School of Culture and Communication - Theses
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ItemDaryl Lindsay : vision for Australian art(University of Melbourne, 2008)
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ItemThe characterisation of oil paintings in tropical southeast Asia(University of Melbourne, 2008)
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ItemClosing the distance. Identity and self-representation in the Japanese literature of three Korean writers in Japan: Kim Sok Pom, Lee Hoe Sung and Kim Ha Gyong.( 2008)The theme of cultural identity is topical in the academy and society at large but it is especially significant for the Korean diaspora in Japan. This thesis investigates the means by which Japan-based second-generation Korean novelists Kim Sok Pom, Lee Hoe Sung and Kim Ha Gyong characterize 'zainichi Korean identity' in six semi-autobiographical novels written in Japanese between 1957 and 1972. I argue that a close reading of The Death of the Crow (1957) and The Extraordinary Ghost Story of Mandogi (1971) by Kim Sok Pom, The Cloth Fuller (1971) and For Kayako (1970) by Lee Hoe Sung1, and Frozen Mouth (1966) and Delusions (1971) by Kim Ha Gyong allows for an in-depth understanding of the experiences of Koreans born in Japan before 1945 and the effects of racial oppression on minority identity formation. Specifically, I evaluate and compare the methods by which ethnicity and images of the self are articulated by these three writers in their creative fiction. The thesis argues that, despite the diversity of the views the three writers off er on ethnicity and cultural identity, a theme which they all share is how to overcome the problem of identity fragmentation - the problem of negotiating incongruous hybrid Japanese/Korean identities. Ambivalent experiences of belonging or dislocation, vis-a-vis both Japan and Korea proper, surface as a continual source of concern for second-generation zainichi Korean writers and their protagonists. How hybridity and difference are articulated as a lived experience by Kim Sok Pom, Lee Hoe Sung and Kim Ha Gyong is at the heart of this thesis. Their protagonists are Japanese-appearing Korean men, who move between the two worlds of Japanese and (zainichi) Korean culture, and search for a unified identity, or at least contemplate what such an identity might be. In effect, they attempt to 'close the distance' between competing and conflicting images of the self while at the same time pointing to a new politics of identity and sense of belonging, where diversity no longer suggests distance but the possibilities inherent in a truly inclusive society.
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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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ItemSeeing in unordinary ways: magical realism in Australian theatre( 2008)This thesis introduces three emerging Australian playwrights, Lally Katz, Ben Ellis and Kit Lazaroo, who are interrogating the politics of culture, identity and gender through the application of magic realism to theatre. This thesis contends that magic realist theatre offers a public site for the cultural mediation of binaries: self and other, margin and centre, life and death, western and non-western, pragmatic and spiritual. Australia, because of its history, geographical location and cultural positioning provides a fascinating case study.
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ItemForecasts of the past: globalisation, history and contemporary realism( 2008)This thesis takes issue with Fredric Jameson’s suggestion that contemporary science fiction is sending back “more reliable information [about current political and economic organisation] than an exhausted realism” and it develops an alternative Marxist defense of contemporary realist fiction. Can realism's techniques adequately represent the complexity of contemporary political organization? The thesis presents readings of key realist texts — by Pat Barker, Maurice Gee, Kerstin Hensel, James Kelman and David Peace — testing their potential to produce the knowledge of history, industrial politics and the metropolis traditionally central to literary realism’s concerns. (For complete abstract open document).
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ItemMoving images, the museum and a politics of movement: a study of the museum visitor( 2008)This dissertation is an investigation of visitor experiences in the Screen Gallery at the Australian Centre for the Moving Image (ACMI), in Melbourne. This thesis argues that visitors’ interaction with moving image art can yield expressions of agency which not only enrich the experience of visiting a new museum, but also find application beyond an institutionalised environment as a praxis for negotiating the conditions of everyday life. I term the articulation of this praxis a politics of movement. (For complete abstract open document).
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ItemArt at auction: price formation and the creation of superstars in the Australian art auction market( 2008)This thesis shows that prices generated by the art auction system can be anything but mysterious despite the common perception that art, as a commodity, somehow falls outside the norm compared with other economic systems. Far from being the by-product of an enigmatic process, auction prices evolve directly from the mechanisms that shape the market and the human agents and institutions that dominate the system. Using the non-Indigenous Australian art market as a case study, this thesis offers a new, cross-disciplinary model that draws on economic and art-historical methodologies as a means of examining and explaining price formation within the art auction market. The research presented shows that the Australian auction market is dominated by a very small number of artists who are responsible for generating the lion’s share of revenue. Referencing cultural economic theory, I describe these artists as ‘superstars’. I discuss the superstar effect as it is defined in economic terms and show how it manifests in the art auction record. I map the existence of a superstar class of artists at the high-end of the Australian art auction market and consider the implications of this for art’s investment potential. Most market commentaries focus on the top-end of the market. This study uses as its starting-point a dataset of over 2,500 artists active at all levels of the secondary-market compiled from auction records covering the period 1972-2004, including artists who registered just a single auction appearance. This presents a broad overview of the market that offers new insights into the relationship between levels of professional accomplishment and auction price. Artists’ auction records and biographies are examined in detail in addition to agglomerate data for the market as a whole. This examination presents a picture of the key events, agents and institutions that shaped the auction market in Australia during the ‘boom’ period that commenced in the late 1990s. The premise of the ‘superstar’ artist is perpetuated and enshrined by the way these factors interact with the art auction system and place upward pressure on prices. The model of the art auction market presented in this thesis suggests that the prices it generates can be formed by activities that have little if anything to do with genuine competitive forces. As I will show, this can have implications for the efficiency and sustainability of the market.
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ItemPierre Huyghe and the association of freed time: historiography in the open present( 2008)This thesis is the first critical monograph on the major contemporary French artist Pierre Huyghe. It provides a detailed account of Huyghe's practice from the 1980s through to his most recent projects, with specific attention to the historiographic dimensions of his works. This focus is without precedent in existing accounts of the artist. The major research finding is methodological: Huyghe's practice is demonstrated to present a model of contemporary historiography capable of responding to what Huyghe calls the "open present." This model is reactionary, in that it counters amnesia and the problematic validation of the future by the present (determinism and causality). It also facilitates the possible "inhabitation" of the now without abandoning the imprints of the past. This thesis defines history as an amalgam of three, inter-related modes of temporality: the time of the market, the time of the image and the time of duration. By examining these three elements as they appear in Huyghe's work, an understanding of the state of "contemporary history" can be reached.