School of Culture and Communication - Theses
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ItemCollecting Australian art history: Dr. S.A. Ewing and the Ewing Collection( 2018)This thesis is a study of collector Dr. Samuel Arthur Ewing (1864–1941) and his collection of Australian art at the University of Melbourne. Although Ewing was considered one of the leading collectors of his day, little is known of Ewing’s collecting activities or the conceptual design directing his acquisitions. This thesis provides a reassessment of the University’s Ewing Collection by identifying and analysing Ewing’s original thematic design for his collection. This thesis therefore returns the conceptual understanding of Ewing’s Collection to its creator. I begin by contextualising Ewing’s collecting activities amongst the art collectors of his era. To address the current paucity of research on Ewing’s peers, I identify collecting trends of the day by analysing a historic, but little known, newspaper series. Through this analysis, I reposition Ewing as an eminent collector of his era. I then utilise material cultural studies and narratology to chronologically delineate Ewing’s collecting career and postulate that Ewing collected a visual exploration of Australian art history. I then conceive art history as a broader cultural activity undertaken, in this study, through art collecting, and analyse the structural framework of Ewing’s Collection. Returning to material cultural studies, I interpret the structural framework through Ewing’s scientific background and contemporary literary histories of Australian art. By reconceiving the Ewing Collection as an exploration of Australian art history, this thesis highlights alternative cultural engagements with art histories being undertaken prior to and outside of the professional discipline in Australia.
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ItemThe sociology of the chick lit of Anita Heiss( 2018)Wiradjuri woman, Anita Heiss, is arguably one of the first Australian authors of popular fiction. Since 2007, she has published across a diversity of genres including chick lit, contemporary women’s fiction, romance, memoir and children’s literature. A focus on the political characterises her work; and her identity as an author is both supplemented and complemented by her roles as an academic, activist and public intellectual. Heiss has discussed genre as a means of targeting specific audiences that may be less engaged with Indigenous affairs, and positions her novels as educative but not didactic. There remains, however, some ambivalence about the significance of the role that genre plays in her literature as well as for the diverse and differentiated audience that she attracts. The aims of this thesis then are two-fold: firstly, to present a complication of academic conceptions of genre, then to use this discussion to explore the social significance of Heiss’ literature. My focus is Heiss’ first four chick lit novels: Not Meeting Mr Right (2007), Avoiding Mr Right (2008), Manhattan Dreaming (2010) and Paris Dreaming (2011). Scholarship in the field leans toward an understanding that the racial politics of non-white articulations of the chick lit genre are invariably incompatible with the basic formula of chick lit texts. My thesis proposes a methodological shift from the dominant mode of ideological analysis to one that is largely focused on reader response. This approach is influenced by Bourdieu’s sociological approach to literature and adapts his multi-tiered analysis to account for the author, the text and the reader. Still implicit in academic writing on chick lit is an argument for formula as constitutive of the genre, this thesis negates this position and follows John Frow’s (2006) understanding of genre as an interpretive frame. This holistic approach allows for a complication of pessimistic readings that reproduce racially thematised chick lit as deviant or politically problematic. I pursue the question of how Heiss’ writing functions in the public sphere, as well as undertaking broader enquiry into the significance of genre for both author and reader. Heiss’ readership is constituted by committed readers of romance and chick lit as well as politically engaged readers that are attracted to Heiss’ dual authorial persona; and, both groups bring radically distinct expectations to bear on these texts. Through analysis of online reviews and surveys conducted with users of the book reviewing website Goodreads, I complicate the understanding of genre as a cogent interpretative frame, and deploy this discussion to explore the social significance of Heiss’ literature.
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ItemBlind spots in motion: antinomies of distance in Eimear McBride's A Girl Is a Half-formed Thing (2013) and The Lesser Bohemians (2016)( 2018)Eimear McBride is an Irish experimental novelist whose striking two novels—A Girl Is a Half-formed Thing (2013) and The Lesser Bohemians (2016)—are bound together by the dreams and voices of their narrators. In them, McBride recuperates from literary modernism a technique of formal opacity, which she uses to aim for transparency in representing sex and sexual trauma. I examine McBride’s novels according to the dialectic of transparency and opacity, showing that blind spots, as well as distance, make vision possible. I investigate McBride’s avowed aim to collapse distance and dissolve boundaries between the readers and narrators of her novels. By showing that they draw attention to the irreducible gap between reader and text, I argue that McBride’s stated aim—like her impulse towards transparency—exhibits its own impossibility. I argue that transparency and the dissolution of boundaries are beyond the capacity of representation; there is always a quotient of opacity in transparency and a measure of distance in closeness. Precisely through opacity and distance, McBride finds a paradoxically appropriate form for the representation of sexual trauma, which serves to circumvent its eroticisation. Both of her novels figure their readers within their fields of vision, casting reader as witness to the traumas they depict. McBride, I suggest, has much to offer contemporary culture: she asks us to consider the antinomies of transparency by showing us the power and possibilities of literary opacity. She wills us to think desire, sex, and sexual trauma in their most startling and uncomfortable dimensions.
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ItemHaunting fear: literary encounters with medieval, renaissance, and gothic ghosts( 2018)The ghost is an enduring figure in literature, one that has appeared over centuries in a plethora of different forms. The power of the ghost as a literary figure and the key to its endurance lies in the intense, heightened emotion prompted by the moment of encounter between living and dead. When these moments of heightened emotion are depicted in popular cultural forms, changing cultural expectations governing the expression and representation of emotions are revealed. This thesis examines an emblematic text from three key periods in literary history: the anonymous fifteenth-century romance The Awntyrs off Arthure, William Shakespeare’s Hamlet (c.1605), and Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto (1764). It will examine the emotions with which each text engages, through the form, environment and genre in which the ghost appears, and through the language in which these are expressed. By comparing the representation of ghosts in these texts, this thesis offers new insight into the evolving representation and narrative function of the ghost in literary culture, and explores some of the different forms of emotional expression in response to the supernatural.
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ItemOut of hopeful grey stuff woven: revision and Civil War in Walt Whitman's Blue Book( 2018)This thesis investigates the evolution of Whitman‘s verse through the Civil War period and into Reconstruction by paying particular attention to the anomalous and under-examined artefact known as the Blue Book—Whitman‘s private copy of an 1860 edition of Leaves of Grass that retains his unpublished textual revisions. In examining this manuscript, I intend to describe Whitman‘s interaction with the conflict in his role as a revisor: how he sifted, rearranged, and restructured his verse in response to the war. Using a combination of digital archival research and contemporary theories of revision, I develop a series of smaller readings taken from the innumerable annotations inscribed throughout the artefact. This thesis looks at Whitman‘s work largely between 1860-1865 and considers it within a process of ongoing change. It is intended to contribute to the growing body of research that examines the often perplexing and vexed issue of Whitman‘s revisions.