| Keywords [eng] |
mapping, landscape, australian literature, voss, patrick white, mateship, nature, quest, failure, self-sufficiency, colonialist, travelling, wayfaring, phenomenology of a place, humbleness, kartografija, kolonialistinė teorija, australų literatūra, valia, nuolankumas, keliavimas, vietos fenomenologija, vossas |
| Abstract [eng] |
Australian literature is rich with great works of art which, despite their cultural significance, are still often overlooked in the larger context of literatures in English. In marking out how Patrick White’s novel "Voss" (1957) explores Australian cultural tropes of mateship and landscape, this MA paper examines the novel’s treatment of fundamental human issues of free will, freedom, humbleness, and sense of belonging. To this end, I follow the phenomenological reasoning of Tim Ingold and Edward Casey, whose ideas about the human relation to place ground my interpretation of White’s cartographic imaginary in Voss. Using Ingold’s analysis of travelling as a mode of being and Casey’s distinction between place and space, I consider the ways in which the mutually constitutive processes of mapping subjectivity and mapping the land unfold their ontological, epistemological, and ethical dimensions. In this novel the scientific exploration of colonial space becomes the protagonist’s quest – both physical and metaphysical – for selfhood, conceived through the ambivalence of his relations with the unfamiliar land, its strange people, and his own sense of exile. |
