On Reconciliation Writing In Miller’s Novels In The Light Of Cultural Memory

Racial reconciliation has always been an important motif in Australian literature,which concerns the future and development of the Australian nation.Since the implementation of multiculturalism and the development of the racial reconciliation movement at the end of the 20^thCentury,the awareness of reconciliation in Australia has been gradually strengthened.As practices of the Australian Reconciliation Movement in terms of literary writings,Australian reconciliation novels answer the call for a new national image and identification,appearing mostly at the beginning of the 21^stcentury.In the boom of reconciliation writings,writers focus on the hidden history under the“Great Silence”of pubic discourse in Australia,paying close attention to the sovereignty of the land,frontier violence,and the trauma of post-memory,requiring a conciliatory gesture to confront the history problem in order to construct a new cultural identity and national identification,reconstructing the Australianness.In this wave of writing that interprets the history and the past from the perspective of literary experience,White Reconciliation Writing has attracted much attention due to its complex political implications and discourse game behind it.Of the representatives related to White Reconciliation Writing,Alex Miller’s Central Queensland trilogy,namely,Journey to the Stone Country,Landscape of Farewell,and Coal Creek stand out.Theoretically,this thesis applies Cultural Memory and relative theories to analyze Miller’s reconciliation in the Central Queensland trilogy by inter-textual analysis,taking Miller’s reconciliation as a dynamic existence to decode its contextual and textual reconciliation representations,reconciliation strategies of deconstruction and reconstruction,and the uncertainties of Miller’s reconciliation;exploring the political discourse and power consciousness behind the reconciliation writings.In addition,the study of Miller’s reconciliation from the perspective of Cultural Memory,which juxtaposes traumatic events,Cultural Memory,and national identity,has an essential textual and practical significance for Australians to find ways to deal with cultural trauma left by traumatic events and reconstruct national identification in their literary experience.The thesis contains five chapters.A brief introduction of Alex Miller and his Central Queensland trilogy,literary review on White Reconciliation novels and Central Queensland trilogy,theoretical underpinnings of Cultural Memory,and the originality and layout of this thesis are displayed in Chapter One.Chapter Two focuses on the relationship between context and text in Miller’s Central Queensland trilogy,illustrating dynamic reconciliation representations from the contextual and textual levels.Chapter Three expounds on Miller’s reconciliation strategies from deconstruction and reconstruction,denoting how Miller attempts to solve identity crises,reshape Cultural Memory and reconstruct national identity through the double reconciliation strategies of re-narrating the past and multiple reconciliations.Chapter Four examines the uncertainties of Miller’s reconciliation writing from the perspective of alternative historical narration and the construction of mixed identity,decoding the tendency of“apologia”behind the discourse of“apology”,and locating the ambiguity and uncertainties in Miller’s reconciliation novels.Chapter five gives a summary of the thesis.As one of the striking examples of white reconciliation writings,Miller’s reconciliation writings have not completely freed from the influence of cultural hegemony and the residue of white discourse;however,overall,the dynamic correlation with the changing context and the application of the double strategies of deconstructing and reconstructing in Miller’s reconciliation practices bridge the gap of the memory caused by cultural trauma,which provides a feasible way to construct the new national image and identity,making considerable progress in terms of constructing cultural memory.