School of Culture and Communication - Theses
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ItemCosmopolitanism and fictionality in eighteenth-century literature : Montesquieu, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, and Oliver Goldsmith(University of Melbourne, 2007)
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ItemDivide and embody : the moment of putting pen to paper in J.M. Coetzee's Elizabeth Costello novels(University of Melbourne, 2007)
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ItemA fragile thing : marketing remote area Aboriginal art(University of Melbourne, 2005)This dissertation examines the marketing of Australian Aboriginal art from remote area communities with a particular focus on the new marketing practices that have evolved in response to government policies. I will argue that the pressures to achieve economic sustainability are leading art centres to put greater emphasis on business rather than artistic development. Indigenous communities do not view art centres solely as businesses, but as mechanisms for cross-generational and cross-cultural communication. I will argue that the marketing of their art is a means of communicating their culture to a broader audience as well as creating employment opportunities within their communities. Chapter 1 defines the role of art centres, examines the contribution of art centres and arts advisors in the marketing of Indigenous art, and explains the role of different tiers of government in creating the infrastructure for the Indigenous art market. Chapter 2 argues that the economic rationalist perspective disregards the cultural, social and environmental issues facing Indigenous communities. It traces the shaping of the Indigenous tine art market through government policy and funding programs, Then it examines the impact of government funding arrangements in skewing community priorities through three funding scenarios: the development of a culture centre, withdrawal of government subsidy from an art centre and the exhibition Balgo 4-04. Chapter 3 surveys approaches to the marketing of art that achieve cultural outcomes rather than business results recounting examples of innovative marketing from Warlayirti Artists Aboriginal Corporation (WAAC), which were initiated with both business and cultural objectives. Chapter 4 explores the motivations of Indigenous communities in establishing art centres. It traces the history of Turkey Creek and the formation of the Warmun Art Centre and its marketing strategies. Chapter 5 addresses the economic issues faced by art centres in competing with private dealers in the marketplace. This study reveals the uniqueness and fragility of art centres operating in remote areas. I argue that the art centres' existence, and the fundamental role they play in maintaining the integrity of the market place through their marketing strategies, is threatened by the business model. In so doing, I question the current direction of government policy.
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ItemEugene von Guerard and the science of landscape painting( 2007)Eugene von Guerard (1811-1901) is regarded as one of Australia's most important nineteenth century landscape painters. He was forty one when he arrived in Australia in 1852. His training, his contact with artists in Rome, Naples and Dusseldorf and his engagement with contemporary scientific thought in Europe shaped his response to the Australian landscape. In this thesis von Guerard's origins in Vienna and the role played by his artist-father in his early art practice are explored. The reconstruction of von Guerard's early life in Europe is based on the artist's sketchbooks and unpublished oil sketches. His training under Bassi in Rome (1830-32), his immersion in the German community of artists there, the significance of the Nazarene painters and the influence of Joseph Anton Koch for his career are examined. In Naples, where von Guerard lived and worked for six years, he painted with Pitloo and the School of Posillipo, he was introduced to Hackert's work and ideas and he undertook an extensive Sicilian expedition recorded in the sketchbooks of both father and son. In Naples von Guerard's interest in volcanic geology was ignited. Following the death of his father in 1836 von Guerard arrived in Dusseldorf 1838 where he studied landscape painting under Schirmer and Lessing, participating in their open air painting expeditions to the Neander Valley and the Eifel. He made studies volcanic phenomena in the Eifel, an important site for the emerging science of geognosy. In Dusseldorf he was exposed to the ideas of Humboldt and Carus, took sketching expeditions along the Rhine, met his future wife Louise Arnz and was a founding member of the Kunstlerverein Malkasten. An examination of the landscape paintings and lithographs that he produced during the almost thirty years he spent in Australia (1852-1882) indicates that Humboldt's ideas were the enduring imperative for von Guerard's journey to Australia. In a series of case studies von Guerard's career as a Humboldtian Reisekunstler is explored. Von Guerard's scientific interests were nurtured in mid-century Melbourne by the community of eminent German scientists resident there. His expedition to Kosciuszko with the eminent geophysicist, Georg von Neumayer, epitomized Carus's ideal of the complementary relationship between art and science. His interpretation of the volcanic Western District, prior to government geological surveys, was informed by his studies of parallel phenomena in Germany's Eifel region. In Victoria's fern gullies and the sub tropical rain forest of New South Wales von Guerard portrayed plant species from Humboldt's sixteen Urpflanzen in their natural groupings and environmental context. His album, Eugene von Guerard's Australian Landscapes, was recognized by the geologist of Novara expedition fame, Ferdinand von Hochstetter in Vienna in 1870 for its geological and botanical content. Carus and Humboldt looked for a poetic response to nature, one that would communicate a sense of the inner life of the subject and this von Guerard achieved through the sensitivity of his touch, the honesty of his response to nature and the compositional geometry of his works, works that brought Humboldt's vision of unity and interconnectedness to the Australian landscape.
