Documents a theatre project involving an Aboriginal theatre group performing a post-Brechtian German play by Heiner Mxller, set within a play by the Aboriginal playwright, poet and novelist, Mudrooroo. Recounts the genesis and development of the project, and gives separate texts for both plays. Mxller has also written an autobiography, TWar without Battle: Living in two dictatorships'.

This third volume of ASNEL Papers covers a wide range of theoretical and thematic approaches to the subject of intertextuality. Intertextual relations between oral and written versions of literature, text and performance, as well as problems emerging from media transitions, regionally instructed forms of intertextuality, and the works of individual authors are equally dealt with. Intertextuality as both a creative and a critical practice frequently exposes the essential arbitrariness of literary and cultural manifestations that have become canonized. The transformation and transfer of meanings which accompanies any crossing between texts rests not least on the nature of the artistic corpus embodied in the general framework of historically and socially determined cultural traditions. Traditions, however, result from selective forms of perception; they are as much inventions as they are based on exclusion. Intertextuality leads to a constant reinforcement of tradition, while, at the same time, intertextual relations between the new literatures and other English-language literatures are all too obvious. Despite the inevitable impact of tradition, the new literatures tend to employ a dynamic reading of culture which fosters social process and transition, thus promoting transcultural rather than intercultural modes of communication. Writing and reading across borders becomes a dialogue which reveals both differences and similarities. More than a decolonizing form of deconstruction, intertextuality is a strategy for communicating meaning across cultural boundaries.

"Mudrooroo: A Likely Story reads the fiction of one of Australia's most controversial and enigmatic literary figures against the backdrop of the likelihood that he assumed an Aboriginal identity to which he was not entitled. As he is neither black nor white, Colin Johnson (a.k.a. Mudrooroo) writes on issues of identity and belonging from the position of an outsider. The book argues that the experimental nature of Johnson's creative body of work coupled with the complexities of his 'in-between' status, mean that both the man and his writing evade neat categorisation within mainstream literary criticism. Also examined here is how the denial of his white mother impacts upon the gender politics of Johnson's fiction in a way that opens up exciting new possibilities for critical comment and textual analysis."--Back cover.

The revised and enlarged edition of the first comprehensive English-language study of the work of Heiner Muller, widely regarded as Bertolt Brecht's spiritual heir and as one of the most important German playwrights of the twentieth century. "Kalb's quest to try and penetrate some of the surfaces of what he calls this 'glacially infuriating writer' is engrossing, and he negotiates his own ambivalences and reservations about Muller as theatre-maker and man with both honesty and adroitness...As a piece of scholarship [this] is a breathtaking tour de force." -Mary Luckhurst, New Theatre Quarterly

ARATJARA is the first collection of essays on Australian Aboriginal culture published and edited from Germany. A group of internationally renowned scholars and specialists in their fields have contributed original essays on political and cultural aspects of Aboriginal life today. These various essays treat the struggle of Aboriginal peoples for land rights, their music, and their achievements in theatre, in literature and in the creation of Aboriginal literary discourses, as well as Aboriginal film and television productions and the representation of Australia's indigenous peoples in the white media. Among Aboriginal writers who have contributed to ARATJARA are the politician Neville T. Bonner, the dramatist Bob Maza, the story-teller David Mowaljarlai and the poet Lionel Fogarty, who has been called the most authentic Aboriginal voice among writers using English as their medium of creative expression. The volume is dedicated to Oodgeroo (formerly Kath Walker, 1920-1993), one of the foremost Aboriginal political and cultural personalities, and also contains a number of poems by Lionel Fogarty.

German-speaking playwrights have exercised a considerable if subtle influence on Australian theatre history. Presenting a range of paradigmatic case studies, this book offers a detailed account of Australian productions of German-language drama between 1945 and 1996. The reception of Bertolt Brecht is used as a touchstone for analysing stagings of plays by writers such as Max Frisch, Rolf Hochhuth, Peter Handke and Franz Xaver Kroetz. In addition, more recent developments in the reception of German drama on the Australian stage are discussed.