School of Culture and Communication - Theses
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ItemTranslating chaos: the modern purification of materiality and ideology( 2017)Complexity theory’s philosophical interpretation of the mathematical phenomenon of chaos has been taken up across various humanities fields. However, this interdisciplinary translation fails to hold the two cultures (science and the humanities) and their histories of the present together and apart coherently. Complexity theory has an obvious historical and mathematical problem, which mathematicians noticed, but which turns out to be a less obvious philosophical one. But mathematics also has a historical and philosophical problem with chaos, which turns out to be a mathematical one. This poses my research question: what is chaos? Why do these translations fail? Is there an interpretation through which I can understand the philosophy, history and mathematics of chaos? In order to solve this problem of translating chaos, I will argue that it is related to a broader problem that Bruno Latour calls ‘modern purification’: an operation that separates nature and culture – and the two cultures that will study them – into distinct domains. I will argue that purification operates by insisting that one of two purified questions is out of the question in modernity: either that of ‘materiality’ (embodying things) for the humanities – or ‘ideology’ (thinking thought) for science. My critique of modernity and the way it frames two distinct cultures contends that neither of these questions is or ever was an unquestionable foundation. This thesis will argue that if I study translations of modernity from each of the two cultures and their histories of the present, then I still perform modern translation and modern purification, but I can no longer believe that these operations ever really worked. If the two cultures have different foundations and questions of materiality and ideology, then the two cultures will therefore have different, but related, kinds of thought and things and histories of the present. This argument offers an explanation of how and why the two cultures mistranslate one another, but also how the questions of what they promise and reduce are related. It is therefore possible to show how the two cultures can be intertwined in a productive way. Analysing modern purification will enable me to explain why translations of chaos fail for both science and the humanities. This analysis offers an alternative explanation of what chaos is philosophically, historically and mathematically, why modern mathematics forgot chaos for sixty years, and why mathematicians have a theoretical problem of how to define it. Studying modern purification reveals why complexity theory’s translation of chaos – and, more broadly, the later material, speculative and posthuman ‘turns’– recuperate a vitalist materiality when modern mathematicians and the Newtonian history of classical natural philosophy had already realised that there is no such thing as modern mechanism. My critique of modern purification also entails a critique of Foucault’s poststructuralism and of science studies, which remember how modernity reimagines the concepts of time and ideology, but forget to ask how modernity reimagines the concepts of space and materiality. I will also connect my argument to Barad’s concept of ‘diffraction’ and Merleau-Ponty’s concept of ‘chiasm’ in order to demonstrate how the question of embodying the body in modern physics and the question of seeing the gaze in modern philosophy are related: neither of these two purified questions was ever out of the question.
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ItemThe art of walking: a romantic genealogy( 2017)This dissertation attends to the development of walking as an art form. It is guided by the research questions: What form might a genealogy of the art of walking take? And what would be its value? Drawing on the genealogical methods of Friedrich Nietzsche and Michel Foucault, and from writings on the everyday and the urban by key twentieth century figures, notably Michel de Certeau and Henri Lefebvre, the dissertation encompasses a study of the art of walking from the English Romantics through to the Situationist International (SI). The thesis sought to establish, describe and analyze the historical antecedents and situational limits of the art of walking. We now have a genealogy with which to interrogate the work of contemporary artists who use walking in the development of their artwork.
