School of Culture and Communication - Theses
Permanent URI for this collection
Search Results
1 - 10 of 10
-
ItemVariations of difference(University of Melbourne, 2009)
-
ItemSydney Dance Company: a study of a connecting thread with the Ballets Russes( 2009)This thesis addresses unexplored territory within a relatively new body of scholarship concerning the history of the Ballets Russes in Australia. Specifically, it explores the connection between the original Diaghilev Ballets Russes (1909- 1929) and the trajectories of influence of Russian ballets that visited Australia. This thesis addresses unexplored territory within a relatively new body of scholarship concerning the history of the Ballets Russes in Australia. Specifically, it explores the connection between the original Diaghilev Ballets Russes (1909- 1929) and the trajectories of influence of Russian ballets that visited Australia. This study sketches the origins of the Ballets Russes, the impact its launch made on dance in the West, and how it progressed through three distinguishable phases of influence. It summarises the important features of the visits to Australia of Russian ballet companies from Adeline Genee in 1913 to the culturally altering impact of the revived Ballets Russes companies over three extended tours between 1936 and 1940. It charts the formation of viable ballet companies in Australia, commencing with Kirsova in 1939 and Borovansky in 1940, to the Australian Ballet in 1962 and the Sydney Dance Company led by Murphy between 1976 and 2008. Drawing on distinctions between classical and contemporary dance, it attempts to demonstrate the groundwork of example established by the Russian ballet, and, particularly, the revived Ballets Russes visits up to 1940. Data for this thesis was drawn from a personal interview with Graeme Murphy, original documentary research in public collections in Australia, government and Sydney Dance Company archives, newspapers and secondary literature.
-
ItemHitler comedy / Hitlerhoff( 2009)The critical component of this thesis, “Hitler Comedy”, is a dissertation on the intersection between comedy theory in general, and the specific practice of Hitler comedy. Focusing on Bertolt Brecht’s play The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui (1941; directed by Heiner Müller in 1995), and Dani Levy’s film Mein Führer: the Truly Truest Truth About Adolf Hitler (2007), my argument critiques existing “instrumentalist” theories of comedy as didactic and morally reductive. Moving beyond prevailing conceptualisations of comedy as corrective and/or forgiving, my dissertation emphasises the centrality of pleasure, displeasure and disruption for audience members in the process of their experiencing Hitler comedies. The creative component of this thesis is a script and a DVD recording of Hitlerhoff, a theatre and multimedia work that combines the characters of Adolf Hitler and David Hasselhoff into a single hybrid figure. Hitlerhoff is a spectacular black comedy that uses comedy to entertain and unsettle, and to disrupt audience members’ expectations. Hitlerhoff is a practical demonstration of the ability of “irresponsible” comedy to act as a potent catalyst for “responsible”, ethically engaged discussions.
-
ItemTradition and innovation: official representations of Queen Victoria and Prince Albert by Franz Xaver Winterhalter( 2009)The thesis focuses on four sets of official portraits of Queen Victoria and Prince Albert, which were painted by the German-born elite portrait specialist Franz Xaver Winterhalter (1805-1873) between 1842 and 1859. These portraits are examined in detail and are placed within the contexts of the existing scholarship on Franz Xaver Winterhalter, British portrait painting of the 1830s and 1840s, and the patronage of portraiture in Britain during the reigns of William IV and Queen Victoria. The thesis compares and contrasts these works with official representations of Queen Victoria and her husband by British artists; and examines the concept of “gender reversal” within the accepted notion of marital pendants by highlighting Winterhalter’s innovations in the genre of official portraiture.The thesis challenges the perception that Winterhalter’s employment at the court of Queen Victoria was due to the Queen’s alleged penchant for “all things German” by placing Winterhalter’s portraits within the context of the British Royal Collection. It examines the reasons for the artist’s success at the British court, accentuating among others Winterhalter’s ability to conceptualise in his portraits of Prince Albert the hierarchically-complex position of the Prince Consort. The overarching arguments of the thesis focus on two propositions - that by employing a foreign artist as her official image maker, Queen Victoria acquired ultimate control over the production, distribution and popularisation of her own imagery; and that this patronage is illustrative of the emergence of a royal and aristocratic international iconography that overrode the competing concept of ‘national’ schools of art.
