Thomas Keneally Critical Essay | Critical Essay by Judith Ryan

SOURCE: "Shrunk to an Interloper," in Field Work: Sites in Literary and Cultural Studies, edited by Marjorie Garber, Paul B. Franklin, and Rebecca L. Walkowitz, Routledge, 1996, pp. 113-19.

In the following essay, Ryan compares the authorial perspectives of Schindler's List, Günter Grass's Show Your Tongue, and Marguerite Duras's The Lover, to account for the ways their national identities influence their attitudes toward multicultural relations.

In one of my very earliest classrooms—it must have been at nursery school—hung a large map of the world. In the lower middle part of the map, a big reddish-pink island swam in a blue sea; at both upper corners small reddish-pink shapes hovered like guardian angels on either hand; in the center a large reddish-pink triangle pointed downward from an amorphous and multicolored land mass; and the whole map was satisfyingly unified by patches of ruddy color distributed over a substantial portion of its...
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