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ItemAfter the revolution: striving for equality, new subjectivities and ecological temporality in contemporary Chinese documentary cinema( 2017)The Chinese economic reform from the late 1970s onwards has been a period of rapid modernisation. This thesis is a study of contemporary Chinese documentary cinema as an emerging grassroots cultural practice in documenting the everyday realities of a society undergoing revolutionary transformation. In analysing a number of prominent documentary films, it is found that the new wave of independent documentary filmmaking is a mode of private and individual storytelling. The popularity of participatory DV culture has created new speaking subjects and personal memories as individuals can now be on both side of the camera assuming the roles of producer and film subjects. Ordinary people are able to participate in discursive construction and subjective meaning interpretations. Diverse views and pluralistic voices are represented on screen that was previously unavailable. A radical departure from the early official pedagogical style in which ideology is promoted as incontestable truth, the unscripted spontaneity of the xianchang aesthetic embraces ambiguity, contradictions and contingency as a reflection of a deeply interconnected world. As China embarked on a breakneck techno-industrial development, the impacts of globalisation such as inequality, labour rights protection, the rule of law, environmental degradation are highlighted in the documentary films. This thesis demonstrates the increasing alignment of China with the global community. Like international practitioners everywhere who critique their own societies in cinematic media, filmmakers working in China are now making documentaries which investigate social and political change. The human and environmental sacrifices made to expand the global labour regime, for example, are exposed in China Blue, Beijing Besieged by Waste and The Gleaners and I. A comparative study between 19th century French realism and contemporary Chinese documentary cinema is conducted to demonstrate the shared social and environmental impacts of industrialisation. The humanitarian fervour of the French realist masters is reflected in avant-garde grassroots filmmaking, a site of contestation against the hegemony of abstract linear time to articulate a new vision of ecological ontology through a contemplative and atemporal aesthetics.
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ItemSpectres of Modernism: authorship, reception and intention in Witter Bynner and Arthur Davison Ficke’s spectra hoax( 2017)This thesis draws from a range of primary materials relating to the Spectric School, a hoax poetry movement concocted in 1916 by poets Witter Bynner and Arthur Davison Ficke, to reconcile the movement’s relationship to the backdrop of modernist print culture. Specifically, it argues that Bynner and Ficke exploited a breakdown of discourses surrounding modernist conceptions of authorship, identity, and intention in their construction of the hoax movement. Additionally, this thesis considers the hoax alongside contemporary appraisals of the movement, and argues that the hoaxers’ subversion of what it meant to be an author exposes a growing disjunction during the modernist period between a culture of reviewing and modernist conceptions of authorship. Finally, this thesis considers Bynner and Ficke’s use of a hoax movement as a medium to further their poetic aims and avers that the hoaxers’ retrospective recasting of their motives alongside the development of the hoax complicate current critical valuations of the movement. Through considering Bynner and Ficke’s recasting of poetic intention, I challenge readings of the hoax that interpret it as having had a clear didactic purpose in parodying modernist poetry, and instead argue that the Spectra Hoax serves as an interface of meanings that complicates attempts to inscribe clear notions of authenticity, authorship and intentionality onto it.
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ItemWhen men were men: masculinity and memory in turn-of-the-millennium cinema( 2017)This thesis explores the imbrications of memory and masculinity in screen culture at the end of the 1990s and the beginning of the twenty-first century. Key works in memory studies from this period argue that remembering and forgetting are complex practices informed by psychological discourses (for example, the debates over recovered memory), cultural and media industries (most notably, the news and popular entertainment industries), and commemorative practices (such as the rituals around Remembrance Day). These factors heavily influence how memory shapes both personal and social identity, and this thesis marshals these insights to explain how key film and television texts at the turn of the millennium remember the (imagined) past of masculinity. Many Hollywood productions of the era feature male protagonists beset by problems of memory and identity (including pathologies such as amnesia and post-traumatic stress disorder), and this thesis argues that in these works, nostalgic desires for lost masculinity have been supplanted by more traumatic modes of memory, ones which provide more critical and conflicted perspectives on both memory and masculinity. These more sophisticated representations demonstrate how the much vaunted contemporary crisis of masculinity is in fact a crisis of male reflexivity, as men struggle to come to terms with their loss of a transcendent or universal subjectivity and its replacement with a specific gendered identity that must compete for recognition within an increasingly pluralistic culture.
