Aboriginality & Whiteness in Relation to Bildungsroman:

Pursuing National Tolerance, Cultural Communication & Identity Formation in Thomas Keneally's Novel The Chant of Jimmie Blacksmith (1972)



Samah Tawhid Ahmed, MA., Part-time Instructor of English as a Foreign Language, Employed at AMIDEAST's partner in Beni-Suef, The Scientific Center for Consultation and Development (SCCD)



Abstract



Since the mid - 1980s, some talented and influential Aboriginal authors were earnestly motivated to release worth-reading literary production. Tackling issues of national significance meant to articulate the Aboriginal past through present status in Australia. The Aboriginal Australian novel was regarded by some Anglo-Australian authors as a passionate form of Bildungsroman; this genre adopted being an avenue towards reaching national tolerance, triggering cultural communication, and seeking identity formation. This is distinctly revealed in Thomas Keneally's novel The Chant of Jimmie Blacksmith (1972).

This paper attempts to show how from a white soul point of view, Australia's “Other" pasts is successfully recovered and determined the white position. Essentially, the paper features the novel as bearing the tradition of the Bildungsroman. A male bourgeois genre through which the protagonist is progressively passing through developmental life stages. The novel takes on the form of a narrative of male self-discovery which describes a protagonist's journey from the enclosed realm of community (i.e., Aboriginal) into the vast metropolitan social world (viz, White). The paper also seeks to clarify why does Keneally position the Bildungsroman. And whether or not the reader's expectations of a Bildungsroman are met.