Dreaming of Others: Carpentaria and its Critics

Alison Ravenscroft

doi:10.5130/csr.v16i2.1700

Cultural Studies Review 16.2 September 2010 Critical Proximity

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DOI: https://doi.org/10.5130/csr.v16i2.1700

Keywords:

Alexis Wright, Carpenteria, Australian literature, Indigenous literature, fiction

Alison Ravenscroft

La Trobe University

Abstract

White critical efforts to make meaning of Alexis Wright’s Carpentaria have sought to anchor it to the big names among white Australian novelists. Such moves presume to make Wright indebted to these literary ‘masters’, assessing the significance of her text by its proximity to theirs. This article explores how in these critics’ eyes white creativity appears as if it were the original creativity and argues that such moves are a way of refuses the text’s unfamiliarity and strangeness to a white reader.

Issue

Vol. 16 No. 2 (2010): Critical Proximity

Section

Articles (Peer Reviewed)

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Author Biography

Alison Ravenscroft, La Trobe University

Alison Ravenscroft teaches in the English Program at La Trobe University, Melbourne. Her book The Postcolonial Eye will be published in 2011.

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Alison Ravenscroft, La Trobe University