Journal by Richard Freadman
Papers by Richard Freadman
The present study restricts itself to published volumes and essay-length autobiographical narrati... more The present study restricts itself to published volumes and essay-length autobiographical narratives. At time of writing, there are probably about 300 published volumes of Australian Jewish autobiography, together with perhaps 400 shorter, essay-length published autobiographical pieces in collections, journals or newspapers. This is a large and varied body of published (to say nothing of the unpublished) work produced over a period of almost 20 years by Jews from all walks of life, in strikingly diverse lifesituations, and employing an impressive array of narrative forms.
In order best to understand the Australian Jewish diaspora and its bearing on Australian Jewish a... more In order best to understand the Australian Jewish diaspora and its bearing on Australian Jewish autobiography it will be helpful to consider the question of diasporas more generally. As leading diaspora scholar Robin Cohen points out, the Jewish diasporic experience is generally associated with catastrophe, and with good reason given the Jews' 2000-year history of deterritorialization. However, Cohen also rightly makes the point that a significant amount of Jewish dispersion some of it voluntary, some not has been productive, resulting in creative new forms of cultural synthesis and opportunity.
Susan Varga's case is complex, for she is not in any simple sense the child of a survivor. In... more Susan Varga's case is complex, for she is not in any simple sense the child of a survivor. Indeed this is one of the book's central findings. It is also complex in narrative terms. Like most Australian Jewish autobiographies, Heddy and Me is essentially realist in its narrative mode. However, the book's structure is somewhat unusual in that the Holocaust story is focused through the mother-daughter relationship itself: Heddy and Susan. This is one of many examples in Australian Jewish autobiography of 'relational life-writing'.
In this ‘memoir about going home’, home is where the heart is. The book’s principal locale is the... more In this ‘memoir about going home’, home is where the heart is. The book’s principal locale is the Tasmania of Martin Flanagan’s Irish Catholic small-town childhood. But ‘home’, in this narrative, isn’t just a place: it’s a state of the self. It’s what one gets back to when life’s useless accretions, confusions and hesitations are peeled away, leaving a self that is pristine — attuned to its true origins, its deepest intimations about the world, and to the values that the unadulterated self lives by. Flanagan’s journey is a quest for the authentic self. A ‘romantic’, he wants to embrace the ‘wild green joy of living’ — a phrase that typifies the passionate intensity of his search
a/b: Auto/Biography Studies, 2004
Eliot, James and the Fictional Self, 1986
The theme of choice in Daniel Deronda and The Portrait of a Lady is much complicated by the probl... more The theme of choice in Daniel Deronda and The Portrait of a Lady is much complicated by the problem of personal displacement; for a displaced person, be it an unwitting Jew or an expatriate American, must often choose at a certain self-conscious remove from coercive or consoling cultural norms. This may mean that no clear guidance emerges from a dominant traditional perspective on conduct; that narratives linking the youthful and adult, or the public and private, personality are absent or insufficient; or, in a more general sense, that certain fundamental assumptions about the authority of the individual moral agent cease to obtain. Choices thus become either impossibly opaque or a matter of isolated and anxious existential self-determination. In George Eliot’s ‘Jewish novel’ the prescriptive spiritual continuity of Judaism must be revealed before Deronda can choose; Isabel Archer, by contrast, marries into an indefinite exile which dictates that she must largely make unaided choices. The expatriate, poised between a native and an adopted culture, may invoke the categorical imperative and do what seems appropriate on a rough scale of general moral propriety, but it is a wintry prospect, especially if your husband is constitutionally incapable of the Kantian sense of conscience.
Eliot, James and the Fictional Self, 1986
‘Character … is a process and an unfolding’: thus wrote George Eliot in Middlemarch (I.15, p. 226... more ‘Character … is a process and an unfolding’: thus wrote George Eliot in Middlemarch (I.15, p. 226) in 1873. ‘What is character but the determination of incident? What is incident but the illustration of character?’1 Henry James had read, sifted and reviewed all of George Eliot’s fiction when he penned this famous rhetorical question in 1884. Though James was to take issue with important aspects of George Eliot’s art, his fascination with novelistic character was no less intense than hers; indeed it is this which motivates many of their common qualities as novelists. Neither, however, believed character to be a simple matter. It is, they knew, all very well to speak of characters in novels as if they are ‘real people’, but in what sense, and to what extent, can this in fact be so? Eliot and James pose this question in their aesthetic writings, their letters and in their private musings. They also, of course, pose it in their novels, either openly or by implication.
