One Life : My Mother's Story
Melbourne
:
Text Publishing
,
2015
8222311
2015
single work
biography
(taught in 1 units)
'Nance was a week short of her sixth birthday when she and Frank were roused out of bed in the dark and lifted into the buggy, squashed in with bedding, the cooking pots rattling around in the back, and her mother shouting back towards the house: Goodbye, Rothsay, I hope I never see you again!
'When Kate Grenville’s mother died she left behind many fragments of memoir. These were the starting point for One Life, the story of a woman whose life spanned a century of tumult and change. In many ways Nance’s story echoes that of many mothers and grandmothers, for whom the spectacular shifts of the twentieth century offered a path to new freedoms and choices. In other ways Nance was exceptional. In an era when women were expected to have no ambitions beyond the domestic, she ran successful businesses as a registered pharmacist, laid the bricks for the family home, and discovered her husband’s secret life as a revolutionary.
'One Life is an act of great imaginative sympathy, a daughter’s intimate account of the patterns in her mother’s life. It is a deeply moving homage by one of Australia’s finest writers.' (Publication summary)
The Spare Room
Melbourne
:
Text Publishing
,
2008
Z1457068
2008
single work
novel
(taught in 10 units)
'Helen lives in Melbourne, and her friend Nicola flies down from Sydney for a three-week visit. She will sleep in Helen's house, in her lovingly prepared spare room. This is no ordinary visit. Nicola has advanced cancer and is seeking alternative treatment from a clinic in Helen's city. From the moment Nicola steps off the plane, gaunt, staggering like a crone, her voice hoarse but still with something grand about her, Helen becomes her nurse, her protector, her guardian angel and her stony judge.' (Publisher's blurb)
Grass is Singing, Lessing
Moments Of Being, Woolf
A Life Like Other People's, Bennet
Fun Home, Bechdel
In this thematically structured unit students will explore some of the literary genres centred on the construction of an individual self. Genres covered might include autobiography, diary writing, first-person fiction, life writing, collective storytelling, lyric poetry, dramatic monologue. Topics covered might include gendered identity, racialised identity, the use of idiom, the question of ‘voice’, conflicted identities, the fractured self, the exiled self, psychological theories of identity.
