Joe Cinque's Consolation
Sydney
:
Pan Macmillan Australia
,
2004
Z1132428
2004
single work
prose
(taught in 26 units)
'In October 1997 a clever young law student at ANU made a bizarre plan to murder her devoted boyfriend after a dinner party at their house. Some of the dinner guests - most of them university students - had heard rumours of the plan. Nobody warned Joe Cinque. He died one Sunday, in his own bed, of a massive dose of rohypnol and heroin. His girlfriend and her best friend were charged with murder. Helen Garner followed the trials in the ACT Supreme Court. Compassionate but unflinching, this is a book about how and why Joe Cinque died. It probes the gap between ethics and the law; examines the helplessness of the courts in the face of what we think of as 'evil'; and explores conscience, culpability, and the battered ideal of duty of care.' (Source: Pan Macmillan website)
Garner takes 'a deliberately subjective and "literary" approach' to her material with an 'emphasis on a sympatheitic authorial persona as the source of the reader's perspective' (Susan Lever 'The Crimes of the Past: Anna Funder's Stasiland and Helen Garner's Joe Cinque's Consolation'. Paper delivered at the Association for the Study of Australian Literature (ASAL) conference 2006).
The Mystery of a Hansom Cab
Melbourne
:
Kemp and Boyce
,
1886
Z156928
1886
single work
novel
(taught in 8 units)
'Set in the charming and deadly streets of Melbourne, this vivid and brilliantly plotted murder thriller tells the story of a crime committed by an unknown assassin. With its panoramic depiction of a bustling yet uneasy city, Hansom Cab has a central place in Australian literary history and, more importantly, it remains highly readable. ' (Publication summary)
The Broken Shore
Melbourne
:
Text Publishing
,
2005
Z1207328
2005
single work
novel
crime
(taught in 9 units)
'Joe Cashin was different once. He moved easily then; was surer and less thoughtful. But there are consequences when you've come so close to dying. For Cashin, they included a posting away from the world of Homicide to the quiet place on the coast where he grew up. Now all he has to do is play the country cop and walk the dogs. And sometimes think about how he was before.
'Then prominent local Charles Bourgoyne is bashed and left for dead. Everything seems to point to three boys from the nearby Aboriginal community; everyone seems to want it to. But Cashin is unconvinced. And as tragedy unfolds relentlessly into tragedy, he finds himself holding onto something that might be better let go.'
Source: Publisher's website (Sighted 22/8/11)
This course introduces students to the study of the novel through a consideration of its diverse and changing forms since the eighteenth century. The focus of the course is on the ways the novel has persisted as a mass genre, adapting in response to shifts in its audiences and to the technologies through which they access long-form narratives. We will consider questions of canonicity, celebrity, global proliferation and contemporary reference in relation to the novel. Possible modules include: celebrity authors; nineteenth- and twentieth-century true crime writing; film and television remakes of canonical novels; the early novel as an adaptation of older narrative forms such as romance and epic.
