123043 PS Literary Studies / Proseminar Literature (2019S)

It is frequently observed that Australia is a highly multicultural society. Indeed, for the first time in Australian history the 2016 census showed a higher proportion of Australians born in Asia than in Europe. Yet, literature by ethnic minorities in English, i.e. writers who are neither Anglo-Australians nor Indigenous Australians, has for a long time operated on the margins of national literary production only. More recently, however, ethnic minority writing (a term introduced by Sneja Gunew) has attracted a reasonable amount of critical interest, as not least the awarding of last year’s Miles Franklin Award, Australia’s most prestigious literary award, to Michelle de Kretser for her novel The Life to Come (2017) has illustrated. In this Proseminar, we will focus exclusively on narrative and dramatic texts by Australian ethnic minority writers from the mid-twentieth century until today and examine the ways in which these texts discuss experiences distinct from both those of the Anglo-Australian mainstream and Indigenous Australians. The primary texts under discussion reflect a wide range of different ethnic backgrounds, namely Russian Jewish (Waten), Latvian (Balodis), Greek (Tsiolkas), and Sri Lankan (de Kretser).

Central questions addressed in this Proseminar will include:
1. How is ethnic minority writing positioned within the discourse of Australian literature as a whole? What is the effect of labelling particular kinds of literature as ‘ethnic minority writing’?
2. What are recurring concerns in Australian ethnic minority literature? How do the texts under discussion negotiate concepts such as ethnicity, gender, class and sexuality?
3. In how far does Australian ethnic minority writing change over time?
4. How does Australian ethnic minority writing respond to the nation’s colonial legacy and how does it make sense of its position within a colonised country?

Apart from addressing the primary texts in their form and content, this Proseminar is also designed to introduce you to basic academic skills, including academic writing, thesis formulation and the structuring of a term paper in literary studies.

NB: This Proseminar will be accompanied by the Schreibassistenz programme offered by the Centre for Teaching and Learning (CTL). In this context, students are required to meet up with a writing assistant once (approx. 50 minutes) to discuss the writing process. Moreover, students will receive feedback on two of their written assignments by writing fellows, which they will then, after having sufficient time to rework them, have to submit as part of the Proseminar credit requirements.