School of Culture and Communication - Theses
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ItemEdith Alsop, Artist( 2013)Edith Alsop (1871 – 1958) is now considered a minor twentieth century Australian artist, but during her some fifty years of artistic activity she was much more highly regarded. Her oeuvre covers sketches, drawings, watercolours, pastels, relief prints and book illustrations. She also produced posters, commercial art, friezes and some oil paintings. The University of Melbourne holds the largest public collection of Alsop’s works, located at The Ian Potter Museum of Art. My thesis will question why she has been forgotten. I will demonstrate an active and important artistic life and an almost textbook development as a professional artist. I find that Alsop suffered from the now well-documented fate of the invisibility of women artists from about 1940. From her oeuvre I pay particular attention to her prints as a small but distinct part of her artistic output. In the 1980s, women artists were being rediscovered. I believe that her lack of rediscovery results from her minor and erratic performance as a printmaker, her concentration on drawing and watercolour (as being ‘lesser than oils’) as her favoured mediums and her lack of visibility in public collections. This thesis is by far the most extensive research into this artist to date, and therefore illuminates her life and provides an important basis, or context, for the consideration of any of her art.
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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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ItemEconomics and the empathic imagination: a literary history of homo economicus through the Anglo-American novel( 2013)This thesis examines the interplay between economic theory and novelistic discourse as it converges in the portrayal of homo economicus in six Anglo-American novels. Adopting a transhistorical approach, through the juxtaposition of economic and literary texts that illuminate historical moments crucial to the development of both discourses from the eighteenth to the twenty-first century, the thesis argues that the novel is an evaluative medium that works to confirm and/or critique the figure of homo economicus. Beginning with Adam Smith’s seminal texts, The Theory of Moral Sentiments and The Wealth of Nations, and Henry Fielding’s A History of Tom Jones: a foundling, this thesis uses comparative analysis to investigate the transformations of the homo economicus model as it traverses through Ricardian economics and Jane Austen’s Sanditon; J.S. Mill and Charles Dickens’ mid-Victorian perspectives; Keynesianism and Mrs Dalloway’s exploration of post-war consumer impulses; the a/moralistic discourses of Friedrich von Hayek and Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged; and finally the virtual crises of the twenty-first century financial market and Don DeLillo’s Cosmopolis. Examining the economic and novelistic discourses comparatively, this thesis explores the manner in which the novel offers an investigation into and a critical account of the psychological, socio-cultural, and moral aspects of homo economicus that the economic vision of rational egoism often ignores. Recognising and examining the discourse of moral philosophy that political economic theory emerges from, and the emotional and imaginative insights of economic theory’s origins, my analysis will, simultaneously identify and investigate the category of the empathic imagination in the origins of political economic theory and the novel, and its implications for the development and understanding of homo economicus.
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ItemMarlowe and Ovid: translation, violence and desire( 2013)This thesis is a study of Christopher Marlowe’s reception of Ovid. It provides a close examination of Marlowe’s translation of Ovid’s Amores followed by a series of analyses of Marlowe’s ongoing use of Ovid in his poetic and dramatic works. It begins by outlining the historical, theoretical and literary backgrounds to Marlowe’s translation, focusing on Tudor translation theory, Elizabethan education and other Renaissance translators of Ovid. It then engages in a close and detailed analysis of Marlowe’s translation with couplet by couplet comparisons to Ovid’s original Latin. This analysis shows both Marlowe’s departures from accepted translation practice in terms of his use of metre and provision of extra-textual material and the meticulous and nuanced way in which he renders Ovid’s words in English. Marlowe carefully recreates both Ovid’s words and style in English and in doing so develops a poetic style which continues to exercise an influence on his original works. Marlowe’s early schooling in translating Ovid can then be seen in his later works, particularly in the portrayal of desire and eroticism. The love scenes of his plays almost all betray some Ovidian presence and the amatory material in Hero and Leander is based upon Ovid’s amatory works. One of the most Ovidian aspects of Marlowe’s amatory scenes is the intertwining of desire with violence. The experience of feeling desire and of being desired come laden with the threat of violence in Marlowe’s Ovidian passages. This is further linked to a portrayal of poetry as associated with both desire and violence. Creation is depicted as arising from strife and both are important for the experience of desire and this is seen most strongly in Hero and Leander. Marlowe’s means of thinking about these three processes stems largely from Ovid. Throughout these works, Marlowe’s use of Ovid is always mediated by his own reading of Ovid’s texts. The vision of what an Ovidian amatory world, Ovidian style and Ovidian techniques or devices constitute is always Marlowe’s vision of this. He both defines himself as an Ovidian poet and defines what it is to be an Ovidian poet.
