School of Culture and Communication - Theses
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ItemThe purpose of futility: leadership in Australian Great War narratives( 2011)The Purpose of Futility identifies and explores unique aspects of the Australian literary commemoration of the Great War. In particular, this thesis investigates the representation of leadership in Australian Great War prose narratives, showing how Australian leaders are depicted as purposeful through three major strategies: the Australian leaders’ investment of impossible or suicidal tasks with meaning; the Australian soldiers’ continued self-conception as a volunteer, egalitarian citizen army; and the Australian attitude to the war as work rather than a crusade. The thesis is presented in two parts, reflecting the dual research methodology of theoretical investigation and creative response. The theoretical component explores literary and historical sources as well as theoretical frameworks of leadership. In this section, Australian Great War narratives are considered against the critically-acclaimed benchmark of the canonical Great War novels such as Robert Graves’ Goodbye To All That (1929) and Siegfried Sassoon’s Memoirs of an Infantry Officer (1930), and a number of important differences are delineated and discussed. The central pivot of this section is the discussion of leadership tropes, which demonstrate how Australian narratives encompass purposeful leaders in the context of an horrific and costly war. The creative component consists of selected sections from a novel which interrogates leadership’s complexities as they are experienced through the life story of an AIF volunteer who returns from the war to face a different life, armed with new perspectives and understandings.