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Articles
A Sense of the Ending
Quadrant
(Volume 54, Number 4, 2010)
"Time is a fact of life," Margaret Atwood admits: "In some ways it is the fact of life. It might even be considered the true hidden subject of all novels." In The Sense of an Ending, Frank Kermode writes about this need of the novelist to explore time as a fact of life. The gist of his thesis is that a story written under the sign of classical metaphysics tends to represent time as linear, and the imagined ending, of the story and of life, is imminent rather than immanent, although immanence is still there in the shadows. Conversely, a story written under the sign of the post-metaphysical critique of classical metaphysics tends to represent time as circular, and the imagined ending, of the story and of life, is immanent rather than imminent, although imminence is still there in the shadows. Atwood's latest novel, The Year of the Flood, which is a companion rather than a sequel to Oryx and Crake, is an example of the balance between immanence and imminence she strives for in her maturity.
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Dickens on Child Abuse
Quadrant
(Volume 54, Number 1–2, 2010)
When considering links between our constructions of child abuse and what Dickens had in mind in Great Expectations, it's necessary to notice the central but easily overlooked role of Jaggers, a prominent London lawyer, whose importance isn't widely understood since he's often in the background. After giving an overview of the novel's most significant symmetry—the parallel stories of Pip and Estella—this article brings Jaggers to the foreground, looks at the boundaries separating his professional and private personas, and how his private beliefs influence his professional actions as Pip's guardian and Estella's controller. Behind all this is the suggestion that Jaggers isn't simply a character in a story. He's a trope in a discourse which moves between literature and philosophy.
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Abraham's Eldest Sons
Spaniel Books
(2010)
Christianity began as a sect that gradually parted from Judaism during the first and second centuries CE; some delay the parting until the third century CE; others believe the parting never needed to happen. Christians have been trying to understand the Jewish context of the New Testament, and the Jewishness of Jesus, for nearly two hundred years. Occasionally their well-meaning attempts have reinforced negative stereotypes of Jews. Things have taken a turn for the better since Christians started letting Jews teach them about Jewishness. This article looks at two examples. The first, Julie Galambush's The Reluctant Parting, comes from a Jewish convert who focuses on the Jewish writers of the New Testament. The second, Amy-Jill Levine's The Misunderstood Jew, comes from an Orthodox Jew who focuses on the Jewishness of Jesus.
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Bickerton on Language
Quadrant
(Volume 53, Number 11, 2009)
Derek Bickerton has two goals in Adam's Tongue: first, to convince us that language is the key to being human; second, to dispose of several confounding factors in the study of language evolution, including its primate-centric bias, its homo-centric bias, and its assumption that language is the target of natural selection. He doesn't believe in intelligent design but neither does he believe language evolution is a juggernaut of precursors and stepping stones. According to Bickerton, Darwin may have challenged the view that humans are special creations of God, but natural selection has never been properly understood. Since Darwin we've adopted the view that humans are special creations of evolution, and evolution has never been properly understood either.
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Bickerton on Creoles
Quadrant
(Volume 53, Number 10, 2009)
Creoles are new languages that spring up, seemingly out of nowhere, whenever people speaking mutually incomprehensible languages are put into contact with one another over long periods. This happened most often when slaves were shipped from Africa to the Caribbean, South America, or islands in the Indian Ocean, where large sugar plantations were
established. It also happened in Hawaii, where waves of indentured labour had immigrated since the late nineteenth century to work on the sugar plantations. This article discusses Derek Bickerton's Bastard Tongues, a book that describes his research into the evolution of creoles, and his admission that creoles aren't really bastard tongues after all. They're the purest expression we know of the human capacity for language.
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Davies on Self-Discovery
Spaniel Books
(2009)
Robertson Davies writes about the distinction between knowledge and wisdom, fundamental to any journey of self-discovery, and about an invisible immaterial world alongside the visible material world. He believes humans can discover this other world through religion, and many do, but he also believes the arts—visual, performing, fine, and literature—are another path too. He has a proviso about religion and the arts, though, which each novel reworks in its distinctive way. He believes a rupture occurs whenever the western mind focuses on reason, ignores the signposts of allegory, metaphysics, myth, and legend, and avoids the realm of feeling. This article provides an overview of the nine celebrated novels that form Davies' three famous trilogies.