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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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ItemOf conceptual deserts: a Deleuzian approach to Aboriginal art( 2013)This thesis departs from the belief that Australian Aboriginal art can be understood on the basis of Western epistemology. Yet since traditional forms of knowledge are denied to the non-initiated individual, how can one approach this art? We argue that it is the very synapses and gaps in our knowledge of Aboriginal art that need to be marshalled towards the creation of a non-representational ‘thought without image.’ In this sense, Aboriginal art is conceived at the limits of what can be known, yet it constitutes a threshold for ushering forth a secular form of knowledge in which the ‘unthought’ forms a basis for the ‘thought.’ The task of this thesis is to dismantle a discursive hermeneutics that would propose to conceptualise this art. It detects a non-dialogical current that draws us into a highly solipsistic (non)relation with the art. Solipsism is the precondition for an encounter with an art and socius that is always-already ‘missed,’ or ‘eclipsed.’ Using Deleuzian and Deleuzo-Guattarian philosophies, we forge uncharted ways of ‘disarticulating’ our knowledge of Aboriginal art. This is not done through a direct encounter with Aboriginal art, but rather through the works of two artists, Albert Namatjira and contemporary artist Rod Moss – both of whom register the epiphenomenal conditions of an indigeneity that has undergone a becoming-Aboriginal. This becoming is triggered once an imperceptible difference-in-itself is exerted in Namatjira’s oeuvre – where the very inability to establish a visual ‘difference’ between his art and the pastoral genre is precisely how the indigenous character of his work is elicited. In Moss’s case, the pure repetition of the Aboriginal stereotype in his art is not couched within social critique. Rather, his faithful repetition of the stereotype eclipses our ability to recognise hereafter what lies before us in a Moss painting. The repetition of the stereotype for itself cloaks and withdraws it from our episteme. In the application of Deleuzian and Deleuzo-Guattarian philosophies to these two artists’ work, we are far removed from any means of accessing Aboriginal art through the paradigm of the known. Yet the sense of its power is intensely magnified.
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ItemPostmodernism and late twentieth-century American realism: immanence and transcendence( 2013)This thesis identifies a space for realism within Fredric Jameson’s theory of postmodernism. It argues that Jameson’s theory is sustained by a specific idea of where realism may remain in the postmodern world and hopes to demonstrate that a concomitant realist space can be detected in late twentieth-century American literature, just as postmodernist writing was ascendant in both popular and critical circles. In doing so, this thesis offers a way of reading works that otherwise provoke critical indecision about their relationship to and classification as ‘postmodernist’ literature. Central to both the argument and to the texts themselves is a tension between what Jameson sees as the resolute immanence of postmodern cultural forms and the persistence of ‘transcendent’ category distinctions and regulatory ideas needed to make sense of history. ‘Transcendence is meaning,’ Jameson writes in a recent essay, ‘the immanent is existence itself.’ The thesis provides the critical background to this thought and connects the criticism to both an argument about the role of realism in Jameson’s theory of postmodernism and to readings of key late twentieth-century works of American literature: from John Updike’s Rabbit, Run in the 1960s to Don DeLillo’s Underworld in the 1990s.
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ItemJeff Wall: reading pictures( 2013)This thesis examines four seminal artworks by Jeff Wall. Through close readings I offer insights into the intellectual work in Wall’s picture-making and the dynamic relation between his writing and art. I argue that Wall’s photographs share the same resistance to resolution as the historical works that he draws upon. Such ambiguities indicate Wall’s interest in the instability of what he calls the Western Concept of the Picture, heightened by the need to negotiate transitions in the history of photo-media.