-
ItemMeeting the aesthetic's impossible demands: the authorial idealism of George Gissing and Oscar Wilde( 2009)This thesis examines Oscar Wilde, George Gissing and the challenges of aesthetic authorship in the literary marketplace of the 1890s. Using Pater’s formulation of the aesthetic as a basis for my understanding, I argue that the commodity-driven changes that transformed the literary marketplace at the end of the nineteenth century created insurmountable obstacles for authors working within the aesthetic ideal. I examine the conflict between the demands of the aesthetic and those of the literary market through two specific notions of ‘utility’. In the first instance, following Regenia Gagnier’s The Insatiability of Human Wants, I explore the seemingly opposed notions of economic utility and aesthetic authorship and how they appear to merge, with examples from the fictional prose of Wilde and Gissing. I then explore the public’s use of the aesthetic, which, I argue, is discernible in the celebrity-status of these authors; in particular, I focus on the growing need for authors to perform for their public—a need which signals a shift in the public’s consumption of art away from the literary work and towards the author himself. As both forms of utility are essential aspects of literary production, yet also pose unaesthetic demands on the author, I examine how Wilde and Gissing respond to these challenges through their literary prose. Taking The Picture of Dorian Gray [1891] and New Grub Street [1891] in addition to Gissing’s The Whirlpool [1897] and Born In Exile [1892] and Wilde’s “The Remarkable Rocket” [1888] and “The Soul of Man Under Socialism” [1891], alongside both authors’ letters and contributions to journals and magazines of the day, I reveal how their aesthetic idealism shapes their writing in an oppositional manner. Despite the overt differences between Wilde and Gissing, I also find striking similarities in their positioning as aesthetic authors in the late-Victorian literary field. By doing so, my thesis comprehensively examines how both authors mediate their aesthetic ideals in the literary marketplace of the 1890s.
-
ItemThe roving party: extinction discourse in the literature of Tasmania( 2009)The nineteenth century discourse of extinction – a consensus of thought primarily based upon the assumption that ‘savage’ races would be displaced by the arrival of European civilisation – provided the intellectual foundation for policies which resulted in Aboriginal dispossession, internment, and death in Tasmania. For a long time, the Aboriginal Tasmanians were thought to have been annihilated. However, this claim is now understood to be fanciful. Aboriginality is no longer defined as a racial category but rather as an identity that has its basis in community. Nevertheless, extinction discourse continues to shape the features of modern literature about Tasmania. The first chapter of this dissertation will examine how extinction discourse was imagined in the nineteenth century and will trace the parallels that contemporary fiction about contact history shares with it. The novels examined include Doctor Wooreddy’s Prescription for Enduring the Ending of the World by Mudrooroo, The Savage Crows by Robert Drewe, Manganinnie by Beth Roberts, and Wanting by Richard Flanagan. The extinctionist elements in these novels include a tendency to euglogise about the ‘lost race’ and a reliance on the trope of the last man or woman. The second chapter of the dissertation will examine novels that attempt to construct a representation of Aboriginality without reference to extinction. These texts subvert and ironise extinction discourse as a way of breaking the discursive continuities with colonialism and establishing a more nuanced view of Aboriginal identity in a post-colonial context. Novels analysed here include Drift by Brian Castro, Elysium by Robert Edric, and English Passengers by Matthew Kneale. However, in attempting to arrive at new understandings about Aboriginality, non-Aboriginal authors are hindered by the epistemological difficulties of knowing and representing the Other. In particular, they seem unable to extricate themselves from the binaries of colonialism.