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ItemChinese media spectacles in the new millennium: counternarratives of modernity in China( 2006)This thesis investigates the centrality of media spectacles in contemporary Chinese media culture, as sites of contestation over identity, citizenship and ethics. It examines four media spectacles - the media event of the new millennium celebrations, the news event of SARS reportage, the media stories about AIDS and SARS by new media users, and the media campaign war between Falun Gong and the Chinese state - to show how such contestation occurs in the interplay between the state and the non-state. It argues that the praxis to define identity, citizenship and ethics is not only in contestation (featuring resistance and opposition), but also in conjunction (characterized by mutual accommodation and appropriation) between the state and the non-state. Chinese modernity is produced in such interplay. This thesis is an interdisciplinary study of Chinese media culture, which combines theories from media studies and critical theory with those from China studies, particularly cultural studies in and about China. Chapter One examines trajectories of studies on Chinese media and culture within the context of China's structural transformations in the post-Mao era. It also offers conceptual discussions of counter narratives of modernity as a tripartite concept and Chinese media spectacles in relation to the thematic structure of the thesis. Chapter Two examines the interplay of the state and the non-state through a case study of the new millennium celebrations. It argues that the interplay produces a rejuvenation millennialism that harbingers China's second coming in the third millennium. This rejuvenation millennialism is a hybrid discourse of nostalgia, nationalism, and utopianism, all of which require a post as their signifier. Chapter Three uses SARS reportage as a case study to examine the intellectual politics of Chinese journalists in their interplay with the state and the society. It shows how journalists use strategies of double-time narration to mediate the different logics that are imposed upon them. It argues that mediation journalism defines and confines contemporary Chinese journalism. Chapter Four studies media stories about AIDS (the case of Li Jiaming) and SARS (the cases of Sun Zhigang and SMS rhymes about SARS) that are produced, circulated and consumed by Internet and mobile phone users in urban China. It shows how new media users are able to re-configure their subjectivities through the interplay with the state and intellectual/journalist communities. It argues that by allowing the reformation of political subjectivities, talking, linking and clicking has become an important means of exercising citizenship for the subjects of postsocialist China. Chapter Five examines Falun Gong's media campaign war with the state, with the focus on their representations of the body, in order to argue that the contestation between the state and the non-state constitutes a crisis not only for body politics but also for ethics. Falun Gong represents an historical force to split the ethics of the self and the nation from the politics of the state. Representing four aspects of counter narratives of modernity in China, these four media spectacles will inform Chinese politics, culture, society and everyday life in the 21st century.
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ItemConsuming illusions: the magic lantern in Australia and Aotearoa/New Zealand 1850-1910( 2003-09)This thesis maps the existence, extent and diverse applications of the magic lantern in the Australasian colonies and brings to light a cultural practice that had remained largely invisible in histories of photography, cinema, and popular culture in nineteenth century Australasia. The thesis demonstrates that the magic lantern was popular as entertainment on both a private, domestic and a public scale. It traces its widespread adoption in two broad institutional contexts, the educational and the religious, and shows how this wide-ranging practice and consumption was supported by developing social and commercial infrastructure in the colonies and a network of touring lanternists. It argues that the magic lantern located the Australasian colonial culture within a global one centred around the consumption of visual technology and an international exchange of images. Colonial audiences were not, however, merely the passive recipients of a globalised imagery or culture. They were active contributors to it, constructing their own meanings in response to imported images. The thesis argues that, while the magic lantern functioned to affirm a sense of imperial identity in both colonisers and the colonised, it was adapted locally to the creation of colonial, intercolonial and regional identities, as an alternative to a dominant Eurocentric mass-mediated world view. Colonial practitioners applied this powerful medium to the generation of images at a local level that reveal an enthusiasm for colonial events and stories, a sense of place, and a celebration of local identity on the big screen.
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ItemAsian scopic modernities: alternative visibilities of transnational Chinese masculinity in global cinema( 2006)This thesis examines transnational Chinese masculinity as the articulation of Asian scopic modernities in contemporary Hong Kong, Hollywood and mainland Chinese films. Transnational Chinese masculinity is a transborder formation of Chinese male representations that occurs across national boundaries via dispersed networks of production, distribution, and consumption. These representations constitute the modernity of transnational Chinese masculinity. This thesis investigates significant cinematic events that contribute to these new conditions of visibility: the popularity of Hong Kong actors Leslie Cheung and Tony Leung who embody marginalised paradigms of masculinity in Asia; the crossovers of Hong Kong stars into Hollywood; and the advent of Zhang Yimou's alternative blockbuster films and Quentin Tarantino's trans-Asian films. These cinematic events form part of a mosaic of visual modernities in Asia - what is herein defined as Asian scopic modernities. “Asian scopic modernities" refers to the revolutionary transformations of visual relations in Asia that result in a plurality of modern scopic regimes. The transformations occur in various areas of cultural production in a complex relationship to modernity as a societal, cultural, political, and historical phenomenon. Asian scopic modernities are alternative visual regimes constituted by the disjunctive global forces or Asian regionalism, Chinese crossovers, and Chinese translocalisms. Each of these forces foregrounds a logic of visuality that destabilises the Chinese male subject uniquely--these logics are identification, mimesis, and becoming. Each of these logics is accompanied by corresponding corporealisations: the charismatic, the mimetic, and the becoming-Chinese bodies. These bodies subvert the dominant scopic regime of patriarchal Chinese masculinity through resubjectivisation in the public domestic, embodied processes or de-mirroring, and the temporal deterritorialisation or Chineseness.
