"The Bodysurfers" by Robert Drewe. The Landscape and its Effects on the Identity of the Characters

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Seminar paper from the year 2010 in the subject Didactics for the subject English - Pedagogy, Literature Studies, grade: 2, University of Innsbruck (Department of English), course: The Urban and the Rural in Australian Literature, language: English, abstract: In my paper I want to talk about the book The Bodysurfers (Robert Drewe) by focusing on the description of the different landscapes and the way people identify with it. I also find it important to mention the mixed feelings of the different characters, all of them living by the coast. While I was reading the book, I could notice the rather different ways of describing the landscapes, each narrator and character senses the surroundings differently. The environment in which the characters are living is one of the main topics of the book, it focuses on the descriptions and provides the reader with the opportunity to ¿live¿ the book and to understand in a better way, how important the sea and the beach are for Australians. In The Bodysurfers the beach is the most popular and most described landscape. It is fantastic how many different ways of ¿seeing¿ and ¿feeling¿ the beach can be found in this book and how different varieties of language can influence the reader by providing him with many ways of understanding the characters. The Bodysurfers is not an easy book, maybe you have to read it twice, but it can give you a perfect possibility to deal with other nations and cultures and to distinguish between different characters and their ways of speaking and telling. When I was dealing with my topic I was impressed how ones opinion can change while reading a book, e.g. in one story the beach is described as a lonely and quiet place, in another story as a sand heap full of rubbish. In my paper I want, above all, to show these different ways of describing, on the one hand, describing by using different sorts of language and on the other hand describing, by ¿feeling¿ and observing the place you live in. I want to show, that these depictions are the essence of the book and make it vivid, because ¿these stories breathe. Taut yet teeming with life, they are shot through with gritty phrases that catch at one's throat.¿ (Goodreads)