AustLit
Texts
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y
This House of Grief
Melbourne
:
Text Publishing
,
2014
7674634
2014
single work
non-fiction
(taught in 3 units)
'Anyone can see the place where the children died. You take the Princes Highway past Geelong, and keep going west in the direction of Colac. Late in August 2006, soon after I had watched a magistrate commit Robert Farquharson to stand trial before a jury on three charges of murder, I headed out that way on a Sunday morning, across the great volcanic plain.
'On the evening of 4 September 2005, Father’s Day, Robert Farquharson, a separated husband, was driving his three sons home to their mother, Cindy, when his car left the road and plunged into a dam. The boys, aged ten, seven and two, drowned. Was this an act of revenge or a tragic accident? The court case became Helen Garner’s obsession. She followed it on its protracted course until the final verdict.
'In this utterly compelling book, Helen Garner tells the story of a man and his broken life. She presents the theatre of the courtroom with its actors and audience, all gathered for the purpose of bearing witness to the truth, players in the extraordinary and unpredictable drama of the quest for justice.
'This House of Grief is a heartbreaking and unputdownable book by one of Australia’s most admired writers.' (Publication summary)
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y
My Place
Fremantle
:
Fremantle Press
,
1987
Z384564
1987
single work
autobiography
(taught in 30 units)
'In 1982, Sally Morgan travelled back to her grandmother's birthplace. What started as a tentative search for information about her family, turned into an overwhelming emotional and spiritual pilgrimage. My Place is a moving account of a search for truth into which a whole family is gradually drawn, finally freeing the tongues of the author's mother and grandmother, allowing them to tell their own stories.' Source: Publisher's blurb.
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Dave Eggers, What is the What. The Autobiography of Valentino Achak Deng. A novel by Dave Eggers.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Confessions.
Thomas De Quincey, Confessions of an English Opium-Eater
Truman Capote, In Cold Blood.
Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar.
Description
This course will take students through a range of carefully selected key works in the nonfiction prose tradition in the English language. As they study these texts, students will consider what it means to construct an "I" in these texts, an "I" who is simultaneously subject, object, and narrator of the text. Students will discover how genre, period, and audience all affect the construction of the self in these texts in ways that draw upon previous literary traditions and that shape the narratives that come after them. Thus, students taking this course will gain an appreciation of how prose nonfiction narratives participate in literary history, as well as a sense of the theory and practice of prose nonfiction and its increasingly complex intersections with fictional genres. More fundamentally, students will come to consider their own position as creators of an "I" as they develop analyses of the texts they study.
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