School of Culture and Communication - Theses
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ItemLife and more life: the strategic hierarchies of Australian literary vitalism( 2008)This thesis argues that Australian literary historiography has largely overlooked the significant impact of literary vitalism on twentieth-century Australian writing, and attempts to redress this with a study of the ways in which principles of vitalist philosophy were used by Australian writers to gain certain strategic advantages in four key twentieth-century literary debates and conflicts. This strategic and functional approach to literary vitalism diverges from the genealogical approach taken by Vincent Buckley in his 1959 essay, `Utopianism and Vitalism in Australian Literature,' which traces various strands of vitalism across generations of writers. Buckley's essay nevertheless remains significant to this thesis because the three strands of literary vitalism Buckley identifies are linked to corresponding literary debates. The vitalist sexuality championed by Norman Lindsay is associated with the censorship debates of the 1930s; William Baylebridge's vitalist nationalism applied vitalist notions of evolution to a nationalist agenda that attempted to resist British cultural dominance; a version of heroic vitalism, which appeared first in the work of Christopher Brennan, provided Buckley with a critical framework for supplanting the nationalist literary canon with a metaphysical canon during the Cold War years. A fourth strand of industrial vitalism, which Buckley omits from his study because of his distaste for the politicisation of literature by the social realist writers with whom it was linked, controversially used literature as agitprop in the promotion of left-wing industrial reform agendas. Instead of following Buckley in making a study of literary influence, the focus of this thesis is on writers' strategic use of vitalism as both a rationale for, and an instrument of, change. These strategic opportunities arise out of vitalism's discursive shift from biology into literature. In biology, vitalism hypothesised an answer to the question, What is life? With the entry of vitalism into literary discourse an entirely different question is addressed: What is a more vital life? This new question introduces into literature an hierarchical and biopolitical notion of life- the possibility of a more vital life or intense life. Since literary vitalism ceases to value all life equally, it becomes a means of discriminating between lives. This meant that writers were able to prioritise certain literary and social formations over others on the grounds that these were somehow more life affirming or more attuned to life. The various strategic priorities asserted by different literary vitalists were based on two main claims: that vital norms have a natural or normative priority over social norms, and that the vital force, while connecting each person with the whole of life, endows upon a chosen few some particular advantage over the rest of humankind. The literary vitalists were interested in change at both the individual and collective levels. Vitalism was linked to social evolution and progressivism and to ideas about self-improvement and self-fulfilment. For those literary vitalists who recognised that life has its own momentum, the emphasis on change meant cooperating with the push of life, a collective force in which all humanity participates in the general evolutionary movement of the whole of life. For other writers the push of life gives way to a teleological pull towards a predefined goal, thereby introducing a finality inimical to the vitalist dynamic. Here the literary vitalists became involved in life management strategies that were biopolitical in the Foucaultian sense, where human life itself becomes the political target and stake, and the lives of individuals are taken charge of and regulated in the name of the well-being of the population, with individuals encouraged to align their personal aspirations and conduct with the cultural imperative to act upon themselves in the interests of the social whole. Central to vitalism's appeal to Australian writers was its promise to liberate life from repressive forces. For the true vitalist, this liberation must inevitably follow from the movement or force of life itself. But more often the literary vitalists thought to accelerate the movement of life by driving it towards particular progressivist or individualist goals. Rather than opposites, these two versions of the movement of life in the work of the Australian literary vitalists tend to dovetail into one another. This is the double aspect or `double horizon' of life which Foucault observed in The History of Sexuality, where life is not only the force which is resistant to power but also the object of power. This thesis is also a study of the literary vitalist tendency to conflate the movement of life with the drive towards progressivist goals. This commitment to progressivism proceeds through the regulation and management of life and works to block the dynamic of change and to constrain the very forces that the vitalists had set out to liberate.
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ItemEthics and poetics: the contemporary lyrical historical novel( 2007)Postmodernism has problematised how we can know and represent history, or engage ethically with the past. Despite this, contemporary authors continue to be preoccupied with history and the ethical questions it raises. This thesis considers whether it is possible to attempt an ethical engagement with the past from within the context of postmodern thought, and identifies a body of contemporary historical novels that use lyrical writing to engage with history in an ethical but non-totalising manner. This study contends that the lyrical language of novels such as Anne Michaels's Fugitive Pieces (1996), Toni Morrison's Beloved (1987) and Kim Scott's Benang: from the Heart (1999) creates room for alterity, and attempts a conflicted but ethical representation of history. Drawing on poetic and postmodern theory and the ethical philosophy of Emmanuel Levinas, the first half of this thesis constructs an ethical poetics of history. Levinas's understanding of alterity, the irreducible difference of the other, is used as the basis of an ethics that is non-totalising, and thus compatible with the postmodern rejection of grand narratives. Poetic theory from Aristotle to the present is used to demonstrate the potential of lyrical writing to preserve alterity, through specificity, polysemy and metafiction. Lyrical writing is shown to destabilise the referential function of language, and thus to provide space for alterity within the text. In its second half, the thesis demonstrates how Fugitive Pieces, Beloved and Benang use various lyrical strategies to create ethical but non-totalising historical narratives. In each of these novels, densely metaphorical language destabilises semantic unity or fixity. A range of lyrical strategies is at work in these novels, each mobilising ideas of (textual) specificity, polysemy and the impossibility of totalising representation. The novels' insistently metafictional elements preclude any totalising claim to historical referentiality. Lyrical writing is shown to be a powerful means of representing the past while preserving alterity and avoiding totalisation. Placing these novels in the context of other contemporary historical writing, the thesis cites a number of recent examples of the lyrical historical novel. The thesis concludes that contemporary writers are turning to the lyrical historical novel as a means of engaging ethically with the past in a writing that is nonetheless informed by the postmodern problematisation of history and representation. In its Sisyphean aspect, this task reflects the inherently paradoxical nature of postmodernism. The contemporary lyrical historical novel attempts an ethical engagement with the past that is both impossible and necessary.
