The Australian apology and postcolonial defamiliarization: Gail Jones's<i>Sorry</i>

Herrero, Dolores

doi:10.1080/17449855.2011.572660

Cited by 7 publications

(1 citation statement)

References 11 publications

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“…He defined it as an aesthetic technique to make objects appear strange. Defamiliarization is a complex concept and can be applied in a variety of contexts, such as television rhetoric (Woal, 1982), political discourse (Boym, 2005), postcolonial discourse (Caomea, 2003;Herrero, 2011), gender studies (Hollinger, 1999) as well as technology design (Bell et al 2005) to name a few. In my research I draw on defamiliarization, theorized by Ann Hegerfeldt (2005), as an essential element of magic realist narratives in education about genocides.…”

Section: Inversion In Magic Realismmentioning

confidence: 99%

Narrating Humanity : Children's Literature and Global Citizenship Education

Yarova¹

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The aim of this thesis is to explore how children’s magic realist fiction contributes to critical Global Citizenship Education (GCE). This study argues that children’s magic realist literature can facilitate young readers’ knowledge and understanding of human rights issues and promote environmental awareness in a non-didactic manner by representing global issues from non-human perspectives. The thesis comprises four articles. The first study explores the non-human perspective of an animalhuman ‘cyborg’ protagonist in Peter Dickinson’s novel Eva (1988). The study shows how the non-human perspective allows the reader to go beyond anthropocentric boundaries in order to explore the issue of treating the other. The second study investigates an animal perspective on the Roma genocide along with the mistreatment of animals in the Second World War in Sonya Hartnett’s The Midnight Zoo (2010). The animal perspective shows human intolerance of other humans (the Roma) intertwined with human actions towards animals and encourages the reader in a non-didactic way to adopt an eco-philosophical standpoint. The third study is concerned with the representation of the Holocaust from the point of view of a supernatural narrator, Death, in Marcus Zusak’s The Book Thief (2005). Death’s inverted magic realist narrative facilitates the young reader’s understanding of human rights issues and represents the history of the genocide in a non-didactic manner. The fourth study examines the relationships between humans and the natural environment shown from the non-human perspective of a tree. Taking the lens of holistic ecology, this study explores the representation of human – nature relationships in Patrick Ness’s A Monster Calls (2011) and how the novel guides the child-reader towards an awareness of environmental issues.

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Section: Inversion In Magic Realismmentioning

confidence: 99%

Narrating Humanity : Children's Literature and Global Citizenship Education

Yarova¹

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Saying the unsayable

Belleflamme¹

2015

ETC

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In her novelSorry(2007), Australian novelist and essayist Gail Jones engages in a reflection on the ethics of reconciliation. Written in response to her wish to acknowledge the debt to the Stolen Generations,Sorryoffers new possibilities of ethical mourning, allowing the dead to return and the voiceless to speak. This article explores the ways in which Jones not only fashions a narrative that bypasses the unsayable dimension of Australia’s history and the representational difficulties inherent in trauma but also fosters the empathetic imagination through a metadiscursive discussion of the act of reading. Self-referentiality and self-reflexivity are also examined, as they allow Jones to draw attention to her novel’s writerly elaborations and offer an alternative to standard reconciliation practices.

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“Shakespeare was wrong”: Counter-discursive intertextuality in Gail Jones’sSorry

Belleflamme

2015

Journal of Postcolonial Writing

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In what is presented as a moment of truth in Gail Jones's novel Sorry, the narrator's brief statement that "Shakespeare was wrong" appears to call into question the English dramatist's literary and epistemological supremacy. Starting from this unsettling premise, this article seeks to define Jones's counter-discursive use of Shakespearean intertextuality. While it has, for decades, proved a risky task for both historians and novelists to write about the delicate issue of silence in Australia without risking the appropriation of an Aboriginal voice, the article examines how Jones exploits defamiliarizing techniques in order to undermine the dominant European discourse (as encoded in the Shakespearean text) without assuming an Aboriginal perspective. Her aim is to facilitate the emergence of an incipient, tentatively defined counter-discourse sufficiently attuned to the specific realities of Australia. The article argues that by adopting an Australian cultural perspective designed to decentre Shakespeare, Jones hopes to reconcile history and writing, and also the divided aspects of White Australia's twofold identity at a time of profound national changes.

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The Australian apology and postcolonial defamiliarization: Gail Jones'sSorry

Cited by 7 publications

References 11 publications

Narrating Humanity : Children's Literature and Global Citizenship Education

Narrating Humanity : Children's Literature and Global Citizenship Education

Saying the unsayable

“Shakespeare was wrong”: Counter-discursive intertextuality in Gail Jones’sSorry

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