School of Historical and Philosophical Studies - Theses

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    Imagination and expectation in reading fiction
    Higgins, Brendan Patrick ( 2003)
    In the course of this thesis I work to provide a reader centred account of fiction reading. I argue that fiction reading (as a form of reading) is primarily about understanding and that fiction readers employ expectation and imagination as tools of comprehension. I challenge Kendall Walton' s make-believe theory of fiction, particularly in his focus on propositional imaginings and his construal of make-believe in terms of make-believe games. I draw on the work of Jean-Paul Sartre and Gilbert Ryle to provide an object-based account of imagining - allowing for readers to reconstitute imaginings as their understanding of character and story develops. I acknowledge that imaginings of objects can include aspects of incompleteness and indeterminacy yet still appear complete and coherent. I further allow that it is possible to form multiple mental images of the one object and to form images on the basis of prior imaginings. I then consider psychologist Frank Smith's work on reading, and how it applies to the context of reading fiction. I argue that it is not completeness of detail that constitutes good comprehension, but rather the capacity to form appropriate expectations from the text. I use discussions by Aristotle, Lamarque and Olsen, Noel Carroll, Gregory Currie, Robert Yanal and Richard Gerrig to consider genre and convention as providing coherent sets of expectation for both readers and authors. I argue that part of what it means to follow a story is to contextualize what one reads in terms of an ongoing narrative - which involves projection of potential outcomes and reinterpretation of prior developments. I synthesize my accounts of imagining and expectation to provide an explanation of reader identification with character. I argue that fictions encourage readers to share in the experiences and values of their characters - first by invoking common moral values and second by presenting its material in a way that can best be understood by imagining the story from the character's perspective. I argue, in opposition to Noel Carroll and D.W. Harding, that it is possible for the reader to identify with the character and still maintain a distinction between herself and the character. Furthermore, I argue that character-identification occurs intermittently and by degrees. This allows readers not only to engage with the narrative as narrative, but also to adopt a perspective external to the character so as to enable the reader to feel for as well as with a character. Finally, I consider how readers engage with a work of fiction as a whole. I consider the manner in which thematic structure is able to contribute both to understanding and emotional engagement with a text, drawing on Lamarque and Olsen as well as Michael Weston. I consider how a reader's attitude towards a work of fiction and its contents changes when she finishes the story. I discuss how internal perspective and external perspective are mutually dependent - and suggest that our understanding of characters as both self-willed agents and. as deliberate artistic creations contributes to the complexity of literary appreciation.
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    Containing anxiety : a socio-analytic contribution to the study of organisational stress
    Patman, David ( 2003)
    The aim of this study is to contribute to the understanding of the phenomenon of anxiety as it is experienced in group and organisational settings. A 1997 study commissioned by the ACTU found that workplace stress was becoming increasingly prevalent in Australia, with the three most stressful conditions at work being increased workload, organisational change and job insecurity. According to the literature, stress appears to be a highly complex phenomenon, involving a myriad of psychological and physical symptoms which impact at the individual and social level. The "causes" of stress appear to be similarly complex, with some research suggesting that the occurrence of stress is a function of individual predisposition. Other studies attribute the origin of stress to environmental factors, whilst still other approaches regard stress as he product of interactions between person and environment. Apart from difficulties involved in alleviating the effects of stress given such conflicting accounts of its aetiology, there are also different political implications depending upon which approach is given precedence. For example, employers tend to adopt "person-centred" explanation of job stress, at the expense of accounts which attribute stress to poor working conditions - a move which might be regarded as "blaming the victim". The thesis attempts to resolve the dilemma of whether anxiety/stress is an individual or social phenomenon by investigating the various assumptions about the constitution of the "subject of stress" which are implicit in existing approaches. By drawing on debates in broader social theory, I suggest that stress cannot be adequately theorised, or addressed in practice, without paying attention to the concept of "inter-subjectivity". Psychoanalytically-informed social theory, by virtue of its concept of the "unconscious", I argue, provides a model of the subject in which the rigid distinction between person and environment, made by existing approaches to stress, is problematised. A particular branch of psychoanalytic organisational theory, known as "socioanalysis", emphasises the centrality of anxiety to both the constitution of the subject and the establishment of organisational systems. As such, I contend that this theory provides a useful base from which to construct a model of organisational stress which avoids the person-environment dilemma encountered by existing approaches. I explore the implications of a model of this kind with reference to a case study of the Australian social security organisation Centrelink. The empirical material consists of interviews with Centrelink staff, a content analysis of Centrelink internal policy documents, and observations of a range of Centrelink work practices undertaken during my own tenure as a Centrelink employee. The case material is interpreted using a socio-analytic methodology to investigate the effects of change on the various individuals and groups who interact with Centrelink. By reflecting on the case study, I make predictions about Centrelink and its changing role in Australian society, and also develop suggestions for ways of addressing the negative effects of stress as it is experienced in Centrelink.