-
ItemNews "Outlook" in international broadcasting: a case study of Radio Australia's Connect Asia program( 2009)The main proposition of this thesis is that the news media serve as public connectors in sustaining and stabilizing national citizens’ transnational public connection to the global public sphere. The term transnational public connection refers to civic orientation to affairs beyond national borders. This approach builds on Couldry et al.’s (2006, 2007)’s notion of nationally based “public connection”. This thesis contends that in order to fulfill such a role, the news media need to provide international news with a transnational outlook, which interprets and describes international events and affairs in relation to different countries, the region and ultimately the globe. Considering different factors affecting international news reporting, this thesis posits that news content carried by international broadcasters would generally have a broader outlook than national news media. Hence it focused its effort on examining one type of international broadcaster: government-funded shortwave radio. This thesis argues that shortwave radio broadcasting is still relevant in today’s multimedia environment. This thesis contends that shortwave radio broadcasting functions as a crucial supplementary “external public connector” in connecting publics located in the world’s less developed regions and/or under repressive regimes to the global public sphere. Therefore it is important for them to incorporate transnational news outlook in their news reporting. This thesis argues that shortwave radio broadcasters’ core mission of carrying out government public diplomacy does not necessarily act as an impediment to their incorporating a transnational outlook in their news reporting. It proposes that the changing notion of public diplomacy is theoretically intertwined with the concept of transnational public connection; hence it is potentially an impetus for news with transnational outlook to emerge. But for such potential to be fully realized, this thesis argues that the broadcasting stations needs to have certain levels of editorial independence and be able to balance the interests of its home country and target region in its news coverage. Using Australia’s international shortwave broadcaster, ABC Radio Australia as a case study, this research attempts to discover whether international news with a transnational outlook could be found and to try to define the parameters of such a type of news. Operationalizing a three dimensions approach proposed by Berglez (2008) in a quantitative content analysis, this study examined news content broadcast by Radio Australia’s flagship news program Connect Asia over a period of nine weeks. It found that news with a transnational outlook does exist in Connect Asia’s news coverage and the emergence of this type of news is closely linked with news topics. This type of news is more likely to emerge in news topics such as environment and health. It also found that news with a transnational outlook comprises a very small proportion of the totality of Connect Asia’s news coverage. The frequency of such news is limited by Connect Asia’s overwhelming focus on the news topic of politics. This thesis discusses several contributory factors which resulted in Connect Asia’s overall emphasis on politics and contends that government-funded international broadcasters, as well as other international broadcasters might need to de-politicize and broaden the scope of their news coverage in order to further incorporate a transnational outlook.
-
ItemCreative writing piece; Reaction time, and critical essay; Wide open roads, landscape, place and belonging in Australian outback narratives( 2009)The thesis contains two components, providing both a creative and critical exploration of the relationship between the subject and place. The creative work, Reaction Time explores how its characters seek particular settings that will affect their sense of place and belonging in certain ways. The critical essay, “Wide Open Roads: Landscape, Environment and Belonging in Twentieth Century Outback Narratives”, explores how the knowledge of the political and cultural conditions of place are produced as affecting the subject’s personal relationship to place in late twentieth century outback narratives. The creative piece, Reaction Time, tells the story of Joel who is returning to Australia after the death of her mother. Joel and her sister have never been able to reconcile their fierce, academic mother of the past with the trivial, domestic self she became in the years after her sudden retirement to her rural Tasmanian home. Throughout the story Joel finds she is trying to realise the grief of losing of a mother she never completely understood, while also dealing with her feelings of alienation both in her mother’s home in Tasmania, and in Melbourne, where the spectre of old relationships she left behind long ago maintains her sense of unease in a place she once thought of as home. The essay, Wide Open Roads analyses three novels published toward the end of the twentieth century to examine the way the characters’ relationships to place and landscape are constructed. It argues that the outback, couched in its newfound cultural role as an untouched, pristine pilgrimage point for spiritual journeys, has come to be considered a ‘sacred’ space for all Australians. Using ecocriticism and postcolonial theory as a theoretical framework, the essay discusses how, while late twentieth century outback narratives constructed characters whose desire to traverse the outback, or sense of attachment to it, was deep, the convergent social influences of environmentalism and Indigenous land rights and a growing postcolonial consciousness have propelled writers to depict more problematic and complex relationships with place than were evident in past outback narratives.
