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.)
Disgrace
London
:
Secker and Warburg
,
1999
6173241
1999
single work
novel
(taught in 11 units)
After years teaching Romantic poetry at the Technical University of Cape Town, David Lurie, middle-aged and twice divorced, has an impulsive affair with a student. The affair sours; he is denounced and summoned before a committee of inquiry. Willing to admit his guilt, but refusing to yield to pressure to repent publicly, he resigns and retreats to his daughter Lucy's isolated smallholding. For a time, his daughter's influence and the natural rhythms of the farm promise to harmonise his discordant life. But the balance of power in the country is shifting. He and Lucy become victims of a savage and disturbing attack which brings into relief all the faultlines in their relationship.' (Publisher's blurb)
Mrs Dalloway, Woolf
Voyage In The Dark, Rhys
Things Fall Apart, Achebe
Heart of Darkness, Conrad
In this subject students are introduced to postcolonial reading practice through the study of modernist writing in English. Modernism -a cluster of early twentieth-century experimental and avant-garde movements in literature and the arts - has been very influential in the institutionalisation of Western literary criticism and the histories of European canon-formation. Set texts by writers from a range of countries will be 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.