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    Being and morality
    Tapley, James Richard S ( 2003)
    The purpose of this thesis is to develop Jean-Paul Sartre's account of an existentialist ethics based upon the phenomenological ontology that he sets out in Being and Nothingness. For a long time after the publication of Being and Nothingness in 1943, this was considered a difficult, perhaps even impossible task, in view of the apparently nihilistic implications of Sartre's understanding of individual reality. His concept of the 'unhappy consciousness,' his descriptions of the 'useless passion' of being and his suggestion that 'Hell is other people' have all been interpreted as ideas that are inimical to the possibility of meaningful moral action, ethical well-being and harmonious relations with others. However, three years after Sartre's death in 1980, Arlette Elkaim Sartre published the unfinished Notebooks for an Ethics, which contain some 500 pages of preliminary considerations of an existentialist ethics based upon the phenomenological ontology of Being and Nothingness. This book does not provide readers of existentialism with a fully-fledged ethical theory, but it does throw new light upon the direction that the development of a morality of freedom will take, and its publication has rejuvenated interest in existentialist ethics. In the twenty years since the publication of the Notebooks, the task of developing Sartre's preliminary considerations into a more developed form of ethical theory has become one of the central concerns for readers of his phenomenological ontology. It is this task which defines the purpose of this thesis. The distinctive feature of this thesis is that it uses a three stage. dialectical model of reflective development in the individual consciousness in order to develop Sartre's account of an ontological ethics. This dialectical model is applied to Sartre's considerations of the individual's relation to the world, to others, and to moral values. The first stage of this model refers to the level of the individual's unreflective being in the world of values in the presence of others. The second stage distinguishes the attitude of impure reflection in the individual's understanding of these relations. The third stage develops Sartre's account of the project of being in the world on the level of pure, or authentic reflection. This project of being on the level of pure reflection is developed by Sartre in the Notebooks, and it is here that he sets out a positive promulgation of his existentialist account of ethics. This positive account compliments and completes the negative critique of ethics that Sartre sets out in Being and Nothingness, and which comprises his considerations of the second stage of the dialectical model. In this way, by developing the dialectical model from the first stage of unreflection, through the second stage of impure reflection and to the third stage of pure reflection, we can arrive at a rounded conception of an existentialist ethics. In Chapter One of this thesis, the dialectical model is applied to Sartre's understanding of the individual's relation to the world. The focus here is upon such ontological and ethical matters as the nature of the individual's being in the world, the question of individual identity, and the possibility of fulfilment or justification to existence. In Chapter Two, the model is applied to the individual's relations with others. The purpose here is to make sense of Sartre's descriptions of conflict and domination that characterise relations based upon impure reflection, and to develop his account of the structure of relations of authentic love. Chapter Three concerns the individual's relations to values. By applying the dialectical model of reflective development to these relations, this thesis aims to elucidate Sartre's understanding of being and morality.
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    A culture of speed: the dilemma of being modern in 1930s Australia
    Andrewes, Frazer ( 2003)
    This thesis explores the reaction of Australians living in Melbourne in the 1930s, to changes in technology, social organisation, and personal attitudes that together constituted what they saw as innovations in modern life. Taking the Victorian Centenary of 1934 as a starting point, it analyses the anxieties and excitements of a society selfconsciously defining itself as part of a progressive potion of the western world. They reflected on the place of the city as locus of modernity; they analysed what appeared to be the quickening pace of human communications. They knew increasing leisure but deprecated the concomitant condition of boredom. They were concerned whether modernity was disease. They faced the ambiguities of the racial exclusivity of Australian modernity, centred in part on their ambivalence about Aborigines as Australians, but also incorporating long-held fears of populous Asian neighbours. They were not Britons, but their concerns for “men, money and markets”—and defence—kept the British connection uppermost. They participated in competing visions of the meanings of the past, and the directions of the future. Modern life, it seemed, was accused of overturning fundamental, and natural, race and gender norms, sapping the vital force of white Australia. Spurred by the increasing likelihood of a major conflict at the decade’s end, and drawing on much older and deepseated anxieties in Australia’s past, pessimists predicted a future where the technologies of modernity would make Australia vulnerable to attack. Australians in Melbourne, however, were excited about modernity and not just anxious. People were prepared to take risks, to seek novel experiences, and the reasons for this probably stemmed from the same causes that made other people turn away from the new to find comfort in the familiar. Modernity, in terms of changing mental processes as much as in its technological dimension, offered the chance for Melburnians to escape the often grim realities of life in the 1930s. Despite clearly expressed uncertainties, interwar Australians had committed themselves to a project of modernity.
