structuring of a term paper in literary studies.