School of Culture and Communication - Theses
Permanent URI for this collection
Search Results
1 - 3 of 3
-
ItemThe posthumanism of William Carlos Williams( 2016)There is a torn fragment of a black and white photograph in the Beinecke rare book room at Yale University, showing American poet William Carlos Williams wearing a beret and tie (see figure 1). A tear cuts off the right two thirds of the original image, but Williams himself has been cut in half by the framing of the shot itself. What remains of the image of the poet has, in turn, been beset by time and mishandling; a white crease bisects Williams’s face a second time. Yet of all the images that exist of Williams, it is this unusual photograph that, more than any other, sums up Williams’s most significant, and most significantly unrecognised, achievements as a poet. Despite his reputation as a poet of clarity, of economic and discrete images of wheelbarrows, chickens and plums, it becomes clear upon closer reading that Williams’s poetics actively resisted notions of unity, clarity and stability of forms—even at the level of his own subjectivity. Rather, Williams’s poetics is predicated on the assumption that all objects, all words, and all human subjects are, like the man in the beret in the photograph, unstable and fragile components of the continuum of the material world. So much so that Williams’s poetics preempts many of the interrogations of the nature of language and human subjectivity that would later constitute the critical movements of posthumanism. Based on this premise, I argue that the critical lens of posthumanism provides an unprecedented and productive means of answering some of the enduring questions surrounding Williams’s poetry. The central challenge that Williams’s poetics has always posed is how to reconcile the tension between Williams’s humanistic ethos and the profound materialism of his work. In other words, how can we speak of a poet who pushes human consciousness to the periphery of his poems in favour of material reality, who destablises distinctions between the human mind and the natural, mechanical and bodily worlds, who reveals, by virtue of his experience as a physician, humankind to be fragile, temporal, mortal compositions of flesh, blood and bones—but whose poetry and prose also embody a deep-seated humanistic ethos, premised on ideals of democracy, charity and empathy? I argue that, from the perspective of posthumanism, the tension between materialism and humanistic values is not a tension at all; rather, the two are intertwined and even at times continuous. Williams’s poetry provides an early example of a particular contemporary notion of posthumanism, championed by Julie Clarke, N. Katherine Hayles and Cary Wolfe, in which the contingency and instability of language, human subjectivity and the borders between self and other serve as a valuable means of destabilising oppressive notions of authority and unity. Through an analysis of Williams’s approach to the relationship between the human subject and modern technology, the natural world, politics and medicine, I examine the ways in which Williams challenged, both thematically and at the level of language, humanist assumptions of the authority, autonomy and sovereignty of the human subject: assumptions that were used throughout the twentieth century to justify and perpetuate the subjugation of women and peoples of colour, the exploitation of the natural landscape, and the rise of fascist, nationalist and eugenic ideologies. I will suggest that the theories of writers such as Haraway, Wolfe, Clarke and Hayles offer the chance of reading Williams’s radical materialism and his posthumanist deconstruction of the humanist cogito not as a rejection of the humanity altogether, but as a poetic response to the various ethical, social and political challenges that defined the early twentieth century.
-
ItemCircuits, computers, cassettes, correspondence: the Clifton Hill Community Music Centre 1976 - 1984( 2016)This thesis examines the production and presentation of experimental music, art, performance and installation by a group of musicians, visual artists, writers, performers and film makers who were involved in the activities taking place at the Clifton Hill Community Music Centre, Melbourne from 1976 until 1984. This thesis will investigate the musical influence of the generation of practitioners who founded the Clifton Hill and taught at the La Trobe University Music Department. It will examine their influence upon the younger generation, with focus on the close relationships both generations had with the broader music and visual art scenes of Melbourne and Australia. This thesis traces a transitional moment in artistic production between the older and younger generations, which was an illustration of the broader shift in Australian artistic culture from modernism to postmodernism. I will document the artistic work of a younger generation at the Music Centre as a symptom of a new postmodern mode of engagement in order to determine what place the Clifton Hill occupies within a history of emergent postmodern theories in Australian art.
-
ItemStoried cities: Bret Easton Ellis and the urban literary tradition( 2016)This thesis is an attempt to re-classify the work of Bret Easton Ellis. It seeks to determine, through close textual analysis and with particular attention to the epigraphs and allusions he employs, whether “blank fiction” and Postmodernism adequately describe the ideological tradition of writing to which Ellis belongs. Noting the central role that the urban spaces of New York and Los Angeles occupy in Ellis’s oeuvre, it asks to what extent can the disturbed minds of his protagonists be seen as resulting from the alienating city environments in which they dwell, and can we ally Ellis’s project to the classical eighteenth and nineteenth-century urban literary texts he references? In reading against a prose style that invites its readers to skim, Ellis’s citations signal that he does not intend his novels to be merely a commentary upon adolescent apathy, 1980s capitalist greed, or 1990s celebrity obsession – the dominant critical interpretations of his key novels – but, in a vision far more closely aligned to classic urban novelists, as comments on the destructive and alienating nature of the city as a force acting upon the psyche of the individual. This thesis examines Ellis’s portrayals of the contemporary American city in order to reveal potential meaning behind what has been described as the unnecessarily graphic and sadistic levels of violence that characterise these works, and argues that Ellis occupies an uneasy position within the Postmodern era.