School of Culture and Communication - Theses
Permanent URI for this collection
Search Results
1 - 6 of 6
-
ItemMedieval textual production and the politics of women's writing: case studies of two medieval women writers and their critical reception( 1991-07)Recent discussions of the state of Medieval Studies, sparked by such books as Lee Patterson’s Negotiating the Past, provide an important impetus for this thesis because they highlight the critical abyss which exists between Medieval Studies and other areas of literary studies. For one entering the field of Medieval Literary Studies this revelation is disturbing and inhibiting. However, the history of Medieval Studies cannot be ignored by those now working within the area. If Medieval Studies is to survive it must come to terms with its past and recognise the precarious position in which the discipline now stands as a result of its academic isolation. ...
-
ItemThe Pinschofs: patrons of art and music in Melbourne 1883-1920( 1991)This thesis deals principally with the period following Pinschof’s arrival from Vienna in 1879, to just after the First World War. It considers the Pinschofs’ generous and timely support of the arts within the context of the amount of private and institutional patronage and the British, German and other cultural influences on Melbourne society at the time.
-
ItemThe legend of the Goodfella Missus: white women, black society, 1840-1940( 1991)The legend of the Goodfella Missus is a gendered myth dear to white Australian history. The most constant motif of the Goodfella Missus is her acclimatization to and affection for all that is different in the antipodes. Concepts of aboriginality are inextricably mixed with her vision of the strange landscape and its flora and fauna. She has had a hallowed place in the Australian annals. The power and persistence of the legend, with its repressive ideology of charity and chastity, is the subject of this thesis. It is a study of race, class and gender in the context of colonization. The stereotypes of aboriginality remain remarkably constant over the century, though place, time and Aboriginal society may be radically different. The gender boundary is the most troubling and revealing because of its ambiguity in the interstice between black and white, servant and mistress, matriarch and monster. Much of the evidence has had to be recuperated, reinstating a selection of verbal and visual images of what white women could come to know of Aboriginal life. My argument works as much through repetition and resonance as it does through explication and exegesis. The historical patterning of three generations of women’s images forms a kind of unhappy hearth history, from Emigrant Gentlewoman of the 1840s, to Australia’s Daughter of the 1870s, and Modern Woman of the early twentieth century.
-
ItemThe Lacanian body: studies of the unconscious in paintings and aesthetics( 1990)Insofar as this dissertation aims to explore aspects of a Lacanian aesthetics, its direction is to show what is at stake in a reading of works of art once one accepts as given that the unconscious is an aspect of the human condition and therefore must be accounted for in any explanatory theory of our interactions in what are called matters of aesthetics and the viewing of works of art. The basic procedure is to explore aspects of Lacanian psychoanalytic theory (such as the symptom, the death drive, jouissance, and desire, as well as the structures of neuroses [obsession, hysteria], perversion and psychosis), and to allow these to be elucidatory of the work of a select number of twentieth century artists. The intent is to give an understanding of how one sees things differently when the unrealised - the unconscious - is both apprehended and theorised, and thus to bring into a new viewing qualities both of those paintings and of one's own observation that perhaps have not been examined in accounts depending upon explanations that do not allow for the findings of psychoanalysis. Crucially, the unconscious/the unrealised is approached from its place in what is (unfortunately) called the clinic, that is, from the intricate and painful search taken there to discover what it is for each of us to have become our own human being, and how we each are to proceed once we have con1e to see that we are played in our lives by jouissance. The dissertation is somewhat ironically called The Lacanian Body: Studies of the Unconscious in Paintings and Aesthetics. While Lacan did not make a distinction between the mind and the body, but was concerned with the soul, one of my major tasks has been to rectify what has seemed to me to be an inappropriate emphasis on the conscious aspects of mind/language in academic studies of Lacanian theory. I deal centrally with the psychoanalytic symptom and jouissance for the place that they have in a system of meaning in their relation to language and speech, with the body posing one of the limits to the emergence of that meaning.
-
ItemThe illuminated manuscripts of the "Légende dorée: Jean de Vignay's translation of Jacobus de Voragine's "Legenda aurea"( 1990)This thesis considers closely 28 illuminated manuscripts of Jean de Vignay’s translation of Jacobus de Voragine’s celebrated 13th-century compendium of saints’ lives, the Legenda aurea. Vignay’s translation, the Légende dorée, poses some particular problems for manuscript studies. The extant manuscripts can be seen to be accommodated by at least two major genres of medieval French illumination: the transition of vernacular, courtly literature and the tradition of devotional texts. The tension created by these two conventions can be reconciled if we regard the Légende dorée manuscripts as enjoying popularity with an elite and secular audience which was not interested in the text as much as it was interested in the illuminations, or more probably, in the status of owning an important scholarly illuminated work. In establishing appropriate genres for the manuscripts of the Légende dorée, the production of the books within the organised artistic workshop is explored. This has led to the conclusion that while in some cases compositions were freshly devised from the text of the Légende dorée, most illuminators relied heavily on standard workshop models and patterns. As well as attempting to place the manuscripts of the Légende dorée in the milieu of late medieval France and as well as seeking to explore the popularity – or at least the level of ownership – of this translation of a somewhat irrelevant and difficult philosophical work, the thesis also presents for the first time an annotated catalogue of all known manuscripts of the text. The catalogue lists the manuscripts according to the sigils ascribed by Richard Hamer, Christchurch College, University of Oxford and Vida Russell of Melbourne. The physical aspects, known provenance, decoration and subjects of the miniatures of the volumes are detailed. This is followed by a commentary dealing with the particular problems and challenges presented by the illumination and production of each manuscript. In some cases artists have been suggested for several previously unattributed manuscripts.
-
ItemValidation and variation in the tradition of Merlin: from Celtic legend to mediaeval romance( 1991)This study will introduce the stages of the continuing legend of Merlin from its archetypal origins, through the Celtic sources in Ireland, Scotland and Wales, and through its possible passage to Brittany.