Launch byProfessor Richard Freadmanof the book:A Soul for Australia?Reading Fosco Antonio’s My Realityedited by John Gatt-Rutter and Peter Willis
- Date
- 11 November
06:30pm to 08:00pm
Join Professor Richard Freadman as he launches the book A Soul for Australia? Reading Fosco Antonio’s My Reality and guides us through its turbulent pages.
Fosco speaks as a member of Post-Christian Society that has emerged from the Great Walk-Out from established religion but as one who cannot subscribe to the Economic Myth of rational Humanism. Fosco’s text, which he dubs My Reality, is republished in this volume, accompanied by six exploratory essays, ranging from the supportive to the dismissive, which seek to open up the debate on the issues which he poses. Can we work towards a society in which humane values prevail, or must we accept that ours is, for lack of a better, the best of possible worlds?
“Wildly eccentric, imaginative and searingly polemical, Fosco Antonio’s My Reality inquires whether modern Australia has a soul and, if it does, what the contours of that soul might be. The accompanying essays written by intellectuals from various cultural perspectives, explore Antonio’s extraordinary book and its implications for postmodern multicultural life in the Antipodes. A mind-expanding read all-round!”
Richard Freadman
John Gatt-Rutter is Maltese by birth and has spent a lifetime in Italian studies, written books on writers as different as Italo Svevo (1861-1928) and Oriana Fallaci (1929-2006). He has recently published The Bilingual Cockatoo: Writing Italian Australian lives.
Peter Willis has researched the relationship between adult learning & the quest for meaning and humanism in civil society. He is currently the acting director of the Australian Centre for Convivial Backyard Civilisation (ACCBC). Recent writings are: Existential Approach to Transformative Learning and Learning life from Illness stories.
Richard Freadman graduated in literary studies at Brandeis University, Boston, and completed a doctoral degree at Oxford University with a thesis on George Eliot and Henry James. He held an academic post in English at the University of Western Australia in Perth and from 1991 to 2013 was Professor of English at La Trobe University here in Melbourne. Richard pursued a special interest in the relation between literature and philosophy, and subsequently focussed especially on the study of biographical and autobiographical writing, for which he has an international reputation, and was Director of the Unit for the Study of Biography and Autobiography at La Trobe. His many books include Threads of Life: Autobiography and the Will,This Crazy Thing, A Life: Australian Jewish Autobiography, and Shadow of Doubt: My Father and Myself. Although now retired, he is active on several fronts, including work on an autobiographical book, and using autobiography as a form of palliative care for the terminally ill, and for those with dementia.
Date: Tuesday, 11th November 2014, at 6.30 pm
Where: Museo Italiano, Co.As.It., 199 Faraday Street, Carlton 3053
RSVP: [email protected]; (03)9349 9021