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    The seeing machine: photography and the visualisation of culture in Australia, 1890-1930
    Ballard, Bernadette Ann ( 2003)
    Since its introduction in Australia, photography has had a profound impact on Australian culture. The modern era, it is often alleged, has been dominated by the sense of sight, and from its inception, photography was explicitly understood in relation to this prestigious notion of modern vision. The camera and its associated technologies offered a “new” and modern way of seeing that was central to the overall project of modernity. This thesis is a study of the role of photography in the increasing visualisation of Australian culture during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Drawing on debates around modernism, it explores the cultural and social expressions of photography. Each chapter of this thesis considers an aspect of photography or its use, and traces the emerging popularisation and commodification of the photographic image. The social impact of photography is explored in a selection of specific contexts that include early camera clubs and societies of the 1890s, and the growing amateur movement that followed the new “point and shoot” technology so ably depicted by the Kodak Girl. Other contexts include the professional applications of photography, official and private uses of photography during World War I, and finally the journalistic and cinematic uses of the photographic image in the 1920s. Together these contexts show how the romance and optimism of technology ignited enthusiasm for the visual medium across class and gender divides, moving from initial popularity amongst a local scientific elite, spreading to amateurs, professionals, and eventually being put to political and social uses, throughout the world. The emergence of photography as a popular pastime and profession was instrumental in reconceptualising public and private life. Popularised by the press and reinforced by private uses, photographs constitute a significant cultural terrain for society and in many ways, paved the way for a broader acceptance of a visual discourse that dominates modern society.
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    White without soap: philanthropy, caste and exclusion in colonial Victoria, 1835-1888: a political economy of race
    STEPHENS, MARGUERITA ( 2003-11)
    The thesis explores the connections between nineteenth century imperial anthropology, racial ‘science’, and the imposition of colonising governance on the Aborigines of Port Phillip/Victoria between 1835 and 1888. It explores the way that particular, albeit contested, images of Aborigines ‘became legislative’. It surveys the declining influence of liberal and Evangelical ‘philanthropy’ at the end of the 1830s, the pragmatic moral slippages that transformed humanitarian gestures into colonial terror, and the part played by the Australians in the emergence of the concept of race as the chief vector of colonial power. (For complete abstract open document)
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    The cinematic mystical gaze: the films of Peter Weir
    Leonard, Richard James ( 2003-08)
    Peter Weir is one of Australia’s most critically acclaimed and commercially successful directors. Ever since Weirs feature film debut with The Cars that Ate Paris in 1974, his work has been explored for unifying themes. Scholars have analysed his films from many perspectives: the establishment of identification and identity especially through binary oppositions in the diegesis; the creation of an oneiric atmosphere as a way of exploiting the spectators dream experience; a clash of value systems; the ambiguous nature of narrative structure and character motivations leading to the creation of a sense of wonder; the experience of the protagonist placed in a foreign culture wherein conflict arises from social clashes and personal misunderstandings; and at the particular ways his films adapt generic codes in service of a discernible ideological agenda. . To the best of my knowledge there has been no study of the mystical element of Weirs work in relation to the construction of a cinematic mystical gaze or act of spectatorship. Within a culture defined by its secularity and a national cinema marked by quirky comedies and social realism, almost all of Weirs films have been described as mystical, arcane or interested in metaphysics. Such an observation could warrant no further investigation if it is held that this critical commentary is but hyperbole in its attempt to grasp what constitutes a Peter Weir film. If, however, language constructs meaning, then the recurrence of references to Weirs mysticism needs to be taken seriously to see what effect this might have exerted on the nature and structure of the Weir text. I will argue that the major consequence of Weirs fascination with the mystical has been the construction of a mystical mode of spectatorship. Furthermore, because other directors and films have been described in similar ways this study opens up a discussion about whether these observations about the mystical qualities in the viewing experience hold importance for other filmmakers, and theories of the gaze in the cinema.
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    Doctoring old age: a social history of geriatric medicine in Victoria.
