We use cookies to distinguish you from other users and to provide you with a better experience on our websites. Close this message to accept cookies or find out how to manage your cookie settings.
The poems, novels and novellas that draw from paramythic forms and tropes draw from its symbolic power and its performative function, and often use it subversively to speak the unspeakable. They often merge incommensurate forms and include foreign words and registers or dialects, which lead to the need for translation, as well as the possibilities for what Apter calls the 'untranslatable'. Foreign words and strange customs as well as oral story-telling forms may be untranslatable to outsiders - but their usefulness is tied to what Apter refers to as a 'linguistic form of creative failure with homeopathic uses'. So, when the paramythic voice, forms and tropes are located, translated, compared and interpreted in works by Australian writers having a Greek heritage, we have a new way to read Australian literature. We no longer read these texts in isolation given an affiliation with an ethnic minority group, but instead we see these as works that, as Gunew says, 'share a world', works that include and converse with other neo-cosmopolitan writers with double or multiple cultural perspectives.
Loading metrics...
* Views captured on Cambridge Core between #date#. This data will be updated every 24 hours.
Usage data cannot currently be displayed.