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ItemChallenging and violating ontological “worlds” in the fiction of John Barth, Alain Robbe-Grillet and Thomas Pynchon( 2017)My dissertation examines instances of ontological violation in postmodern fiction through a close reading of John Barth, Alain Robbe-Grillet and Thomas Pynchon. Each reading will focus on diegetic violations generated through either ekphrastic or epistolary writing. I use literary theorists Gérard Genette, Patricia Waugh, Mark Currie and William Nelles (among others) to create a framework with which to analyse diegesis creation and violation. Central to my dissertation is Brian McHale's understanding of "literary ontology" and his insights into the ontological foregrounding that occurs in postmodern texts. The first chapter begins by introducing and examining epistemological narrative framing. This is done to demonstrate the codependence of epistemological and ontological framing; as often epistemological framing is necessary to create a “world” within a “world”. The first chapter also presents various different examples of narrative frame breaking and, more specifically, examines the various manifestations of ontological violations; for example mise en abîme. Each subsequent chapter thereafter is dedicated to each of my chosen authors. An assessment of my findings are outlined in my conclusion. This is followed with closing thoughts on future directions of research. The creative writing component of my PhD incorporates both hypodiegetic and extradiegetic ontological violations to produce various comical and philosophical metafictional outcomes. The primary questions posed in the dissertation (and fiction) are: how are “worlds” framed and established in fictional texts? Moreover, what are writers trying to achieve by putting into question the existential status of the “worlds” in a fictional texts?
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ItemFauna Fiction: 'Interspecies Communication in Contemporary Literature' and 'The Animals in That Country'( 2017)Instances of interspecies communication and miscommunication occur in almost every interaction humans have with other animals. Nonetheless, discussions of nonhuman animals as communicative subjects are often relegated to interspecies language experiments and children’s fiction. This thesis makes an original contribution by exploring representations of interspecies communication in contemporary adult fiction, which I call ‘fauna fiction’. In the critical component I analyse in some detail what is occurring in novelistic accounts of human-nonhuman animal encounters. I focus on six contemporary fauna fictions: The Conversations of Cow (1985) by Suniti Namjoshi, The Evolution of Bruno Littlemore (2011) by Benjamin Hale, Wish (1995) by Peter Goldsworthy, A Beautiful Truth (2013) by Colin McAdam, Bear (1976) by Marian Engel and Dog Boy (2009) by Eva Hornung. In these texts, the meeting point of attempted contact between species is framed theoretically by three key concepts: the ‘speaking meat’ (as conceptualised by ecofeminist philosopher Val Plumwood), the ‘species boundary’, and ‘language primacy’. I argue that what I call ‘agency-centred models’ of literary animal studies – in which nonhuman animals are considered as responding beings – provide a relevant theoretical base from which to study interspecies communication in fauna fiction. In order to draw out these ideas, I ask: how we might read these novels as disruptive speculations upon a perceived species divide between human and nonhuman animals? I argue that fauna fiction contains subversive sexual and violent subtexts of nonhuman animal resistance. Through this lens, the nonhuman animal protagonist is no longer an allegory or stand-in for human meaning in fiction, but a destabilising, transgressive and resistant figure. The creative component consists of a novel extract, The Animals in That Country. The novel is an apocalyptic literary fiction that provides new insights by exploring communicative human-nonhuman animal relationships. The story follows Jean, a fifty-one-year-old Australian zoo guide, into a world where humans can understand other animals. Through shared communication the human characters in this novel are able to put words to their complex relationships with other animals. They are also confronted with their own animality, a reality for which the language barrier usually provides a convenient shield. Conversations between species forge new connections. The novel also engages with issues of intersubjectivity, power and violence, resulting in dystopian outcomes. As the narrative develops, a dingo character called Sue becomes increasingly important to Jean, and eventually takes charge of Jean’s life. Through this process, dingo speech is prioritised. In The Animals in That Country, the overwhelming responsibility that comes with sudden shared communication with other creatures is sometimes offset by the thrill of insight into previously incomprehensible minds.
