School of Historical and Philosophical Studies - Theses
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ItemThe development of irony in England circa 1470-1530( 2007)Irony is the art of expressing something by saying the opposite. Although there are many studies of irony in English literature, most either do not look at the concept of irony historically or begin only with the mid- to late sixteenth century. In the medieval and early modern period, its most common definitions were blame by praise, sophism, Socratic false modesty and mockery. This thesis examines the evolution of English irony, historicizing modern studies of ironic literature and tracing the influence of ancient ideas. In the neglected period just before More and Erasmus, irony was applied to the central contemporary concern of reconciling eloquence and wisdom. This thesis locates irony in the context of rhetoric’s relationship to philosophy in England, analysing the irony indifferent texts and relating it to the intellectual context in which the texts appeared to discover irony’s contemporary purpose in each. I argue that because of its connection to both rhetoric and philosophy, irony was intimately connected with contemporary concerns throughout the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. Plato associated irony with Sophistry, as a form of eloquence designed to disguise ignorance and confound thought. Socrates, however, was admired for using irony as a philosophical technique. Aristotle, Cicero and Quintilian focused on irony’s effects, making it a more prestigious form of humour. St Augustine’s suggestion that knowledge of irony was necessary to interpret the hidden meanings of scripture further legitimized it as an institution of oratory. In 4fteenth-century England, allegory and the ‘wise fool’ were used to articulate complex or dangerous ideas. While Socratic false modesty was still distrusted, ‘grammatical’ irony could be used to reprove or teach. Printing and translations into the vernacular facilitated the reform of grammar and rhetoric. The ‘new rhetorics’ of the 1470s-1510s followed Augustine's notion of irony as something that by presenting the reader with contradictory examples could teach judgement (prudentia) and analysis. Irony became established as an instrument of social reform in allegory and grammar. In the early sixteenth century, the new rhetorics became central to ‘grammarians’ wars over the pedagogical rivalry between philosophy and rhetoric. Published epigrams and letters reflected classical understandings of irony as blame by praise, and revived classical mistrust of irony as ‘Sophistical’ point scoring. In this setting, More and Erasmus used the ironic forms of blame by praise in the Praise of Folly and satirical allegory in Utopia. After the mid-sixteenth century, irony was developed separately, in literature as sophisticated mockery, in philosophy as Socratic detachment. Ironic humour became more favoured and irony’s potential in philosophy was recognised—but the notion of philosophy and rhetoric as separate disciplines remained, as did the problem of irony as dissimulation. Grounded in a sense of its own past and constantly applied to contemporary problems, irony is a topic that deserves the attention of historians. From the 1470s to the 1530s,inherited understandings of irony as situated between rhetoric and philosophy were used in the central problem of reconciling eloquence and wisdom.
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ItemMediating risks : investigating the emergence of court ADR through the risk society paradigm( 2007)In the US, England and Australia alternative dispute resolution (ADR) has been increasingly employed as integral component in the handling and disposal of garden-variety civil cases. This thesis examines the quality and character of changes brought about through the uptake and continued use of ADR in the courts, a configuration that I refer to as Court ADR, in non-family law cases. Ulrich Beck's risk society paradigm provides the theoretical lens through which those changes in the courts are to be understood. In short, Beck claims that institutions and individuals' relationships to those institutions are transforming in contemporary societies, a transformation that is organised by and around risk. According to Beck, these transformations, while partial and incomplete, describe how the fundamental structures that generate and maintain society redound and confront their very foundations, a process that Beck refers to as reflexive modernisation. Moreover, individuals' relationships with institutions are caught up with such transformations. Beck describes this through his concepts of individualisation, whereby individuals are increasingly invited to make decisions regarding particular risks, which are simultaneously enabled and constrained by expert systems. I argue that these two central risk society conceptualisations - reflexive modernisation and individualisation - provide an informed theoretical framework for understanding those transformations in certain US, English and Australian courts as they relate to Court ADR. With the institutional emergence of Court ADR, and the growth of court-sponsored mediation in particular, the rationale underlying its development and continued use can be understood through the risk society paradigm. In terms of reflexive modernisation, the process of producing legal goods as they take shape in a judgement has and continues to produce negative side-effects, including expense, delay, undue complexity and limited accessibility to the courts themselves. One result is the emergence of Court ADR, which provides new procedures to structurally address many of those negative side-effects generated when legal goods are produced through processed that are oriented around adversarial adjudication. The emergence of Court ADR evidences the qualities and characteristics of individualisation insofar as litigants are invited into new decision-making spaces, inclusive of court-sponsored choices over whether arbitration or mediation might be more appropriate to handle and dispose of the case, as well as the attendant decisions once mediation, arbitration or other alternative processes are selected. Moreover, while litigants' entry into these spaces is enabled by legal actors and systems, they are simultaneously constrained. In short, Beck's risk society paradigm provides clarity with respect to how those alternative practices themselves have been legalised when used to handle and dispose of garden variety civil cases in the US, English and Australian courts.
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ItemFactory girls: gender, empire and the making of a female working class, Melbourne and London, 1880-1920( 2007)Between 1880 and 1920, something remarkable happened among the women and girls who worked in the factories of the British Empire. From being universally represented as the powerless victims of industrial capitalism, women factory workers in the cities of Melbourne and London burst onto the stage of history, as bold, disciplined and steadfast activists and demanded their rights, not merely as the equals of working-class men, but as the equals of ladies. The proletarian counterpart of that other subversive fin de siecle type, New Woman, the factory girl became visible at a time when the nature of femininity was being hotly contested, and coincided with the growing militancy of the organised working-class. Her presence in the streets, economic autonomy and love affair with the new mass culture, represented a radical challenge to conventional bourgeois ideas of how women should behave. Her emergence as a new social actor also coincided with a crisis of confidence in Empire, radical disillusionment with the project of modernity and a growing unease about the consequences of urban poverty. As middle-class anxieties proliferated, so surveillance of the factory girl intensified. In this way, female factory workers came under the scrutiny of missionaries, medical men, demographers, social workers, socialists and sociologists. This study traces the role of female factory workers in the emergence of a transnational movement for working-class women's rights. As more women entered the factories in search of independence, their shared experience of exploitation emboldened and empowered them to demand more. During this period, increasing numbers of female factory workers in both cities thus confounded the stereotype of female workers as submissive, shallow and innately conservative, by organising and winning strikes and forming unions of their own. Such explosions of militancy broke down trade unionist prejudice against women workers and laid the foundations of solidarity with male unionists. They also forged of a new model of working-class femininity; based not on the pale imitation of gentility, but one which expressed a profoundly modern sensibility. In the process, women workers fashioned a new political culture which articulated their common interests, and shared identity, as members of a female working class. Yet the rise of working-women's militancy also coincided with the mature articulation of a racialised labourism and the rise of male breadwinner regimes. As the white populations of Empire were re-configured as one race with a common imperial destiny, the corresponding preoccupation with the white settler birth rate, increased hostility and suspicion of women workers. The first decades of the twentieth century thus saw the solidification of a regulatory apparatus which sought to police and discipline young working women in preparing them for their racial destiny as mothers. The contemporaneous demand of the labour movement for a family wage worked to further marginalise wage-earning women, and ultimately reinforced the sexual division of labour.