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Texts

y separately published work icon Sixty Lights Gail Jones , London : Harvill Press , 2004 Z1136231 2004 single work novel historical fiction (taught in 15 units)

'Sixty Lights is the captivating chronicle of Lucy Strange, an independent girl growing up in the Victorian world. From her childhood in Australia through to her adolescence in England and Bombay and finally to London, Lucy is fascinated by light and by the new photographic technology. Her perception of the world is passionate and moving, revealed in a series of frozen images captured in the camera of her mind's eye showing her feelings about love, life and loss. In this confident, finely woven and intricate novel Jones has created an unforgettable character in Lucy; visionary, gifted and exuberant, she touches the lives of all who know her.' (Publication summary)

y separately published work icon Burning In Mireille Juchau , 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, Benjamin

Camera Lucida, Barthes

Coming Through Slaughter, Ondaatje

Description

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.

This semester the unit focuses particularly on "Phototexts", thinking about the creative and political relationships between photography and narrative.

We will be studying films and written texts that incorporate photographic elements, real photographs, photographic techniques and references to photographs, with the aim of doing something more than illustrating the story. Considering the conjunctions between the still image and narrative offers us the opportunity to investigate how these forms work to shape both representation and how we read.

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