School of Culture and Communication - Theses
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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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ItemUncollected verse: an analysis of the decline of the national poetry anthology( 2007)In this thesis I show that there has been a decline in the production of "national poetry anthologies" in Australia since the end of the 1990s and seek to understand the reasons behind this decline. The first chapter examines changes in the economics of publishing and asks how these impact on literary texts, including the poetry anthology. I argue that with the increasing influence of a neo-liberal, deregulated industry context, production is concentrated within a smaller number of firms and that these firms concentrate on titles that might become blockbusters and are reluctant to produce texts — like anthologies — which will never be bestsellers. This is in spite of the fact that, I argue, there remains demand for them. I consider other factors including the introduction of a GST in 2000; the arrival of Nielsen BookScan, also in 2000; changes at Oxford University Press in the late 1990s; and adjustments in Australia Council funding since 1996, which I argue have aided the decline. The second chapter looks at cultural changes that have threatened the legitimacy of the national poetry anthology, including the "new" reality of social fragmentation in Australia and moves within the intellectual environment to express a more complex, diverse image of national culture. The challenge posed to national poetry anthologies by thematic anthologies produced in the 1970s and 1980s is also considered. In Chapter Two, I go on to provide a close textual reading of the eight major national poetry anthologies produced between 1986 and 1998 by focusing on their "paratextual" apparatus, including the Introduction, the cover, the publisher's and anthologist's reputations and the critical reception of these works. In the past, commentaries have tended to look at the selection of poems or poets in an anthology but these paratextual elements shape our reading of the poems in powerful ways and so deserve careful examination. In considering these anthologies, I argue that national poetry anthologists in the 1980s and 1990s were, for the most part, unable to make the anthology reflect social diversity and this made the anthology appear out-dated and irrelevant to contemporary reality. In the conclusion I argue that there is a need for the form of the national poetry anthology to change in order to try to accommodate current social and intellectual conditions.
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ItemSex and power in Australian writing during the culture wars, 1993-1997( 2009)I address a selection of texts published in Australia between 1993 and 1997 which engage with feminist debates about sex and power. These texts are important, I argue, because they signpost the historical moment in which the culture wars and globalisation gained force in Australia. A key word in this thesis is ‘framing’. The debates which my texts engage with have (much like the culture wars in general) commonly been framed as conflicts between polarised political factions. These political factions have, in turn, been framed in terms of generations; that is, an ‘older’ feminism is pitted against a ‘newer’ feminism. Each generation of feminists supposedly holds quite different views about sex. I argue that my texts actually provide an insight into how various feminist perspectives on sex diverge and intersect with each other, as well as with certain New Right discourses about sex. My selected texts also suggest how the printed text has helped transport feminism within and outside Australia My texts fit into two broad genres, fiction and scholarly non-fiction. The texts are: Helen Garner’s The First Stone (1995), Sheila Jeffreys’ The Lesbian Heresy (1993), Catharine Lumby’s Bad Girls (1997), Linda Jaivin’s Eat Me (1995) and Justine Ettler’s The River Ophelia (1995). I engage with various critical responses to these texts, including reviews, essays and interviews with the authors. I draw also from a range of theoretical sources. These include analyses of the culture wars by the American theorist Lillian S. Robinson and the Australian scholars McKenzie Wark, David McKnight and Mark Davis. Davis has provided a useful overview of how the metaphor of ‘generational conflict’ circulated in Australian culture during the 1990s. I draw on Arjun Appadurai’s model of “global cultural flows” and Ann Curthoys’ history of feminism in Australia. I engage with research into the increasingly ‘globalised’ nature of Australian writing, as well as a number of feminist works on the relationship between sex and power