{"product_id":"cultural-memory-and-literature-9789004304062","title":"Cultural Memory and Literature","description":"Cultural memory involves a community’s shared memories, the selection of which is based on current political and social needs. A past that is significant to a national group is re-imagined by generating new meanings that replace earlier certainties and fixed symbols or myths. This creates literary syncretisms with moments of undecidability. The analysis in this book draws on Renate Lachmann’s theory of intertextuality to show how novels that blur boundaries without standing in for history are prone to intervene in cultural memory. \u003cbr\u003eA brief overview of Aboriginal politics between the 1920s and the 1990s in relation to several novels provides historical and political background to the links between, and problems associated with, cultural memory, testimony, trauma, and Stolen Generations narratives, which are discussed in relation to Sally Morgan’s \u003ci\u003eMy Place\u003c\/i\u003e and Doris Pilkington’s \u003ci\u003eRabbit-Proof Fence\u003c\/i\u003e. There follows an analysis of novels that respond to the history of contact between Aboriginal and settler Australians, including Kate Grenville’s historical novels \u003ci\u003eThe Secret River\u003c\/i\u003e, \u003ci\u003eThe Lieutenant\u003c\/i\u003e, and \u003ci\u003eSarah Thornhill\u003c\/i\u003e as examples of a traditional approach. David Malouf’s \u003ci\u003eRemembering Babylon\u003c\/i\u003e charts how language and naming defined our early national narrative that excluded Aboriginal people. \u003cbr\u003eIntertextuality is explored via the relation between Thea Astley’s \u003ci\u003eThe Multiple Effects of Rainshadow\u003c\/i\u003e, Chloe Hooper’s \u003ci\u003e The Tall Man, and the Royal Commission into Aboriginal Deaths in Custody. Kim Scott’s \u003ci\u003eBenang: from the heart\u003c\/i\u003e and \u003ci\u003eThat Deadman Dance\u003c\/i\u003e and Alexis Wright’s \u003ci\u003e Carpentaria\u003c\/i\u003e reflect a number of Lachmann’s concepts – syncretism, dialogism, polyphony, Menippean satire, and the carnivalesque.\u003cbr\u003eSuggested is a new way of reading novels that respond to Australia’s violent past beyond trauma studies and postcolonial theory to re-imagine a different, syncretic past from multiple perspectives.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/i\u003e","brand":"Diane Molloy","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":48268310348027,"sku":"9789004304062","price":86.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0779\/3917\/9771\/files\/9789004304062.jpg?v=1772491231","url":"https:\/\/indiepubs.com\/products\/cultural-memory-and-literature-9789004304062","provider":"IndiePubs","version":"1.0","type":"link"}