    HUNTER, CECILY ELIZABETH ( 2003-02)
    The pattern of medical practice that emerged in Victoria, following the introduction of a national system of publicly subsidised voluntary hospital and medical insurance by the Liberal-Country Party Coalition government in the early 1950s, was dominated by the provision of individualised, curative medical services based upon a reductionist model of disease. Older adults, classified officially as aged according to age of eligibility for the Age Pension introduced in 1909 by the Commonwealth government, were prominent in this pattern of practice. The number of adults over the age of sixty-five increased over the early decades of the twentieth century, and the technical advances made in postwar medicine led to a growing clinical engagement with the degenerative diseases associated with old age. The growing medical involvement with old age , the basis of the specialist fields of medical practice that proliferated throughout the 1960s, was recognised as such only in relation to the work of general practitioners. Specialist practitioners defined their clinical engagement with old age in terms of pathologies of bodily organs or systems. In contrast, the special role of the GP in relation to elderly patients was defined in terms of that practitioners personal knowledge of patients as individuals. Formal designation of the general practitioner as specialist in caring for the sick aged was confined to the Pensioner Medical Service, a component of the national system of remuneration for medical services. Within this pattern of medical practice infirm old people, whose afflictions could not be readily resolved by curative medical services, occupied a residual category outside the field of active medical practice. When poverty compounded the difficulties experienced by these infirm old people they were categorised as a social problem to which the appropriate response was the provision of adequate infirmary beds through the charitable efforts of local communities. (For complete abstract open document)
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    Careers in captivity: Australian prisoner-of-war medical officers in Japanese captivity during World War II
    Hearder, Rosalind Shirley ( 2003-12)
    During World War II, 106 Australian medical officers were taken prisoner of war by the Japanese, along with 22,000 Australian troops and many thousands more British and Dutch. Over three and a half years, they accompanied work parties of Allied prisoners sent to camps all over southeast Asia and Japan, living in a variety of harsh and dangerous conditions. Despite the doctors’ efforts, one in three Australian POWs died in captivity. Of those who survived, most attributed this not to inner strength or to luck, but to the care of their medical personnel. Yet apart from the attention recently accorded to Sir Edward “Weary” Dunlop, who was only one of these doctors, the experiences and work of all Australian POW medical officers in World War II has been largely overlooked. Medical officers were crucial for the survival of Australian prisoners, both physically and psychologically. Doctors attempted to keep men of all nationalities alive with little medication, tools or diagnostic equipment, and battled a variety or medical conditions, starvation and systematic physical brutality from their captors. As survival became more difficult, the increased status and responsibilities of the doctors had significant ramifications for the military chain of command and for the burdens on the doctors themselves. This thesis explores many aspects of Australian POW doctors’ experience of captivity: the complexities of practising modern medicine without any of its tools; the development of unique strategies to combat a wide variety of environmental limitations and life-threatening medical conditions; the unique relationship between medical personnel and their captors; the relationships between Australian POW medical officers and combatant officers and a comparison with relationships in the British military in captivity; the daily dilemmas faced by doctors trying to reconcile their professional ethics with their military obligations, and how they coped with these responsibilities. Doctors’ continuing roles in the postwar lives of ex-POWs, and the influence captivity had on their own lives and careers after the war are also analysed. While examination of the influence of medical officers on other prisoners’ lives is important, studying their experience as a group in their own right is equally valuable. In this thesis, both these areas are investigated to bring a variety of perspectives to understanding the complexity and importance of Australian POW doctors’ captivity experience.
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    Divided we stand: the sexuality debate in the Uniting Church in Australia 1977-2000
    Hannah-Jones, Avril Margaret ( 2003)
    This thesis examines the way in which the (homo)sexuality debate conducted by the Uniting Church in Australia between 1977 and 2000 illuminates the nature of the Uniting Church. It makes use of sources including interviews with key participants, the reports, recommendations and minutes of Uniting Church councils and articles and letters in the Uniting Church media to reconstruct a debate that over twenty years became central to the way the Uniting Church understood itself. The thesis argues that it was the distinctive nature of the Uniting Church, its commitment to social justice, its conciliar structure, its emphasis on multiculturalism, its covenant with Aboriginal members of the Church and its focus on the importance of the individual, that enabled it, alone among mainstream Australian Christian denominations, to conduct a public and passionate sexuality debate. It examines each of these characteristics separately to illuminate the influence they have had on that debate. The thesis also argues that these same characteristics prevented the Church from making a final decision on the acceptance or rejection of homosexuality and left those on both sides of the debate dissatisfied. The Uniting Church continues to struggle with the limits of diversity in unity, or unity in diversity. This thesis also considers the influence that the `comings out' of Church members and ministers had on the sexuality debate. Without people publicly willing to identify as homosexual, the Uniting Church would never have debated sexuality to the extent that it did. However, this identifying was a complex process. People who identified as homosexual had other aspects of their identity ignored; while others found that a perceived conflict between their racial and sexual identities prevented them from coming out sexually. The thesis concludes by reflecting on the forms the sexuality debate may take in the future. While the uniqueness of the Uniting Church in Australia influenced the shape of the sexuality debate, making the Uniting Church's discussion of sexuality more candid than debates in other denominations, the solution that the Uniting Church has found to the dilemma of the conflict between unity and diversity resembles the solution found by the Anglican Church of Australia. Individual homosexual members of the Uniting Church share their sexual identity with those people and councils of the Church they feel they can trust, and so remain secure within the Church.