‘Sixty Lights’ Gail Jones context thingy PDF

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Context information about Gail Jones 'Sixty Lights' as part of HSC English Extension 1 ...

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Sixty Lights’ Gail Jones Context Research Task 1. Personal context Gail Jones’ family has lived in Western Australia for several generations. In a possible source for the story of Lucy, Jones has stated: My great-grandfather committed suicide after his wife died in childbirth. He committed suicide leaving his two young children with a barmaid in a Kalgoorlie hotel. This was a story I’d heard about as a child, and the idea of this double death and these two children left, a brother and a sister, seems to have settled in me. I wasn’t even conscious, when I began this novel, that I was retelling a story that my mother had told me. (www.abc.net.au/rn/arts/bwriting/stories/s1330197.htm) Who is Gail Jones? Research the author and make notes on: ● Her geographical background Gail Jones was born in Harvey, Western Australia. She grew up in Broome and Kalgoorlie with a working-class childhood. She studied fine arts briefly at the University of Melbourne before returning to Western Australia where she took her undergraduate degree and PhD from the University of Western Australia in 1994. ● Her social upbringing and environment Gail Jones was brought up around Broome with the pearl-diving industry. She was brought up as a Methodist but is now an atheist but she does introduce biblical concepts throughout her writing. Her father was an electrician that worked for the Civil Aviation Safety authority and her mother was a part-time journalist. She was brought up in an environment with “enormous freedom” where she was free to explore and make discoveries. ● Her personal and academic interests and how these have influenced her writing Personal and academic interests include wanting to become a visual artist(avid painter) when she was a child . A lot of her work is cross-cultural because of her continued travel around the world and the time she spends in other places. ● Her oeuvre Her first novel, Black Mirror, published in 2002, ranged from the West Australian goldfields to Paris of the 1930s, where a young artist gets caught up in the world of the Surrealist painters. and was followed by Sixty Lights and Dreams of Speaking, exploring family relationships and cross-cultural friendships.

Sorry, in 2007, was an ode to Jones’s Aboriginal compatriots and the suffering of the Stolen Generations, which narrowly prefigured the Rudd government’s apology to Indigenous Australians. Her next novel, the multi-narrative Five Bells, from 2011, was a nod to Kenneth Slessor’s poem of the same name, its characters converging on Circular Quay in Sydney. For A Guide to Berlin, Jones took her cue from a Nabokov short story, its characters connected to historical calamities such as the Holocaust and the 1995 Tokyo subway sarin gas attack.

● Read the transcript of the ABC radio interview with Gail Jones (posted on Google Classroom). What insights does this interview provide into the ideas that interest Jones? ● Identify 5 key quotes from the interview that link to the concept of mindscapes. Explain what these quotes reveal about Jones’ influences and ideas. - “What I wanted to do was to imagine the consciousness of a young woman as though she was already a photographer, as though there's a certain way of seeing that attends to the specificity and the remarkable visual qualities of the world in a way that is not always delightful, so that when we see things intensely, sometimes we see things that are disturbing”, Jones was keen to portray the consciousness in a manner that balanced both positive and disturbing aspects of life and the world, influenced by the Victorian novels of the past and conflicting the romanticised tropes with the more realistic and gritty style of modernist fiction. - “Susan Sontag has a new book out called Regarding the Pain of Others, which is a meditation on what it means to see disturbing photographs or photographs of suffering, and what it might mean to convert the real into a photograph.” Jones is clearly interested and perplexed by the concept of meditation on suffering and disturbing photographs, influencing her to integrate the idea into the novel through the protagonist. - “The flying Dutchman story mutates throughout the novel, so that it's a story of a man condemned to wander the world in a ship because of his overweening pride. He's allowed to make landfall once every seven years. On one of these brief stops he meets a woman, falls in love with her, but it's a kind of tragic love and they both die by sinking under the ocean.” The simplicity of the story of the flying Dutchman intrigued Jones, as it is a story that promises hope and positivity, but ultimately ends in death, unravelling to reveal itself as a haunted, doomed journey. The disappointment of the ending is evident in the. Jones’s interst in the way the story is reconfigured as it is passed down through families is seen in the way the Flying Dutchman story is interpreted by Lucy and her mother very differently, as the story changes to emulate their differing life experiences. -

