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- Hansson, Karin
(author)
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The Departure of the Author : A Post-Structuralist Reading of Gerald Murnane's Landscape with Landscape
- 1999
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Reports (other academic/artistic)abstract
- Gerald Murnane’s Landscape With Landscape is an intriguing book, full of contradictions and inconsistencies, teasing in the way it seems to be deliberately constructed to escape interpretation. Its anonymous, subversive and conceited first-person narrator cum protagonist, recognizable from other books by Murnane, is also the alleged writer of the six stories in the volume. In this capacity he gradually distances himself from his readers and finally, as will be further discussed, divests himself of all credibility. Thematically, truth and reality are key concepts but the narrative slides precariously between events that are ‘really’ taking place and a set of events that exist only in the deceptive narrator’s imagination. All the stories start with a definition of place, a vantage point or a scene of departure. Significantly, as the title indicates, place and spatial perspectives are far more important than time. Seemingly matter-of-fact introductory descriptions like “I am in the backyard of my three-bedroom house in the City of Heidelberg…” or “I stood on a hill northeast of Melbourne and looked across the folds of suburbs…” turn out to be just as unreliable as the person who defines them. What the narrator claims to be a Paraguayan setting turns out to be decidedly Australian, for example. Beneath and beyond what is usually defined as reality, depths and vistas of unreality are exposed. This indeterminacy related to landscapes and perspectives affects the reading experience making the interpretation of the text fraught with intriguing uncertainty.
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| 2. |
- Hansson, Karin
(author)
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Entering Heart of Darkness from a Postcolonial perspective. Teaching Notes
- 1998
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Reports (other academic/artistic)abstract
- The aim of this paper is twofold. First it contains a description how Heart of Darkness can be used in the definition and discussion of the terms imperialism and civilization. Second it describes a pattern of analysis based on the novella that is particularly relevant for postcolonial studies. Thus the novella, together with a selection of source material, serves both to give the historical and factual background necessary for the study of New Literatures in English and to provide the students with an analytical model that may be applied to other books in their reading list.
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| 3. |
- Hansson, Karin
(author)
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Gerald Murnane's Changing Geographies
- 2000
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Reports (other academic/artistic)abstract
- Lecturing on his novel The Plains at La Trobe University Gerald Murnane argued that the book “was the story of a man who tried to see properly.” In the introductory paragraph we are told that the first-person narrator is looking for “anything in the landscape that seemed to hint at some elaborate meaning behind appearance.” This search for “the furthest of all landscapes” is a recurrent theme in Murnane’s writing. My paper will discuss the characteristics and the function of his idiosyncratic geographies in such contexts. As he writes in Velvet Waters his mysterious hidden vistas of loneliness and otherworldliness belong to a world in which “there will never be any such thing as time. There is only place.” These two novels like Inland and Landscape With Landscape take us on cerebral journeys across maps and strange territories of continually changing perspectives. It will be argued that the settings referred to as Paraguay, Hungary, America or Australia, ‘the plains’ or ‘the inland’ are to be understood as mental precincts, as states of mind.
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