Volume 1, March 2005
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Item[BOOK REVIEW] Crafting Memory Review of Jane Urquhart, The Stone Carvers(Department of English, Flinders University, Adelaide, Australia, 2008-04)If history is more or less bunk, then memory is more or less craft. In The Stone Carvers Jane Urquhart depicts characters who are traumatically hauled into the modern age, and suffer for it. This painful journey begins with the foundation of a pioneer village in South-western Ontario and ends with a redemptive kind of healing on former French battlefields after WWI. Across all this time and space, memory and the power of art and craft are crucial in maintaining social fabric as well as the individual psyche.
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Item[BOOK REVIEW] Regenerative Spirit Vols 1 & 2(Department of English, Flinders University, Adelaide, Australia, 2008-04)Anna Rutherford once wrote, reading the literature of the Commonwealth, the “regenerative spirit is stressed, a link is established between the old world and the new. It is precisely the attention paid to the regenerative spirit that characterises the essays assembled in these two volumes, papers read at several conferences organised by the Centre for Research in the New Literatures in English (CRNLE) and the School of Humanities at Flinders University in Adelaide. Dedicated to Rutherford’s memory and to honour her as an outstanding pioneer in Commonwealth Literature / New Literatures in English / Post-colonial studies, the two collections address themes of exile and migration, dislocation, diasporan and cross-cultural writing.
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ItemParadisiacal Imagination: Rabindranath Tagore’s Visvovod or Vision of Non-National Neo-Universalism.(Department of English, Flinders University, Adelaide, Australia, 2005-02)Why is the poet who was considered a literary titan in his time, a supreme symbol of India’s culture and spirit, now so widely neglected? Is it because of some change of taste in poetry? As Tagore has aptly said, ‘poetry is… a matter of taste’ Or is it because Tagore was too provincial a poet to retain a universal appeal after his death? Perhaps the reasons are not so much poetical but ideological and philosophical,for Tagore was a poet-philosopher and the world simply chose not to tread the path that he sought to pave.
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ItemRajni Walia, Women and Self: Fictions of Jean Rhys, Barbara Pym, Anita Brookner.(Department of English, Flinders University, Adelaide, Australia, 2005-03)This review calls into question Walia’s views, calling them ‘dated’ and questioning their validity in light of modern scholarship and her ‘under-acknowledged dependency’ on other scholars’ works.
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ItemPlaywright with a Plural Consciousness: Kuo Pao Kun. Images at the Margins: A Collection of Kuo Pao Kun’s Plays.(Department of English, Flinders University, Adelaide, Australia, 2005-02)Pao Kun’s ability to express himself creatively in two languages, or swim in two unlike streams, is what constitutes his main strength. It gives him that rare identity of a cultural individualist and pluralist at the same time and the privilege to provide the vital bridge between the indigenous Chinese and Anglophone theatres in Singapore. It empowers him to dialogue with culturally divergent groups of people, who, as he explains in an interview, ‘think differently and have different experiences’. Paradoxically however, it also brings him into a kind of marginality – a fringe kind of existence that is experienced by one whose imagination is not anchored in any one particular language or culture, and who habitually occupies a neutral ground between two seemingly incompatible worlds, acting as an arbiter of the diverse.
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ItemValue of Others(Department of English, Flinders University, Adelaide, Australia, 2005-02)Reviews of Keiko Tamura's "Michi's Memories: The story of a Japanese War Bride" and Akira Yoshimura's "Shipwrecks"