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ItemDown the road between the promise and the freaky now: understanding the new Australian poetry( 2007)The thesis closely analyses the earliest work of eleven Australian poets who came to prominence in the late 1960’s and early 1970’s — the era of the “Generation of 1968” or “The New Australian Poetry”. In comparatively critiquing the earliest volumes of these poets, this study identifies the attitudinal, stylistic, and conceptual common denominators that lead to the recognition and categorization of this group of writers as a unique “generation” in Australian literary history. These artistic common denominators are identifies as including qualities such as aesthetic self-reflexiveness, anti-lyricism, anti-Romanticism, and a generally antagonistic and sceptical attitude towards the accepted historical role and function of the poet and poetry. The thesis takes particular account of the early work and editorial foresight of John Tranter in collecting the work of his contemporaries in his The New Australian Poetry anthology of 1979. A large amount of analytical weight is given over to exploration of Tranter’s earliest volumes in an effort to underscore the contemporary impact and relevance of his conceptual concerns. In establishing that the work of the New Australian Poets is marked by a set of recurring attitudes towards literature and the poetic statute, the thesis moves to theoretically situate these attitudes in between an anxious, fast-paced version of Modernism and a horizon of Postmodern promise. In arguing thus as to the specific theoretical location and categorisation of the work of this group of poets, the study aims to make a contribution to the twentieth-century narrative of Australian literary history. Perhaps more importantly, the thesis aims to clarify precisely what it was about the work of these poets that made their initial artistic breakthrough so controversial and confronting.
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ItemVisions of the island: the mimetic and the ludic in Australian postcolonialism( 2000)This thesis examines three Australian postcolonial historical novels: Peter Carey's Oscar and Lucinda and Jack Maggs, and Patrick White's Voss. I argue, first, that in these texts colonial identifications/resistances are grafted onto a binary logic that I define as mimetic; second, that the three novels reprocess colonial mimetic structures in a ludic or playful mode; and, third, that the postcolonial ludic at once deconstructs and reconfigures colonialism's mimetic logic. My analyses focus on British Victorian mimetic structures to address these three levels of argument. In Oscar and Lucinda the figure of Edmund Gosse evokes the pattern of "role modeling," which relates to Britain's historical and literary authority over colonial Australia, and to the project of Christianizing the natives. I maintain that Carey disjoints the functional binaries underlying these topoi ("authoritative" history/"unauthoritative" history, Christian/non-Christian) to articulate perspectivism, rather than authoritativeness, through the persona of his narrator, and mutual transformation, rather than conversion, through characters like Oscar and Mary Magdalene. In Voss, Ludwig Leichhardt's and Alec Chisholm's rival histories foreground the "Hero worship" pattern, which pertains to the thesis of British racial superiority and to the assertion of "white" power over the Aborigines. I argue that White confuses the terms of the implied dichotomies (British/non-British, white/black) by his construction of a collective hero and by pluricontextualization. Jack Maggs focuses on Charles Dickens's portrayal of Magwitch in Great Expectations to examine the 'juridical morality" that determined the convict stain complex and colonial Australia's inferiority vis-à-vis Britain. I contend that the novel revises binary repartitions like judge/criminal, moral/immoral, and gentleman/convict, in order to reapportion the convict stain complex according to a ternary, rather than binary, justice. While my thesis acknowledges the body of knowledge of colonial derivation that postcolonial Australia inherited, it also purports to signal that, in the three novels discussed, the mimetic logic which generated this body of knowledge yields to a ludic reconceptualization. The postcolonial ludic vision, then, proposes an epistemological mode that valorizes loci of intersection, convergence and coincidence.
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ItemCultures of special effects: the cultural reception of CGI effects in Hollywood SF cinema( 2000)This thesis offers an historical and theoretical investigation into the role that cultures of connoisseurship, appreciation, and fandom have played the cultural reception of computer-generated imagery (CGI) in Hollywood science fiction cinema. It begins by looking at some of the contexts that have been important for the cultivation of these cultures: arguing that the discursive networks that support them actually took on their contemporary contours in the late nineteenth century. Central to this analysis is an examination of the reasons why science fictions have been so important for the exhibition of new kinds of visual effects imagery. In moving from an analysis of popular scientific demonstration in the late nineteenth century, to Hollywood science fiction cinema in the late twentieth century, this investigation weaves together two methodological and chronological lines of inquiry: the first historical and contextual, and the second, critical and futurological. The historical and contextual axis of this investigation is concerned with examining the role that a wide range of popular publications – popular science magazines, genre fimzines, computer lifestyle magazines – have played in the social formation of cultures of effects appreciation and connoisseurship. The critical and futurological axis of this investigation looks at how film and cultural studies scholarship on special effects has dealt with the task of theorising their reception. Rather than simply offering a critical engagement with this work, this analysis is concerned with testing new lines of theoretical inquiry by suggesting other readings, other ways of understanding, special effects and the popular science fictions that feature them.