School of Culture and Communication - Theses
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ItemCruel visions: Artaud and late twentieth century theatre and film( 2013)This thesis centres on Antonin Artaud's The Theatre and its Double (1938), one of the most influential collections of theatre writing of the last century. The thesis aims to apply a critical framework of three concepts discussed in 'The Theatre of Cruelty' to analysis of three texts in late twentieth century theatre and film. The thesis will discuss the ongoing relevance of Artaud's manifesto through an investigation of works by playwrights Martin Crimp's The Treatment (1997) and Anthony Neilson's Normal (1990) and the filmmaker Todd Solondz's Happiness (1999). The creative section of this thesis is an original script that utilises Artaud's influence on late twentieth century theatre. The script is based on the life of Sue Lyon, the 'Lolita' of Stanley Kubrick's 1962 film.
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Item'Transborder' journalism in the 19th Century: a case study of the first Chilean newspaper and the formation of a network of public( 2013)This study is a contribution to the historiographical debate of global communications. It proposes to rethink the public communication in historical contexts of cultural and societal globalisation processes. This thesis examines the conventional use of public sphere paradigm and suggests the dimension of ‘transborder networks’ as a conceptual framework for addressing historical spheres of public communication. In so doing, the traditional focus on the national scope, embedded in the Habermasian public sphere model, is replaced with a globalised one. This perspective unveils the densities of ‘transborder networks’ of public communication in the early 19th Century. The historical period has been described by Roland Roberston as the ‘Incipient Phase’ of globalisation. It could be argued that this phase has not only been shaped by emerging national patterns but also, specifically, by the interrelations of newspapers that circulated in different societal context across Europe, the United States and Latin America. To better understand the social processes dialectically unleashed by this ‘transborder networks’ of media, this study has conducted a Critical Discourse Analysis of articles published on La Aurora de Chile (LACH). This is the first Chilean newspaper which circulated in 1812 and 1813. Through analysing a selected sample of international news, the study provides empirical evidence which allows to create a more subtle historical perspective of the emergence of media in one Latin American country. The results reveal a sphere of public communication which is situated in a distinctive historically dialectical relationship between media, the publics and state institutions.
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Item"A great blooming, buzzing confusion": language, thought & embodied experience in the writing of Lyn Hejinian( 2013)Lyn Hejinian is considered one of the more significant members of the Language poets, a group of late twentieth century American poets who take language as a formative aspect of human existence. Literary critics have largely studied Hejinian’s poetry and essays in that context, using theories based in linguistics and post-structuralism to assert that Hejinian’s writing celebrates the powers of language to shape the world. Hejinian often advocates what she refers to as an ‘open’ text, in which the author uses various techniques to invite the reader to participate in the construction of meaning. However, studies of Hejinian’s work have tended not to question why she believes this embrace of openness is necessary. What is it about language, and its role in the human experience of the world, that allegedly compels this openness? This study attempts to answer this question by examining how Hejinian characterises the human condition: how we speak, how we think, and how both language and thought influence and are influenced by our embodied experience of the world. Such a question calls for a theoretical framework that incorporates concepts from disciplines such as linguistics, post-structuralism, cognitive science and phenomenology. This question also calls for a close reading of both Hejinian’s essays and her poetry, with particular focus on the essay ‘The Rejection of Closure’, which establishes her open poetics, and the prose poem memoir My Life, which is often considered to be Hejinian’s chief example of an open text. A careful analysis of these texts reveals that Hejinian’s writing does not merely celebrate the powers of language, but does so in spite of the failure of language to enclose in words the vast and uncertain nature of lived experience. Hejinian characterises the human condition as poised between an embodied presence in a vast, uncertain world and partial, provisional enclosures of that world through language. Her poetics is predicated on the belief that language can never reach perfect closure and completion because the lived world is neither closed nor complete. Hejinian is perhaps too emphatic in her complete rejection of closure, which is sometimes necessary, but her writing suggests that language can provide partial closures as well as express a sense of wonder, curiosity, playfulness and freedom about the world. This reading contributes an important qualification to previous readings of Hejinian, which have tended to aggrandise the role of language in shaping the world. The deployment of ideas from cognitive science also puts the human use of language in an evolutionary and biological context, which is hinted at in Hejinian’s writing but has previously been unexplored by her critics. For the first time, this study puts Hejinian’s work in relation to the recent turn in the humanities towards questions of biology and nature; in that sense this project will contribute to further research in the same area.
