Renata Singer

Even before I'd finished talking, hands shot up from the grey heads in the audience. 'I'm very concerned,' said the jowly chap with the sailor's suntan, 'that advances ...

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Literature is rich in ethical implication, but do we incur ethical responsibilities when we write about it? Arguably we do. Literary authors seek to convey something to others, and to convey it in literary form. Perhaps, then, our accounts of literature should respect its literary qualities, not least when we bring literature into interdisciplinary contact with other discourses? ... (read more)

The main character in Renata Singer’s novel, The Front of the Family, says ‘What’s past is passed.’ We only have a brief encounter with her before she slumps over dead in her old terry-toweling dressing gown in front of the television. But, in the tradition of Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying, the narrative continues to revolve around the present absence of Zosha Feldman, her past, her life and her complicated relation­ship with her two daughters, Felunia and Miriam. Indeed, the central question of the novel is whether the past is ever past. As another character remarks, ‘some things you can’t talk about. You can only talk about what you can think about. Better not to think about some things.’

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