Dislocation Writing And Identity In Australian And Persian Literature

This study aims to foreground key literary works in Persian and Australian culture that deal with the representation of exile and dislocation. Through cultural and literary analysis, Dislocation, Writing, and Identity in Australian and Persian Literature investigates the influence of dislocation on self-perception and the remaking of connections both through the act of writing and the attempt to transcend social conventions. Examining writing and identity in David Malouf’s An Imaginary Life (1978), Iranian Diaspora Literature, and Shahrnush Parsipur’s Women Without Men (1989/ Eng.1998), Hasti Abbasi provides a literary analysis of dislocation, with its social and psychological manifestations. Abbasi reveals how the exploration of exile/dislocation, as a narrative that needs to be investigated through imagination and meditation, provides a mechanism for creative writing practice.

Brings together for the first time essays that consider a range of high-profile cases of literary hoaxing, identity crisis or imposture in Australian literature. Critics explore the history of hoaxing and imposture, and consider the cultural and political issues at stake. Nolan at Australian Catholic University.

he current political climate of confrontation between Islamist regimes and Western governments has resulted in the proliferation of essentialist perceptions of Iran and Iranians in the West. Such perceptions do not reflect the complex evolution of Iranian identity that occurred in the years following the Constitutional Revolution (1906–11) and the anti-imperialist Islamic Revolution of 1979. Despite the Iranian government’s determined pursuance of anti-Western policies and strict conformity to religious principles, the film and literature of Iran reflect the clash between a nostalgic pride in Persian tradition and an apparent infatuation with a more Eurocentric modernity. In Familiar and Foreign, Mannani and Thompson set out to explore the tensions surrounding the ongoing formulation of Iranian identity by bringing together essays on poetry, novels, memoir, and films. These include both canonical and less widely theorized texts, as well as works of literature written in English by authors living in diaspora. Challenging neocolonialist stereotypes, these critical excursions into Iranian literature and film reveal the limitations of collective identity as it has been configured within and outside of Iran. Through the examination of works by, among others, the iconic female poet Forugh Farrokhzad, the expatriate author Goli Taraqqi, the controversial memoirist Azar Nafisi, and the graphic novelist Marjane Satrapi, author of Persepolis, this volume engages with the complex and contested discourses of religion, patriarchy, and politics that are the contemporary product of Iran’s long and revolutionary history.

Beyond the obvious and enduring socio-economic ravages it unleashed on indigenous cultures, white settler colonization in Australasia also inflicted profound damage on the collective psyche of both of the communities that inhabited the contested space of the colonial world. The acute sense of alienation that colonization initially provoked in the colonized and colonizing populations of Australia and New Zealand has, recent studies indicate, developed into an endemic, existential pathology. Evidence of the psychological fallout from the trauma of geographical deracination, cultural disorientation and ontological destabilization can be found not only in the state of anomie and self-destructive patterns of behaviour that now characterize the lives of indigenous Australian and Maori peoples, but also in the perpetually faltering identity-discourse and cultural rootlessness of the present descendants of the countries’ Anglo-Celtic settlers. It is with the literary expression of this persistent condition of alienation that the essays gathered in the present volume are concerned. Covering a heterogeneous selection of contemporary Australasian literature, what these critical studies convincingly demonstrate is that, more than two hundred years after the process of colonisation was set in motion, the experience that Germaine Greer has dubbed 'the pain of unbelonging' continues unabated, constituting a dominant thematic concern in the writing produced today by Australian and New Zealand authors.

This volume explores the subterfuges, strategies, and choices that Australian women writers have navigated in order to challenge patriarchal stereotypes and assert themselves as writers of substance. Contextualized within the pioneering efforts of white, Aboriginal, and immigrant Australian women in initiating an alternative literary tradition, the text captures a wide range of multiracial Australian women authors’ insightful reflections on crucial issues such as war and silent mourning, emergence of a Australian national heroine, racial purity and Aboriginal motherhood, communism and activism, feminist rivalry, sexual transgressions, autobiography and art of letter writing, city space and female subjectivity, lesbianism, gender implications of spatial categories, placement and displacement, dwelling and travel, location and dislocation and female body politics. Claiming Space for Australian Women’s Writing tracks Australian women authors’ varied journeys across cultural, political and racial borders in the canter of contemporary political discourse.

What does it mean to belong? When we belong, how do we recognise it as belonging? What role does belonging play in the formation of self-identity? Through a provocative discussion of contemporary Australian life writing, Strangers at Home examines what it means to belong and what belonging means for self-identity. First and foremost, belonging is a kind of relationship, and the connection between self and place has a long philosophical tradition. Experienced across time and place, belonging may be configured through a range of contexts, from belonging to country, belonging to a suburb, a house, even a room within a house or an object. Places and spaces are fundamental to self-identity because our interpretation of our relationships with places and spaces gives rise to meaning, and it is through meaning that a sense of belonging emerges. Understood as a relationship, belonging obviously connects individuals. Whether they are parents, siblings or have no biological history, self-identity is inscribed through our interrelatedness and mapped through a narrative construction. Belonging is always rooted in some conception of place, family, language - that is, some shared, communal space, for belonging must almost always entail others with whom to share it - but it is always also a negotiation between an act of sharing and how one sees oneself within that shared space, a self narrated into a world. To speak of belonging necessarily entails a sense of estrangement, a recognition of the complexity, even the ambivalence, that is at the heart of the relationship between individuals and what they find in the world. Belonging, like identity, requires some nexus between self and something other; belonging requires, quite literally, something to belong to, a "home" in which we seek not to be a "stranger." Together, belonging and estrangement map the connections through which self-identity is lived. Life writing necessarily inscribes ourselves into relationships and places and, as our relationship with the past evolves over the years, and as the ever-changing present offers new possibilities for the future, so those relationships are not just written but rewritten, reconfigured, re-imagined, and renegotiated with the time since lived and the forecast of future time. Bringing together theorising on autobiography as well as place, Jack Bowers examines a range of contemporary Australian autobiographies to consider the intersections between personal and social identities. From Drusilla Modjeska's Poppy and Second Half First, to Rebecca Huntley's An Italian Girl, Steve Bisley's Stillways and many more, Strangers at Home invites readers to reconsider what it is to feel "at home." The foreword is by Jeff Malpas, Distinguished Professor at the University of Tasmania. Strangers at Home is part of the Cambria Australian Literature Series, headed by Dr. Susan Lever.

National Book Award Finalist: “This man’s ideas may be the most influential, not to say controversial, of the second half of the twentieth century.”—Columbus Dispatch At the heart of this classic, seminal book is Julian Jaynes's still-controversial thesis that human consciousness did not begin far back in animal evolution but instead is a learned process that came about only three thousand years ago and is still developing. The implications of this revolutionary scientific paradigm extend into virtually every aspect of our psychology, our history and culture, our religion—and indeed our future. “Don’t be put off by the academic title of Julian Jaynes’s The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind. Its prose is always lucid and often lyrical…he unfolds his case with the utmost intellectual rigor.”—The New York Times “When Julian Jaynes . . . speculates that until late in the twentieth millennium BC men had no consciousness but were automatically obeying the voices of the gods, we are astounded but compelled to follow this remarkable thesis.”—John Updike, The New Yorker “He is as startling as Freud was in The Interpretation of Dreams, and Jaynes is equally as adept at forcing a new view of known human behavior.”—American Journal of Psychiatry

Drawing on a wide range of migrants' writings, this collection reveals an extraordinary diversity of global migratory experience while illustrating the realities and emotions shared by all who leave their home and culture and must adapt to another.