106-454 Melancholy in Australian Literature

Usually admission to the postgraduate certificate, diploma or fourth year honours in English or creative writing.

This subject will explore melancholy in Australian literature and its relation to contemporary cultural and political formations. Students will read contemporary writers who express the tedium-vitae of late modernity, (eg. Houellebecq) and traditional and contemporary Australian texts, and engage with a variety of theoretical works on melancholia drawn from the philosophical, poetic, visual and medico-psychoanalytic tradition. Questions to be considered include: Why did melancholia emerge as a dominant trope in colonial literature? How was melancholia projected onto the 'landscape' and what were the implications of this for emerging patterns of subjectivity, affectivity and intimacy? Is melancholia gendered and how does this manifest in Australian literary representations of suffering? Is there a relation between melancholia, Australian linguistic patterns and the incorporation and encrypting of cultural memory? Has the liquidity of late modernity accelerated the melancholic state of contemporary Australia? Students completing this subject will develop an understanding of contemporary theoretical accounts of melancholy and develop the conceptual and theoretical skills to situate and analyse literary melancholy in relation to the social and cultural forms and forces that contribute to the deepening and acceleration of melancholia in late modernity.

• have advanced research and analytic skills;

• have the ability to communicate oral and written arguments and ideas effectively;

• have advanced theoretical knowledge in a field of inquiry

A seminar presentation equivalent to 1000 words 20% (due mid-semester) and an essay of 4000 words 80% (due at the end of semester).

A subject reader will be available from the University Bookshop.

• M Houellebecq, Atomised.
• M Clarke, His Natural Life.
• R Stowe, Tourmaline.
• P White, The Tree of Man.
• X Herbert, Capricornia.
• B Castro, The Garden Book.
• B Castro, After China.