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ItemPostmonologue: politics and parody in performance( 2007-12)This thesis examines the reinvention and resurgence of the monologue as a contemporary performance mode. It focuses on four pioneering practitioners: Laurie Anderson, Spalding Gray, Karen Finley and Anna Deavere Smith. The study reviews historical developments in monologue and analyses contemporary innovations made to the form. It also responds to debate on the use of postmodern aesthetic techniques in performance, as a means of critically engaging with and commentating on Western, specifically American, culture and politics. The hypothesis of this study is that monologue, as it is examined in this work, is a biopolitical form. It is biopolitical, as this analysis will show, in the sense that it is a linguistic, communicational and creative response to the conditions of global capitalism in the West. The study argues that the term monologue is increasingly inadequate to the discussion of these new forms of solo speech and performance and proffers the term “post-monologue” as a means of furthering consideration of the monologue beyond the terms of current understandings. It opens the way towards future manifestations of the form that offer critically effective, and affective, commentary on world events.
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ItemContemporary art: the key issues: art, philosophy and politics in the context of contemporary cultural production( 2007)This submission comes in two parts; the written dissertation, Contemporary art: the key issues, and the exhibition Melbourne - Moderne. When taken together they present a discourse on the conditions facing contemporary art practice and one artist’s response to these conditions in the context of Melbourne 2003-2007. (For complete abstract open document)
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Item(Re)Presenting the Victorians: history, historiography and the Victorian past in contemporary historical fiction( 2007-03)This thesis examines representations of the Victorian era in a series of contemporary historical fictions by Graham Swift, A.S. Byatt, Helen Humphreys and Gail Jones. Situating these novels in terms of both their generic heritage and in terms of their representation of the Victorian past specifically, this thesis demonstrates that the texts’ exploration of nineteenth-century strategies of historical recollection evinces an awareness of the problematics involved in seeking and achieving historical knowledge, while remaining nonetheless committed to the possibility and the value of striving for that knowledge. This investment in historical recollection is largely elided in current scholarship about contemporary historical fictions which foregrounds the problematisation of representation and does not adequately account for the ways in which these texts do re-member the past. This thesis also adds to the critical discussion of these texts a focus on which particular images of the Victorian era they produce and to what ends. In the first chapter, an exploration of the claim to historical recollection traditionally made by history, fiction, and historical fiction, treats these as distinct but overlapping discourses that share the goal of remembering the past, and enables the suggestion that the texts are committed to discovering the manifold ways in which the past can be remembered and represented. In Chapter Two, an examination of the appropriation of “Victorian” throughout the twentieth century in our cultural, political, historical and literary discourses opens up the question of what characteristics, attributes, and ideals have been considered Victorian since the period ended. And, what attitudes toward the past have coloured twentieth-century representations of the era. I argue that these novels posit the inherence of the Victorian past in contemporary culture, not as seamless continuity but as a series of flashes and repetitions that suggest the alterity of the past, its difference, while also, paradoxically, producing a shock of recognition. In Chapter Three, a critical reading of Graham Swift’s Waterland confronts the late twentieth-century historiographic crisis, which posits the narrativity of history and the uncertainty of historical knowledge, but it shows, too, that the novel is infused also with the desire to know and re-create the past. This desire is naturalised as a vital force integral to the living of life and the pursuit of the past is cast as necessity. In the fourth chapter, an examination of the romanticised relationship between the literary text and its reader in A.S. Byatt’s Possession: A Romance suggests that Byatt utilises a particular version of the Victorian period to resituate the literary text at the centre of historical knowledge. Finally, the exploration of the use of Victorian visual technologies in Gail Jones’ Sixty Lights and Helen Humphreys’ Afterimage suggests that rather than existing only in its textual traces, the Victorian past inheres in the present in the form of embodied memory, as a repertoire of shared cultural images, and as a series of repetitions. Together, these textual analyses demonstrate that the novels’ re-presentation of the Victorian era stems from a desire to re-member the period as part of our shared history. These novels return to Victorian vocabularies of history, memory, and loss in order to recast historical inquiry as desire and to avow the enduring importance of historical recollection, as well as to explore the creative role the literary text can play in such recollection. The very prevalence of contemporary historical fictions today witnesses to both the desire for historical recollection and its importance, so that this thesis looks ahead, too, to the ways in which the field of literature can productively contribute to ongoing debates about what shall count as history, a question that haunts these fictions as it does contemporary culture.