This prompt is intended to bring together several threads from our readings this week, as well as our course video lectures on Australasia, Papua New
Guinea, and colonization. As usual, we are thinking collectively about the ways in which our core novels for the week remediate Great Expectations, and
what those changes bring to our attention, downplay or highlight, omit or extend.
One way to get at this complex set of overlapping texts, geographies, and ideas is to consider them through the broad lens of “geographies of
otherness.” From the British perspective, Australia and its Indigenous people are “others”- other places, other cultures- in ways that provoke fascination
and repulsion.
In Mister Pip the general theme of “civil war” is relevant. We might think of this as another version of the blurring of the line between outside and inside,
us and them (in civil wars, there is generally a confused boundary between sides, a general confusion of belonging and not belonging). We also have
with Matilda another child protagonist; the themes of folk or indigenous wisdom, culture, “magic,” and customs; outsider (colonial/white) figures and a
complex set of ethnicities and ethnic tensions among Bougainville’s inhabitants (and intruders). We have contrasts of geographies and spaces, between
Pip’s English island and Matilda’s island home, but also amid the landscapes (plural) of Papua New Guinea, with its jungle, its seaside, its ocean and river,
and its human-built structures, including the school. These are elements of geographical confusion and displacement, social difference and conflict, and
psychology in both novels, and these features also connect them to Dickens’s original novel.
Please respond to one or some of these ideas, using Mister Pip as our primary remediation for the week. You are welcome, as always, to reflect back to
Great Expectations, but since remediations craft their own original narratives-often in ways quite distinct from the original novel-you will want to
focus here on how Jones’s novel remediates Dickens’s novel in frameworks that often differ dramatically from his.
1-2 pages singled spaced.