‘Australia’: literature, ideology and fetishism
Ali Alizadeh I am delighted to be this month’s Southerly blogger, and would like to use this opportunity to explore the crucial rapport between literature and ideology. In this and my forthcoming blogs for Southerly, I’ll be reflecting on how, in my opinion, the production and reception of contemporary Australian writing is informed and in many cases formed by what Karl Marx has termed, in The German Ideology, as an epoch’s “ruling ideas”: The class which is the ruling material force of society is at the same time its ruling intellectual force. The class which has the means of material…