Australian course description for next fall

The literature of Australia is passionately engaged with the land and its history, conveying an often outsized sense of the incomers and the dispossessed, the settlers and migrants, the rebels and the rulers, the extraordinarily landscape of eucalyptus trees and kookaburras and kangaroos. . But Australian writers also look to the world, taking all of history as their canvas. This seminar will study great Australian writers such as Peter Carey, Shirley Hazzard, and Tim Winton. Thomas Keneally, and Gail Jones who incarnate in there work Austrlaia aspirations and failures, its ideals and tragedies. We will also examine younger writers such as Christos Tsiolkas, and Melissa Lucashenko who focus on a changing Austrlaia in the twenty-first century.   Discussion will focus on these writers’ diverse and inventive styles and narrative strategies, their social and psychological insights, their sense of their own nation’s terrain and people, and the world beyond its borders. Reading list: Peter Carey, True History of the Kelly Gang, Shirley Hazzard, Transit of Venus, Tim Winton, Breath, Gail Jones, Five Bells, Melissa Lucashenko, Mullumbimby, Christos Tsiolkas, The Slap. Thomas Keneally, The Daughters of Mars.