Lorraine Sim

Bio

Lorraine Sim is an Associate Professor in Modern English Literature at Western Sydney University. She is the author of Virginia Woolf: the Patterns of Ordinary Experience (Ashgate, 2010) and Ordinary Matters: Modernist Women’s Literature and Photography (Bloomsbury, 2016). Lorraine is currently writing her third book, Happy Modernisms, which provides a critical and cultural history of happiness in modernist literature and art.

Contributions

Happy Modernisms

Peer Reviewed

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Can modernism be happy? Or perhaps the question should be: can modernist studies be happy? These questions started to preoccupy me some time ago when I was seven weeks into teaching my undergraduate course in modernist literature at Western Sydney University. As we were about to turn our attention to Jean Rhys’s novel Voyage in the Dark (1934), I felt compelled to apologize to my students. I was asking them to delve into yet another textual universe of trauma, alienation, and unease. The only...

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affect

On Seeing Ghosts

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When I first saw this image on the National Gallery of Australia’s website, I wasn’t quite sure who, or what, I was seeing (fig. 1). What is the shadowy form lurking in the bottom-left-hand-corner of the image? Is it a person emerging out of the basement, a playful photographic superimposition, or something more banal: just another painting propped in the corner?

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archives photography ghosts