Tsiolkas Research Paper

Here is a person who is what he is; but he does not make us forget, does not absorb , cover over entirely the objects he holds and the way he holds them , his gestures , limbs, gaze , thought, skin, which escape from under the identity of his substance , which like a torn sack is unable to contain them. ("Reality and its Shadow" 135)

The intellectual structure of intentionality is preceded by direct sensuous contact. It is not a being-toward-death that conditions the form of the book, but the veracity of saying and unsaying whose exposure is described in directly corporeal terms, as an act denuding itself of its skin, a stripping beyond nudity. (Foreword to “Substitution" 88)

The schema that corporeality outlines submits the biological

Following Heidegger’s notion of art as ‘unconcealment’, this thesis reads Tsiolkas’ novels as such a bringing into the open of the human interrelation that have unfolded in the course of this period of the continent’s history. "Art is historical" writes Heidegger, "and as historical it is the creative preserving of truth in the work" (207). The ‘truth’ of history thus preserved in this work is contained in the narrative of conflict and trauma experienced both privately and collectively by the migrant people of Australia during this time. Tsiolkas’ fiction, as art which "grounds history" (207) in such a way, then, foregoes the right conventionally

Widespread conflicts and tensions permeate various communities in the world. Migrations and multiculturalism are a reality that affects almost every nation and society. Such a situation is complicated in the West by the spectacularly orchestrated destruction of the World Trade Centre in New York, following which the terror of the Madrid and London train bombings, the attack on Mumbai, and the recent hostage crisis in Sydney, the Charlie Hebdo shootings in Paris have equally contributed to a significant sense of and unease in the unfolding consciousness of the twenty-first century. The global community has been cast in the role of collective witness to these traumatic events as they pass rapidly from an immediate visceral reality to a collectively experienced media event. In the present era of globalization and mediatization the collective experience of traumatic events unfolding in various localities in the world has altered what is understood by the idea of community. It has become less a function of choice, geographical location, nationality or ethnic grouping, but rather one determined by the shared experience of events. The contemporary situation thus charts a passage from the order of the real to the order of the symbolic, and it is in the latter domain that its