Sixty Lights
London
:
Harvill Press
,
2004
Z1136231
2004
single work
novel
historical fiction
(taught in 15 units)
“Photography has without doubt made her a seer; she is a woman of the future, someone leaning into time, beyond others, precarious, unafraid to fall.”
In 1860, when they are just eight and ten, Lucy Strange and her brother Thomas are orphaned. Left now in the care of their uncle, the children begin slowly, frighteningly, to find their place in the difficult world. And so begins Lucy's adolescent journey of discovery, one which will take her away from her childhood home in Australia, first to London, then to Bombay and finally, to her death, at the age of twenty-two. It is a life abbreviated, but not a life diminished. Lucy is a remarkable character, forthright, gifted and exuberant; she touches the lives of all who know her.
Written in confident, finely interwoven and intricate layers, Sixty Lights is the powerful chronicle of a modern and independent young woman’s life in the Victorian world. Objects evoke memories and hint at the future in a narrative that flows between pleats in time. Through her observation of such objects Lucy’s photographic vision is apparent. Her world is a series of still images which one day, printed on albumen paper, she will leave as affecting mementoes of her own extraordinary life.
Burning In
Artarmon
:
Giramondo Publishing
,
2007
Z1432957
2007
single work
novel
(taught in 2 units)
In her late twenties, Martine Hartmann moves from Sydney to New York to pursue her career as a photographer, leaving behind her mother Lotte, a Holocaust survivor. Nine years later, Martine's daughter Ruby goes missing in Central Park. Ruby's disappearance throws Martine into an emotional struggle which threatens to overwhelm her, but which also, in time, brings her to understand Lotte's anxieties and inhibitions, and to discover the act of abandonment at their heart. - back cover
Berlin Childhood Around 1900
Camera Lucida
Coming Through Slaughter
Railtracks
Emigrants
This unit offers advanced specialist studies in the literature and culture of the modern period, defined as the period from the Enlightenment onwards (approximately 1750 to the present). Students study a selection of Anglophone writings from Britain and Ireland, America or other societies shaped by British colonisation and drawn from particular periods within the modern era. The text selection and the period focus may vary from year to year, depending on staff availability. The unit aims to enable students to experience a deeply contextualised encounter with writings and other texts of various kinds, and to understand their textual and material forms, their engagement with the wider social, intellectual and political disruptions of modernity, and their cultural influence.