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ItemMerchants of pathos: confessional poetry, publicity, and privacy in cold-war America( 2013)The relationship between confessional poetry and cold-war culture in America is structurally important to our understanding of ongoing debates over the authenticity of the textual voice in confessional verse. Exploring the work of poets Robert Lowell, John Berryman, Sylvia Plath and Anne Sexton, this thesis provides an explanation for the tendency among both readers and critics to conflate the roles of poet and persona in assessments of confessional poetry. It is argued that the confessional poets deliberately manipulated the status of truth in their work to create the illusion of a publicly legitimate, yet authentically private self. This thesis does not, however, reduce confessional verse to simply poetic artifice. Rather, in the process of conflating poet and persona, the confessional poets fashioned an unprecedentedly complex culture of postmodern poetics. This thesis divides the poetic voice of confessional poetry into three sites of poetics, detailing how each complicates the status of truth in confessional verse. The first site, the ambiguity of confessional poetics, is characterized by the still-contested definition of confessional poetry and the indeterminate nature of persona in confessional verse. By blurring the distinction between autobiographical fact and poetic fiction, confessional poetry directly participated in national tensions over privacy by questioning the status of truth in acts of apparent revelation. Additionally, by applying rhetoric characteristic of the modern age of publicity, confessional poetry repeatedly advertises itself within the poetic text, acting to further blur the distinction between poet and persona. In the second site, lyric poetry, it is argued that lyric poetry’s long-established definitional connection to music allowed confessional poetry a dynamic relation to voice and sound. It is argued that the confessional poets utilized the inherent audibility of the lyric poem—in both live readings and recorded readings—to create the illusion of an authentic authorial event. In the third site, publicity, the role of the confessional poets as public figures is explored. Situating the themes of confessional poetry inside the larger privacy crisis of the cold-war era, this thesis illustrates the ways in which confessional poetry engaged with social and political tensions between public and private in order to complicate the status of its claims to truth. Noting the broad changes in post-war American culture, combined with an appreciation of the ambiguous status of truth in confessional poetry, this thesis illuminates the important role of confessional poetry in using the relationship between confession, publicity, national security, and privacy, to challenge ideas about the authenticity of poetic voice.
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ItemAfter the apology: the Australian gothic and reconciliation melancholia( 2013)This thesis discusses three Australian Gothic texts: the novel Bereft (2010) by Chris Womersley, Rachel Ward’s film Beautiful Kate (2009) and Andrew Bovell’s play When the Rain Stops Falling (2009). It investigates how these texts deploy the features of the Australian Gothic across contemporary literary, cinematic and theatrical forms. This thesis argues that each text interrogates the ongoing role that settler guilt plays in contemporary Australia from a distinctively non-Aboriginal perspective. As a result, this work suggests that these case studies can be read as Gothic allegories for an emerging ‘post-reconciliation’ Australian culture. The final component of this project is a play entitled Doomsday Devices. The play uses many of the conventions of the Australian Gothic in a way that suggests a further discussion of ‘post-reconciliation’ identity as outlined in the critical section of this thesis. The play is a ghost story set in Melbourne in the summer of 2015.
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Item'Gay, innocent and heartless': the ideal child in The Secret Garden( 2013)This thesis argues that the ideal child in Frances Hodgson Burnett’s novel, The Secret Garden (1911), is ultimately not a child but a young man capable of leading Britain into the future. It examines the figure of the ideal child within the context of the late Victorian and Edwardian period. My methodology involves the use of J. M. Barrie’s Peter and Wendy (1911) to identify the investments that were made in the ideal child figure, and to identify what threatens these investments. These investments reveal the ‘adult-child dynamic’, or the power relationship between adult desires and constructions of children. The thesis investigates the influence of the adult-child dynamic in the condemnation of particular kinds of children. I then apply these insights to analyse the narrative representation of Mary Lennox, Burnett’s female protagonist, comparing it with that of Colin Craven, her sickly cousin. The thesis also applies Michel Foucault’s study of the panopticon to the novel to reveal the function of the child in the adult-child dynamic, examining how Mary, a failed child, is transformed through the English, adult gaze into an acceptable child. By revealing who is given the authority to use the adult gaze, the thesis connects the adult-child dynamic with national and imperial discourse of early twentieth-century England. An examination of the meanings of food and air in the mental and physical transformations of the two children is also included. The narrative use of food and air is studied for its support of imperial values and discourses, as seen in the difference between Mary and Colin’s transformed bodies and attitudes. This reveals the ways in which the expectations of the two children differ: while Mary merely becomes more pleasing, Colin comes to embody hope for his community at Misselthwaite Manor. This, I argue, demonstrates that the novel’s primary concern is not Mary but Colin. It is Colin who, like the Lost Boys in Peter and Wendy, is freighted with the responsibility of representing the English nation and its future.
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ItemA queer theory of narrative: repetition, rereading, and graphic narrative( 2013)This thesis examines the relationship between, on the one hand, a ‘straight’ understanding of narrative development, and, on the other, the maintenance of a cultural presumption of heteronormativity, in three examples of graphic narrative. More specifically, this thesis considers how the former takes its shape from—and reinforces the inevitability of—a larger generational narrative that privileges heterosexuality as the default ideological template through which meaning is produced and received. Building on recent critical re-examinations of its literary importance, “A Queer Theory of Narrative: Repetition, Rereading, and Graphic Narrative” explores how graphic narrative engages an understanding of narrative development that deconstructs the grounds, the temporal logic, through which heterosexuality maintains its presumptive normativity. Working through a theory of repetition indebted both to comics criticism and deconstruction, this thesis examines how the presentation of time in Alan Moore’s and Dave Gibbons’s Watchmen (1986-1987) and Bill Willingham’s Fables (2005) queers the expectation that the end of narrative results in the reproduction of some sort of eternal truth. Confronting the reader with a form of narrative development that unfolds toward no certain future, Peter Milligan’s and Duncan Fegredo’s Enigma (1993) asks that the relationship between time and the truth be reread as something that is, in fact, unmotivated. Suggesting, in other words, that graphic narrative interrupts the inevitability of ‘straight’ reading, this thesis demonstrates how a closer look at its narrative structure impels the critical effort of queer literary studies to theorize temporalities alternate to those of heterosexual narrative histories.