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Eliot on Scholasticism
Quadrant
(Volume 53, Number 6, 2009)
This article discusses one of English literature's most interpreted novels, George Eliot's Middlemarch, to draw attention to the way Eliot participates in the post-metaphysical critique of classical metaphysics, and in particular to her take on the decline of scholasticism and rise of early modernism. While the critique went on to become mainstream, and dominated the twentieth century, it was still relatively new in the period Eliot wrote, and was certainly new in the 1830s, the period in which the novel is set. Noticing this critique helps the reader understand the relationship between the literature of ideas and the history of ideas.
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How Anglicanism Shaped the Nation
Quadrant
(Volume 53, Number 3, 2009)
Brian Fletcher's latest book, The Place of Anglicanism in Australia isn't a history of Australian Anglicanism since western contact. It's about that church in the lead-up to Federation, and its place in Australia since. Fletcher wants to counter a public image, fostered by an uninformed media, and equally uninformed authors of general and popular books, of a church turning inward, nationally and globally, divorcing itself from society, and becoming ineffectual if not suicidal. He also wants to counter the trend among secular historians, who still dominate the academy, of intentionally marginalising, or unconsciously overlooking, the history and role of religion in Australia.
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Spark on Evil
Quadrant
(Volume 53, Number 1–2, 2009)
It's been said no author of the twentieth century was more aware of the many forms evil takes than Muriel Spark. This article provides an overview of Spark's expositions of evil in three brilliant, incisive, economical, and immensely funny novels from her prime: The Hothouse by the East River, The Abbess of Crewe, and The Takeover. In each novel, all that's metacritical is rendered hypocritical, in Spark's humorous but deadly serious way, as she reminds us of how evil inhabits our thoughts, words, and deeds.
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Golding on the Fall
Quadrant
(Volume 52, Number 6, 2008)
This article provides 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 represents a fall, physical and metaphysical, located within language, consciousness, free will, or a combination of these. The power of Golding's representations comes from his gift for mimesis rather than diegesis; for his ability to show rather than tell; for the way he embodies rather than narrates.
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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, it's useful to employ 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 these principles 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.
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Sovereignty and the Sovereign
Spaniel Books
(2008)
For many reasons, constitutional monarchy in Hawaii never had the opportunity to evolve into the Westminster model as we currently know it, since that model is Victorian. From the beginning, the Hawaiian model was more Georgian and therefore, ironically, more American. It wasn't like the Victorian model where the sovereign became an observer with reserved powers; it never had the opportunity to strike the right balance between Bagehot's "dignified" government (the crown) and "efficient" government (the cabinet). Like American presidents, Hawaiian sovereigns were expected to be efficient as well as dignified. They were politically involved and politically vulnerable, and they never had the luxury of separating foreign interests from indigenous interests even when the former were compromising the latter.
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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 demonstrates how the young Murdoch and Spark did what emerging literary authors of the 1950s were expected to do: frame the human condition and reflect on its existential dilemma.
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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 one of Margaret Atwood's most canonical novels, Alias Grace; on the resilience of the sacred and secular canons in an age where some read novels instead of scripture and others go to book club instead of church.
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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 the interrogation. More recently the focus has been on literary theory and opinions about White's personality. This recent focus 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.
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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 industrialised 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.
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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 acknowledge the religious dimension 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, best accessed through Austen's worldview, in which church and state were still an organic unity.
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A Gadamerian Reading of A Passage to India
Literature & Theology
(Volume 12, Number 2, 1998)
Since the early nineteenth century several authors have written within the genres of neoclassicism, romanticism, modernism, and post-modernism, as part of an ongoing interrogation of classical metaphysics, which Habermas calls post-metaphysical thinking. Gadamerian hermeneutics is one useful 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.
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Freedom and Necessity in Interpretation
Literature & Theology
(Volume 9, Number 3, 1995)
The idea of an Australian university was predicated on an assumption that religion was divisive and should be excluded from enlightened institutions. In questioning this exclusion, during a commencement address at Sydney University, Professor Ken Cable pointed to 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 represents, marginalised the churches to halls of residence at the fringes of Australian universities.
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The Christian Imagination in Patrick White
Christianity & Literature
(Winter 1994)
The religious critic usually mentions White's experience of falling into the mud and realising there is a God. The secular critic usually mentions how a sermon about jelly beans 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 dominate the western imagination.
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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 characterisation 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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