Eliot, James and the Fictional Self, 1986
George Eliot’s historical novel Romola reflects in a particularly obvious way her use of fiction ... more George Eliot’s historical novel Romola reflects in a particularly obvious way her use of fiction as a means to test the powers and possibilities of various forms of humanism. Set in fifteenth-century Florence, this ‘experiment’ poses in dramatic form many of the issues that have dominated ethics since the Greeks. However, as always, it was George Eliot’s intention that the novel’s depiction of ethical situations be more than merely diagrammatic. As she explained in a famous letter, she sought to present a ‘picture’, not a ‘diagram’.1 The ‘aesthetic’ teacher aspired to what she considered the highest office of art: the arousing and guidance of sympathy. Thus ‘the most effective writer is not he who announces a particular discovery, who convinces men of a particular conclusion, who demonstrates that this measure is right and that measure wrong; but he who rouses in others the activity that must issue in discovery’.2 Strictly didactic writing could not, she believed, move the reader to intelligent reflection: ‘Art is art, and tells its own story.’3
Partial Answers: Journal of Literature and the History of Ideas, 2009
World Literature Today, 1993
... Forsyth, Sam Goldberg, Dennis Haskell, Gail Jones, Eugene Kamenka, the late Julius Kovesi, Ia... more ... Forsyth, Sam Goldberg, Dennis Haskell, Gail Jones, Eugene Kamenka, the late Julius Kovesi, Ian Mac-donald, Peter Macdonald, Crawford Miller ... Seumas Miller and Richard Freadman, 'In the Beginning Was the Word: Catherine Belsey as an Instance of Contemporary Literary ...
Philosophy and Literature, 1991
Philosophy and Literature, 2011
Partial Answers: Journal of Literature and the History of Ideas, 2005
In February 1974, Robert Rose, a twenty-two year old Australian Rules league footballer and Victo... more In February 1974, Robert Rose, a twenty-two year old Australian Rules league footballer and Victorian state cricketer, was involved in a car accident that left him quadriplegic for the remaining twenty-five years of his life. The tragedy received extensive press coverage and struck a chord with many in and beyond the Melbourne sporting community. Robert was a brilliant all-round athlete with an impeccable sporting pedigree. He was the latest of the celebrated Rose family of the Collingwood Football Club the most famous sporting club in Australia; a bastion of working class pride located close to the center of Melbourne. Robert's father, Bob, had been one of the greatest ever players for the club and had gone on to coach it. Four of Bob's brothers had also played for the Collingwood 'Magpies'. Later in his career, Bob coached Footscray, another Melbourne working class club. At the time of the accident, Robert too had joined Footscray, was playing state cricket, and might have gone on to bat for Australia. His best-remembered cricketing feat was to put Dennis Lillee, perhaps the finest of all Australian fast bowlers, to the sword at Melbourne's coliseum of sport, the Melbourne Cricket Ground. Robert's younger brother, Peter, witnessed the assault on the great fast bowler. Sitting in the top tier of the Northern Stand reading Norman Mailer's autobiography, Peter's attention is drawn to the "microscopic drama" (21) unfolding below. Proud as always of his brother's sporting prowess, he forgets about Mailer and becomes part of the rapturous crowd.
Life Writing, 2004
This essay considers post-Holocaust Australian Jewish autobiography with respect to six broad iss... more This essay considers post-Holocaust Australian Jewish autobiography with respect to six broad issues: authorial motivation and the contexts in which the narratives are written; shifts in narrative practice as between first- and second-generation works (included in the latter are child survivor memoirs); attitudes to Australia and the extent to which various authors write the adoptive culture in their autobiographies; theoretical and methodological issues that arise in reading such narratives; questions of form and aesthetic value; and questions of genre. I argue for a referential approach to texts such as these — an approach that contrasts with the postmodern one advocated by Sneja Gunew in her account of ethnic minority writing in Framing Marginality. The essay concludes with a reading of the work of three autobiographers who are Australian child survivors of Hungarian origin: Paul Kraus, Andrew Riemer and Susan Varga. The prefatory quotation from Eva Hoffman’s Lost in Translation is intended to indicate, among other things, certain commonalities between Australian texts and those written by Jews elsewhere.
Life Writing, 2012
Inga Clendinnen's Tiger's Eye is a brilliant, if conflicted, work of what I term ‘illness... more Inga Clendinnen's Tiger's Eye is a brilliant, if conflicted, work of what I term ‘illness life writing’ (as opposed to the scientistic terms ‘pathography’ or ‘autopathography’). In fact, no single generic descriptor can do justice to this text, which comprises elements of illness and survival writing, memoir, autobiography, fiction, narrative history, confession and Kunsterroman. As its title suggests, the book exudes a tigerish, agential tenacity; a refusal to succumb to life-threatening illness and its attacks on psychological and physical selfhood. Writing, both before and after the major illness, is fundamental to Clendinnen's agential response, and indeed this survivor narrative claims not only that writing helped to save the author but that illness helped her to become a writer. This later claim, which is never fully clarified, provides the Kunsterroman dimension, though, curiously, the whole issue of ‘becoming’ itself becomes clouded late in the book where Clendinnen seems to repudiate confessional—indeed all autobiographical—writing and to see the self, especially the agential self, as a fragmentary fiction. This quasi-postmodern view sits uneasily with much of what has come before, and indeed with some of Clendinnen's pronouncements as an internationally acclaimed historian. The essay, which also considers gender issues and the book's shifting account of the mind/body relation, concludes by inquiring what responsibilities survivor illness life writers have to their readers.
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Journal by Richard Freadman
Papers by Richard Freadman