2. Literary Context The Victorian Era and the Victorian Novel

Sixty Lights is set in the period known as the Victorian Age. Research this period in history and make notes on: Enlightenment Rationalism (philosophical paradigms, key thinkers) The social impact of the Industrial Revolution (transport, urban growth, shifts in class structure) Scientific advancements/discoveries The role of women (separate spheres, Queen Victoria as an idealised vision of femininity) Romanticism (philosophical paradigms, writers, composers, artists) The expansion of the British Empire in the Victorian Age (which countries were colonised by Britain?) The reasons for colonial resentment towards the British Empire Look closely at the map from this period. https://www.berfrois.com/uploads/2012/10/britishempire.jpg. How are other cultures represented here? What does this map show about the impact of Britain's colonisation on the world at this time? Literature in the Victorian Age In the first half of the 19th century the English became a nation of avid novel readers. The growth of a moneyed, leisured and educated middle class contributed to the rise in popularity of the novel. In the Victorian novel: ● The tradition of realism is sustained, stories are set in real society as the authors experienced it ● The story is told chronologically ● The stories present idealized portraits of difficult lives in which hard work, perseverance, love and luck win out in the end ● Upheld the idea that virtue would be rewarded, and wrongdoers would be suitably punished -

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The literature of this era was preceded by romanticism and was followed by modernism or realism. Hence, it can also be called a fusion of romantic and realist style of writing. Victorian novels tend to be idealized portraits of difficult lives in which hard work, perseverance, love and luck win out in the end. The Victorian era was the great age of the English novel—realistic, thickly plotted, crowded with characters, and long. It was the ideal form to describe contemporary life and to entertain the middle class. Much of the writing during this time was a reaction to the rapidly changing notions of

science, morality, and society. Victorian writers also reacted to the writings of previous generations. -

Modernism - KAILASH SARMA Modernists deliberately tried to break away from the conventions of the Victorian era. Whilst Jones has set ‘Sixty Lights’ in the Victorian Age, the novel is written in a modernist style. ● When did modernist thinking first emerge? ● What conventions underpin Modernist ways of thinking? (consider freedom of expression, radicalism, primitivism, re-examination of existence. ● Define: modernity, atonality, symbolism, individualism, moral relativism. ● How does the novel, ‘Sixty Lights’ reflect modernist ideas?

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In other words, the modernists repudiated the moral codes of the society in which they were living in. For one, they created an optimistic aura of a worldly paradise, of a new technology that was to reshape man into moral perfection. By 1900 the world was a bustling place transformed by all of the new discoveries, inventions and technological achievements that were being thrust on civilization: electricity, the combustion engine, the incandescent light bulb, the automobile, the airplane, radio, X-rays, fertilizers and so forth. These innovations revolutionized the world in two distinct ways. For one, they created an optimistic aura of a worldly paradise, of a new technology that was to reshape man into moral perfection. Struggled with the alienation, the fragmentation of the modern world The purpose of modernism was to make masterpieces; it was to create great works of art Dystopias are a byproduct of modernism because there was anxiety to where we are going ‘To make it new’ Values come before originality Rather, their rejection of conventional morality was based on its arbitrariness, its conformity and its exertion of control over human feelings. In other words, the rules of conduct were a restrictive and limiting force over the human spirit. The modernists believed that for an individual to feel whole and a contributor to the revitalization of the social process, he or she needed to be free of all the encumbering baggage of hundreds of years of hypocrisy The modernists believed that for an individual to feel whole and a contributor to the revitalization of the social process, he or she needed to be free of all the encumbering baggage of hundreds of years of hypocrisy By the time a new scientific or philosophical system or artistic style had found acceptance, each was soon after questioned and discarded for an even newer one.

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Another reason for this fickleness was the fact that people felt a tremendous creative energy always looming in the background as if to announce the birth of some new invention or theory. This dissatisfaction with the moral bankruptcy of everything European led modern thinkers and artists to explore other alternatives, especially primitive cultures. For the Establishment, the result would be cataclysmic; the new emerging culture would undermine tradition and authority in the hopes of transforming contemporary society. This rebellious attitude that flourished between 1900 and 1930 had, as its basis, the rejection of European culture for having become too corrupt, complacent and lethargic, ailing because it was bound by the artificialities of a society that was too preoccupied with image and too scared of change. Tradition, for the purpose of this argument, will be “the transmission of customs or beliefs from generation to generation.” I will define Tradition still further as those customs or beliefs belonging on the one hand to the artist and on the other hand to the viewers of the art. The Modernist movement was a rejection of tradition but…. why? By the 20th century the world was a place of pure innovation with Electricity, X-rays and production lines created for the first time – Some would say it was re-inventing itself every single day. But in a world where atrocities on a global scale was now imaginable due to automatic weapons, bombs and the creation of nuclear warfare, for some technology created a utopian paradise and for others, technology became a religious cult; another place to conform to. Citizens were asked to testify against anybody be it their neighbour to colleagues and many people had to take loyalty oaths just to keep their jobs. People who were accused of being a communist without even having evidence, would be put on a blacklist. Many writers and artists including Ellison was put on this blacklist and was not paid for their work....