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ItemFaces in the shadows: an investigation into the anonymous diary A Woman in Berlin and A Rose in Winter, a fictional retelling of the Rosenstrasse Protest( 2013)This thesis represents the first in-depth academic examination of A Woman in Berlin, an anonymous diary first published in 1954 which detailed the experiences of a woman who experienced first-hand the chaotic weeks of April, May and June 1945 in the German capital, including the arrival of the Russian troops and their treatment of civilians. Her numerous diary entries, which cover a period of eight weeks and contain graphic accounts of the suffering she and others underwent, have frequently been quoted in historical descriptions of the period. Thus their historical value is beyond question, making the lack of investigation of the text even more surprising. To remedy this deficiency, several elements of A Woman in Berlin have been selected which, when examined, will give the reader a far deeper understanding of both diary and diarist. Chapter I considers the various tropes and themes that a reader may detect in the diary, looking at whether the traditional ideas associated with those genres are fulfilled, and how this fulfilment or subversion of it leads to the categorisation of the diary, as well as what this means for the reader. The second chapter focuses on the numerous intertextual references that appear in the diary, evaluating what their inclusion says about both the diarist’s literary knowledge and also her feelings at the moment that prompted her to include them in her recollections. The reader’s understanding of the diarist is further expanded in the third chapter by an examination of the various paratextual elements that make up the diary, in particular the illustrations that appear on the various covers, the fore- and afterwords written by people who seek to conceal the truth of the diarist’s identity and yet let slip numerous details about her, and finally the reaction that has greeted the diary upon its various publications. By focusing on these details, this investigation aims to give the reader an insight into both a fascinating retelling of history and also of a nameless diarist. The creative piece that forms the second part of this thesis is a fictionalised retelling of a little-known historical event known as the Rosenstrasse Protest. This uprising took place in Berlin during the end of February and early March 1943, when, having been prompted by the mass-arrest of the remaining Jews in the German capital, non-Jewish women gathered outside the building in which their husbands were being held and, for seven days, despite bombing raids and the constant, threatening presence of the SS, held a public protest. Despite annual memorial services held to remember this event, as well as a film directed by Margarethe von Trotta that told the story, which premiered in 2003, this event remains all but unknown, particularly to English-speaking audiences, and therefore ripe for retelling. With the event narrated in diary format, the reader is able to employ many of the techniques adopted in the critical study of A Woman in Berlin to come to participate in the unfolding narrative of A Rose in Winter.
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ItemDesire and governance: discourses of excess and restraint in late medieval England( 2013)This thesis examines the competing and interlaced discourses of excess and restraint that inform many of the social practices, political systems and literary texts of late medieval England. To achieve this aim, the thesis groups the texts that will be the subject of discussion into three domains: texts that celebrate chivalric sacrifice; texts concerned with public governance; and texts that promote governance of the self. In these texts, discourses of excess and restraint assume multivalent forms in order to enact their epistemological or ontological projects; their many manifestations may be rhetorical, economic, parliamentary, juridical, physical, psychological, material, emotional or religious. Part I adopts a psychoanalytic approach to two canonical Middle English texts in order to investigate how discourses of excess and restraint shape desire within these chivalric romances. Aranye Fradenburg has developed a Lacanian framework that intimately intertwines sacrifice and desire, thereby structuring chivalric culture, and this theoretical apparatus is combined with Georges Bataille’s theory of an economics of waste to decipher the discourses of excess and restraint that emerge from Sir Gawain and the Green Knight and The Knight’s Tale. While psychoanalysis could serve as an interpretative tool for all of the texts considered here, Part II instead privileges historical context in order to develop an understanding of the parliamentary, political, sumptuary, economic and social manifestations of excess and restraint that can maintain or undermine medieval public governance. Chaucer rarely comments on his historical moment, but his depiction of the Trojan parliament in Troilus and Criseyde and his consistently derogatory description of the people’s voice indicate his opposition to parliamentary constraint over the king and realise his firm support of the royalist party. The debate poem Wynnere and Wastoure engages with the economic management of the realm by addressing contrasting approaches to household expenditure — spending or saving — and Sir Launfal reflects the commercialisation of chivalry through Chestre’s concern with the impossibility of reconciling appropriate chivalric performance with prudent expenditure. Part III continues this concern with governance but moves from the broad public context of Part II to an analysis of individual practices of excess and restraint through the frameworks of self-governance and religious emotion. The rhetorical excess of penitential treatises and sermon collections such as Handlyng Synne and Jacob’s Well imbues their cautionary exempla with a sense of narrative entertainment that destabilises their project of restraint. Aristocratic courtesy texts, such as The Book of the Knight of the Tower, similarly describe extreme consequences for breaches of acceptable social behaviour. But conduct texts that evince the emergence of the bourgeoisie are strikingly free from such rhetorical excess. How the Good Wife Taught Her Daughter delivers its strictures in a restrained, efficient manner that is arguably more effective due to the realistic and relatable nature of its advice. Finally, a brief discussion of the history of emotions frames a comparison of the religious practices of two iconic figures of medieval piety: Margery Kempe and Julian of Norwich. Considering these practices through their emotional expression reveals surprising similarities between Margery and Julian’s engagement with, and articulation of, their faith. This thesis explores a range of texts in which medieval authors expressed, negotiated and, at times, resolved the different discursive forms assumed by excess and restraint. Whether these discourses emerge in opposition or in collaboration with each other, they invariably allow a deeper understanding of the impulse towards excess and restraint that shaped many fourteenth-century practices.