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ItemRepetition and the temporal double in cinema: a theory of critical cinematic time-travel( 2017)This thesis explores the filmic figure of the double and its relationship to temporality and repetition in cinema. I trace its evolution—extending upon and contributing to the discourse on the trope of the double—by reconceptualising the figure in relation to the function of repetition and manipulation of temporality in film. I consider the dual perspectives of characters and the spectator/scholar, as well as repetition within the individual film, and repetitions forging intertextual connections between films. I posit an original term: the ‘temporal double.’ I define it as a cinematic body/being multiplied by temporal processes, emerging via both narrative and cinematographic techniques. It is characterised by its complex relationship with time, operating as a self-reflexive tool, drawing attention to and deconstructing the function of repetition and temporal manipulations in film. In this thesis, I ask: what is the temporal double’s relationship to patterns of repetition and images of time, and how does this figure continue to be produced and repeated with difference in cinema? To answer these questions, I engage with Gilles Deleuze’s philosophy of time on two connected levels by cross-reading Cinema II with Difference and Repetition. I examine how the images comprising a film speak to each other and understand a film as a synthesis of these repeated images that, in turn, speaks to other films. In my close analysis of three films, I investigate how they extend and complicate Deleuzian conceptualisations of temporality and repetition as elements of both cinema in the form of film as a text, and of film scholarship and discourse. This Deleuzian approach allows me to posit and mobilise another original concept, ‘critical cinematic time-travel’. Critical cinematic time-travel invites contemplation not only by the spectator but also by the film critic/scholar, and occurs within broader cultural and academic contexts of film reception. Critical cinematic time-travel allows the spectator/scholar to alter not only the present and future, but the past, as they re-turn to texts such as Vertigo, which can be re-read through the lens of subsequent films including La Jetée and Primer. Tracing the progression of the temporal double, I demonstrate how this figure becomes increasingly sophisticated in its destabilisation of chronology: the figure’s manifestation renders visible the multiplicities constituting time and the self, drawing attention to and deconstructing the functions of repetition and temporality in and across cinema.
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ItemContemporary vampire genre fiction: ethical feeding and the posthuman vampire in urban fantasy and paranormal romance( 2017)Contemporary vampire literature uses a bloodsucking monster to play with continually shifting social boundaries, to try on new identities, and to refract our world in a different, fantastic context. It has been widely acknowledged that from the later twentieth century onward, the vampire has become “humanised”: it has become a sympathetic figure that is no longer necessarily or definitively evil. This thesis argues that since the 1980s, the vampire has developed in new ways as a posthuman figure. A vital concern has emerged over the increasingly problematic distinction between the human and the vampire, and the ways in which vampires and humans might interrelate. This concern is most clearly elaborated in relation to how and upon whom the vampire feeds. Taking a posthumanist and feminist theoretical position, the thesis traces the ways in which representations of vampiric feeding have changed in recent decades, thereby identifying how the boundaries between the vampire and the human have been contested and renegotiated in new ways in recent vampire literature. As a response to and interrogation of the dramatic social shifts of the posthuman era, twenty-first-century vampire literature has divided into two popular strands. The first, dominant strand, urban fantasy and paranormal romance, embraces the posthuman vampire and celebrates its potential to forge symbiotic, mutually beneficial connections between the human and the monstrous. The second, less prominent strand, the post-apocalyptic vampire narrative, rejects the posthuman vampire, suggesting that this vampire is an atavistic evil, a harbinger of the disasters that must result when humans and monsters align and intertwine. In both these strands, the fragility of the boundaries that divide the self from the Other is foregrounded through transgressive acts of vampiric feeding. In analysing vampiric feeding, the thesis thus elucidates some of the ways that vampires in recent literature refract contemporary sociocultural anxieties about shifting conceptions of the self and the Other.
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ItemA literature of absence: post-independence fictional narratives of Singapore (1965-1990s)( 2017)This thesis traces configurations of textual absence (disavowal, repetition, silence) as the elaboration of a political unconscious in three iconic Singaporean prose fiction texts, If We Dream Too Long (1972) by Goh Poh Seng; Little Ironies: Stories of Singapore (1978) by Catherine Lim; and Abraham’s Promise (1995) by Philip Jeyaretnam. With a particular focus on the tensions between politics and aesthetics in Singaporean literary history, my approach contextualises absence as an aesthetic category across the domains of public culture and literary production. Investigating the formation of literary and cultural identity within the period of the becoming of Singapore’s social, cultural, economic and political systems, loosely periodised as 1965-1990s, I re-examine reading and writing models and practices associated with the formation of the canon and consolidation of national identity that occurs during this period of postcolonial becoming. Employing the close reading practices of ideology critique, this thesis re-emphasises the texts’ own productively ambivalent sense of marginality, open-endedness and erasure, and engages the mobility of the texts by reading their circulation among the nation's diverse readership as cultural commodity alongside their study as literature. Through this focus, I argue for different critical connections and interventions to be made by challenging the texts’ codified histories of literary value and cultural production.