Mrs Dalloway Woolf
Voyage in the dark Rhys, J. Penguin
Heart of darkness Conrad, J. Penguin
Disgrace Coetzee, J. Random House
Five Bells
North Sydney
:
Vintage Australia
,
2011
Z1735512
2011
single work
novel
(taught in 19 units)
'On a radiant day in Sydney, four adults converge on Circular Quay, site of the iconic Opera House and the Sydney Harbour Bridge. Crowds of tourists mix with the locals, enjoying the glorious surroundings and the play of light on water.
'But each of the four carries a complicated history from elsewhere; each is haunted by past intimacies, secrets and guilt: Ellie is preoccupied by her sexual experiences as a girl, James by a tragedy for which he feels responsible, Catherine by the loss of her beloved brother in Dublin and Pei Xing by her imprisonment during China's Cultural Revolution.
'Told over the course of a single Saturday, Five Bells describes four lives which chime and resonate, sharing mysterious patterns and symbols. But it is a fifth person, a child, whose presence at the Quay haunts the day and who will overshadow everything that unfolds. By night-time, when Sydney is drenched in a rainstorm, each life has been transformed.' (From the publisher's website.)
The Aunt's Story
London
:
Routledge
,
1948
Z470389
1948
single work
novel
(taught in 27 units)
'With the death of her mother, middle-aged Theodora Goodman contemplates the desert of her life. Freed from the trammels of convention, she leaves Australia for a European tour and becomes involved with the residents of a small French hotel. But creating other people's lives, even in love and pity, can lead to madness. Her ability to reconcile joy and sorrow is an unbearable torture to her. On the journey home, Theodora finds there is little to choose between the reality of illusion and the illusion of reality. She looks for peace, even if it is beyond the borders of insanity.' (From the publisher's website.)
Modernism is the name given retrospectively to a range of early twentieth-century experimental and avant-garde trends in literature and the arts. Appreciation of its aesthetic theories and practices has been very influential in the institutionalisation of Western literary criticism and the histories of European canon-formation. In this subject modernism and variously modernist writing in English are re-situated in the contexts of colonial and post-independence cultures and experiences of gender, race, class, sexuality, desire, ethnicity, nation and expatriation. Students examine the ways in which writers have negotiated and shaped modernist practices of representation, tensions between the narrative possibilities of modernism and realism and the recent Western anthropological, psychological and philosophical theories which often informed modernist practices of representation.
Essay 30%
Essay 40%
Tutorial preparation exercises 30%