-
ItemConvergence, concern and the "real" girl: teenage girls' everyday media cultures( 2009)This is a revisionist audience study examining the everyday media cultures of twenty-four young teenage girls from Melbourne in Australia. It argues that in an era of proliferated and convergent media, audience studies cannot restrict its vision to a single media text, technology, or genre. It takes a broad approach to girls’ media culture and considers the full range of media that girls engage with on a daily basis. It identifies a hegemonic discourse about girls’ media use which it calls “(feminist) new media effects”. This anxiety takes as its key concern the proliferation of media and mediated representations of girls across the spaces of everyday life. (Feminist) new media effects discourse renders girls passive and unable to cope with such media presence without the guidance of adults to teach them how to correctly engage with the media. In order to challenge this construction, the thesis examines participants’ engagements with a range of convergent media texts and technologies, including Internet social networking, repeat DVD spectatorship, young female celebrities, and discourses of moral panic. It shows how mediated representations of girls across these sites are embedded in the fabric of participants’ everyday lives. Apart from highlighting the challenge that this poses to the practice of conducting audience research, it demonstrates the ways that girls both resist and incorporate mediated constructions of femininity within their everyday negotiations of teenage girlhood. It argues that the representation of girlhood constructed in (feminist) new media effects discourse – the vulnerable girl overwhelmed by toxic media messages – is key to girls’ media culture. My findings indicate that participants are primarily invested in resisting this construction of youthful femininity.
-
ItemDead drunk( 2009)My concern in Dead Drunk is not simply the subject matter of death, it is rather with the representation of drunks in the form of fictional phantoms in The Glass Canoe and Bliss as rendering the death drive visible. Close scrutiny of the representation of the drunk in Australian fiction, as discussed in relation to The Glass Canoe, and Bliss reveals a ‘constant recurrence of the same thing’ rendered uncannily visible. On inspection, what becomes visible is recurring deaths and subsequent resurrections. For the ghostly Australian drunk there is always the possibility of resurrection, but that resurrection is usually in the form of another drink. A drink promises resurrection, but instead delivers a return or recurrence of the drunken, ghostly state. The presence of drinking and drunks in Australian fiction can be described as a haunting, the ghostly drunks as repetition of an anachronistic past. It is the repetition of the representations of drunks as ghostly presences in Australian fiction that is telling. Utilising Sigmund Freud’s theories developed in ‘The Uncanny’ (1919) and Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1920), I propose that if the uncanny is an encounter with one’s origins and the death drive is a backward looking return to origins; the drunks are a past that is repeatedly encountered in an uncanny moment. Utilising the modalities of the uncanny in regards to The Glass Canoe reveals the guises of the drunken ghosts. Making reference to an Australian colonial past, founded on intoxicant use and abuse the dissertation suggests alcoholism as a white man’s dreaming. A discussion of Bliss links the uncanny ghosts to a registration or surfacing of the death drive. In conclusion I suggest the psychoanalytic concept of sublimation as both an explanation for and a release from the symptomatic repetition. Floundering, the creative work, is an extract from a novel in progress. The section presented is the opening to the novel. The narrative unfolds during one day, New Year’s Eve, and involves the interactions between the two brothers Jordy and Tom, and Old Fat. Loretta, the boys’ absent mother, haunts the novel and drives the narrative. Although the creative work does not explicitly depict dead drunks as discussed in the dissertation, the theory has by necessity permeated the creative, and the creative permeated the theory, forming a chiasma – a crossing over between strands of thought.