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Articles by Michael Giffin
Golding on the Fall
Quadrant
(Volume 52, Number 6, 2008)
This article gives an overview of William Golding's interrogations of the fall in three brilliant and economical novels that succeeded his more popular first novel Lord of the Flies: The Inheritors, Pincher Martin, and Free Fall. In each, Golding presents a fall, physical and metaphysical, located within language, consciousness, free will, or a combination of these. The power of Golding's presentations comes from his gift for mimesis rather than diegesis: that is, for his ability to show rather than tell; for the way he embodies rather than narrates.
On Interpreting Literature
Quadrant
(Volume 52, Number 1–2, 2008)
Partisans in the conflict of interpretation adopt different positions over what literature should be studied. When a discussion about interpretion occurs, I advocate the principles of hermeneutics, but not all literature stands up to the rigour they encourage. They're best employed when approaching literature with hermeneutical intentions. To demonstrate how they work, this article applies them to A Passage to India, a novel that's fallen out of favour among academics who take their cues from theorists such as Edward Said.
Framing the Human Condition
The Heythrop Journal
(Volume 48, Number 5, 2007)
Iris Murdoch and Muriel Spark are often compared but they interrogate classical metaphysics from different perspectives: Murdoch is a secular philosopher while Spark is a religious theologian. Through a reading of The Bell and Robinson, both published in the same year, this article describes how the young Murdoch and Spark do what emerging literary authors of the 1950s were expected to do: frame the human condition and reflect on its existential dilemma.
Writing and Reading the Canons
Quadrant
(Volume 51, Number 6, 2007)
Canons don't suddenly appear. They evolve. Their evolution influences how we write and read them. There's a chicken-and-egg scenario here. What comes first, a canonical text or its ideology and aesthetic? This article offers four reflections: on the construction of divinity in the sacred canon, on the construction of humanity in the secular canon, on Margaret Atwood's Alias Grace, and on the resilience of the sacred and secular canons in an age where some read novels instead of scripture and go to book club instead of church.
Four approaches to Patrick White
Quadrant
(Volume 50, Number 12, 2006)
The variety of critical approaches to White represents literature's version of the history wars. The first generation of critics noticed an interrogation being conducted in his novels, and they used evidence from the novels to demonstrate that interrogation. More recently the tendency has been to focus on literary theory or opinions about White's personality. This is more noticeable in Australia, where the legend of a great literary giant has been lost to the myth of a nasty old queen. Critics overseas feel less of a need to cut White down to size.
Covenants of Wholeness
Adoption & Fostering
(Volume 30, Number 3, 2006)
Throughout history, adoption has reflected the social covenant of the society it serves. For example, adoption served semi-feudal agrarian society in different ways from modern industrialized society. Adoption was once an agreement among extended families and allies, which didn't mandate divorce from birth families and sought to advantage birth and adoptive families alike. This article compares case studies of adoption in the Austen and Kamehameha families, during the period in which Britain and Hawaii made their rapid transitions to constitutional monarchy.
Jane Austen and the Economy of Salvation
Literature & Theology
(Volume 13, Number 1, 2000)
Because literary criticism in the twentieth century was secular in character, it was difficult for critics to understand the religious dimensions of what appeared to be ostensibly secular novels. This reading of Mansfield Park questions several strongly-held beliefs that once prevailed in literary criticism. It suggests the novel presents a systematic discourse that can only be accessed through Austen's worldview, which united the social with the religious.
A Gadamerian Reading of A Passage to India
Literature & Theology
(Volume 12, Number 2, 1998)
Since the early nineteenth century several authors have explored the imaginaries of neoclassicism, romanticism, modernism, and post-modernism. This exploration is part of an ongoing interrogation of classical metaphysics, which Habermas calls post-metaphysical thinking. Gadamerian hermeneutics is a key to understanding the hermeneutical modes of A Passage to India. This article considers the ways in which both Gadamer and Forster think and write within the post-metaphysical spirit of their age.
Freedom and Necessity in Interpretation
Literature & Theology
(Volume 9, Number 3, 1995)
The idea of an Australian university was predicated on an assumption that theology was divisive and should be excluded from enlightened institutions. In questioning this exclusion, Professor Ken Cable, during a commencement address at Sydney University, pointed out the carved angels holding up the ceiling of the Great Hall. How ironic, he said, there was no angel guarding theology. Until recently this secular ethos, and the apartheid it represented, marginalized the Churches to halls of residence at the fringes of Australian universities.
The Christian Imagination in Patrick White
Christianity & Literature
(Winter 1994)
The religious critic usually mentions White's experience of falling into the mud and realizing there is a God. The secular critic usually mentions the sermon about jelly beans that drove him from the Church. But White continued to believe in God and until the end of his life he prayed regularly. The Christian imagination is integral to his novels. His late-modernist vision focuses on what contemporary philosophers such as Gadamer and theologians such as Ricoeur also explore: the myths and metaphors that still dominate the western imagination.
The Jewish Imagination in Patrick White
Literature & Theology
(Volume 8, Number 1, 1994)
The Jewish imagination is integral to four of White's novels: The Living and the Dead, Riders in the Chariot, The Solid Mandala, and The Eye of the Storm. White admitted to admiring Judaism and studying it thoroughly. He must have been successful in his characterization of Judaism, for it has attracted Jewish scholarship in Israel, and praise from Jewish readers, one of whom has commented: "How does this man know it all? He has written what I thought nobody but me and my kind could possibly know and with the understanding of a god".
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