D. H. Lawrence and Australia : Wilderness within the Self in Kangaroo (1923)

抄録

D. H. Lawrence (1885-1930), generally viewed as a tenacious traveler, embarked upon a journey in 1922, and continued to travel abroad until his death in 1930. It is obvious that the discussion over the foreigner became a recurring theme in his writing. As is so often in the Western classics, Lawrence tends to give the foreigner negative characteristics, by describing them as strange and horrible. Nowhere is this tendency more apparent than in Kangaroo (1923), written during his stay in Australia. Kangaroo, prompted by the desire to explore Australian cultural otherness, gave rise to controversy among critics because of its ambiguous description of the foreigner. This notion of the foreigner can be linked with Julia Kristeva's theory of abjection, which insists on the blurring of the boundary between the subject and the object. It is fair to say that Kristeva, drawing from Freud's essay, "The Uncanny (1919)," discloses the true characteristics of the foreigner. Referring to Kristeva's Strangers to Ourselves (1991), this paper explores where the foreigner/abject exists in colonial discourse in Kangaroo and clarifies why we feel intimidated when exposed to the foreigner.