Thursday 9 September 2010

Virginia Woolf: The Patterns of Everyday Experience













Staff, students, and interested public are invited to the book launch of Lorraine Sim's Virginia Woolf: The Patterns of Everyday Experience (2010). Published by Ashgate.

Where: Ballarat Books, 15 Armstrong Street
When: 5:30pm on Thursday 9th September 2010

Book cover: "In her timely contribution to revisionist approaches in modernist studies, Lorraine Sim offers a reading of Virginia Woolf's conception of ordinary experience as revealed in her fiction and nonfiction. Contending that Woolf's representations of everyday life both acknowledge and provide a challenge to characterizations of daily life as mundane, Sim shows how Woolf explores the potential of everyday experience as a site of personal meaning, social understanding, and ethical value. Sim's argument develops through readings of Woolf's literary representations of a subject's engagement with ordinary things like a mark on the wall, a table, or colour; Woolf's accounts of experiences that are both common and extraordinary such as physical pain or epiphanic 'moments of being'; and Woolf's analysis of the effect of new technologies, for example, motor-cars and the cinema, on contemporary understandings of the external world. Throughout, Sim places Woolf's views in the context of the philosophical and lay accounts of ordinary experience that dominated the cultural thought of her time. These include British Empiricism, Romanticism, Platonic thought and Post-Impressionism.

In addition to drawing on the major novels, particularly The Voyage Out, Mrs. Dalloway, and To the Lighthouse, Sim focuses close attention on short stories such as 'The Mark on the Wall', 'Solid Objects', and 'Blue & Green'; nonfiction works, including 'On Being Ill', 'Evening over Sussex: Reflections in a Motor-car', and 'A Sketch of the Past'; and Woolf's diaries. Sim concludes with an account of Woolf's ontology of the ordinary, which illuminates the role of the everyday in Woolf's ethics."

Lorraine Sim is a Lecturer in Literature and Film at the University of Ballarat.

September Book Group









The book group will meet at our usual haunt, The Known World Bookshop in Sturt Street, for another session on James Joyce's Ulysses. We're almost there folks! Just another session or two and we'll be able to move on to lighter readings (The Brothers Karamazov :-) ?). We commence at 2:00pm so nip in early for your pot of tea.












David Suzuki returns to Ballarat to give a public talk on his new book The Legacy and his Legacy Project. I was lucky enough to catch him at UB a couple of years ago and found him to be both inspiring and sobering with regards to environmental ethics and activism. I think Ballarat is most fortunate to have another such opportunity.

From the promo: "Based on the premise - 'If I had one last lecture to give, what would I say?' -The Legacy presents a critical and candid exploration of a period of human history which includes David Suzuki's own life journey - an era which has overlapped and converged with many of the most important social, scientific, cultural and political developments of the past seventy years. His focus also acknowledges the wisdom of his grandparents and moves forward through to the promise held in the birth of his new grandson."

Held at the Wendouree Performing Arts Theatre
Sunday 17 October 2010
Please book following the link here.

Here is the link to the David Suzuki Legacy Project