Angels and Constellations in Australian Fiction: Profane Illumination and Topological Temporality in Gail Jones's A Guide to Berlin

This seminar will focus on Australian writer Gail Jones’s sixth novel, A Guide to Berlin, published in 2015. Named after a short story by Vladimir Nabokov, Jones’s guide portrays the advent of a small international community through the convergence in snowy Berlin of six foreign travellers joined together in their devotion to Nabokov’s literary œuvre.
Drawing on the psychogeography of Berlin, with its “shifting angles” and “receding perspectives,” its “corridors between spaces” and “immaterial traces,” this seminar aims at bringing together Michel Serres’s topological reading of time, Walter Benjamin’s convoluted view of history, and Paul Celan’s speaking shadows and at textualising their precepts in Jones’s fiction.