Christos Tsiolkas and the Fiction of Critique

Christos Tsiolkas and the Fiction of Critique

Politics, Obscenity, Celebrity

By Andrew McCann

Anthem Australian Humanities Research Series

This is the first theoretically informed study of Tsiolkas’s work. It follows the arc of his controversial career, and explores the tensions between political radicality, transgressive sexuality and his more recent commercial success.

PDF, 176 Pages

ISBN:9781783084050

June 2015

£20.00, $32.00

EPUB, 176 Pages

ISBN:9781783084487

June 2015

£20.00, $32.00

  • About This Book
  • Reviews
  • Author Information
  • Series
  • Table of Contents
  • Links
  • Podcasts

About This Book

Christos Tsiolkas is one of the most recognizable and internationally successful literary novelists working in Australia today. He is also one of the country’s most politically engaged writers. These terms – recognition, commercial success, political engagement – suggest a relationship to forms of public discourse that belies the extremely confronting nature of much of Tsiolkas’s fiction and his deliberate attempt to cultivate a literary persona oriented to notions of blasphemy, obscenity and what could broadly be called a pornographic sensibility.

Reviews

‘McCann deftly situates Tsiolkas in both his vernacular local context as well as defining the contradictory elements of his growing global appeal. Tsiolkas’s extreme fictions are rendered legible as much through references to Pasolini’s legacy of queer aesthetics as to Adorno’s critiques of mass culture. At the same time McCann delivers an incisive and breathtakingly well-informed assessment of the current state of cultural politics in Australia.’ —Sneja Gunew, University of British Columbia

‘McCann deftly situates Tsiolkas in both his vernacular local context as well as defining the contradictory elements of his growing global appeal. Tsiolkas’s extreme fictions are rendered legible as much through references to Pasolini’s legacy of queer aesthetics as to Adorno’s critiques of mass culture. At the same time McCann delivers an incisive and breathtakingly well-informed assessment of the current state of cultural politics in Australia.’ —Sneja Gunew, University of British Columbia

Author Information

Andrew McCann is a professor in the Department of English at Dartmouth College, New Hampshire.

Series

Anthem Australian Humanities Research Series

Table of Contents

Preface; Introduction: Pasolini’s Ashes; 1. The Down-Curve of Capital: ‘Loaded’; 2. Inside the Machine: From ‘Loaded’ to ‘The Jesus Man’; 3. The Pornographic Logic of Global Capitalism: ‘Dead Europe’; 4. In the Suburbs of World Literature: From ‘Dead Europe’ to ‘The Slap’; 5. The Politics of the Bestseller: ‘The Slap’ and ‘Barracuda’; Conclusion: Aesthetic Autonomy and the Politics of Fiction; Notes; Bibliography; Index

Links

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