School of Culture and Communication - Theses
Permanent URI for this collection
Search Results
1 - 7 of 7
-
ItemThe performance of perversion in Kafka's literature and its adaptations( 2019)The interpretation of Kafka’s literature has always presented major problems for critics, who have attempted to simplify the figures and metaphors contained in the stories by offering possible explanations. Starting from the view of Kafka’s perversions as logical absurdities in a specific time and place, this thesis interrogates their role as a dominant element in Kafka’s poetics. I argue that performativity and performance are central to representations of perversion in Kafka and its effects over the fictional characters. I use a predominantly psychoanalytic approach to Kafka’s life and a post-structuralist analysis of his stories and their filmic and theatrical adaptations. The frequent perverted elements and the predominance of perverse performances, particularly revealed through the presence and need of a spectator, are explained by the different stages of Kafka’s life. Through this analysis it can be concluded that Kafka’s perverted view of life originates in his relationships with other people, particularly figures of power. Perversions abound in Kafka’s literature, but here I focus on gender, animality and Law. I argue that gender, animality and law/punishment are strictly connected by the need for a performance to define them. My work establishes perversion as the originating factor of Kafka’s narrative. His intent is to challenge standards by performing their perversion and showing how this has nefarious consequences only when an audience is present. If there were no performative expectations based on arbitrary standards, there would be no perversions to confuse and shock the audience and no punishment would be needed for the perverted individuals.
-
ItemThe endurance of horror film masks: ritual, power, and transformation( 2018)This thesis surveys a range of horror film masks to explore why they have been such an enduring generic motif in horror cinema. Their potency as transhistorical, transnational artefacts has played a significant role in contemporary horror as their power has evolved and adapted to new aesthetic, ideological, and national contexts while still broadly adhering to the genre’s broader codes and conventions. The transformative potential of horror film masks continues the object’s complex cross-cultural history: when considered in relation to ritual (be it religious or secular), power, and transformation, I demonstrate how and why horror is a durable contemporary space for the symbolic force of the object to endure. Its ability to adapt to new contexts allows its power to align with new meanings. This relies on what I identify as the shamanic imagination, which consists of lingering yet often unspoken residual traces of the mask’s importance to long-forgotten rituals and cultural festivals, beginning in tribal communities and continuing across history through a range of masked cultural events, performance traditions, and literary movements such as Renaissance Carnival, the commedia dell’arte, Japanese Noh theatre, Gothic literature, the Grand Guignol theatre, and the Theatre of Cruelty, before manifesting in cinema from its earliest days, codifying as a key iconographic element of the genre from the 1970s onwards. To demonstrate this, I offer five case study chapters defined through popular horror film mask typographies: skin masks, blank masks, animal masks, repurposed masks, and technological masks. Considering movies made by filmmakers from countries including Australia, Britain, Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, Nigeria, South Korea, Sweden, and the United States, I map precisely how this often-overlooked object has been re-imagined and re-deployed, adapting to new, culturally specific contexts, and creating new meanings.
-
Item‘Awkward moments, optional electric shocks’: the products and politics of intermedial participatory performance( 2017)This project argues for a more nuanced understanding of performances that frame social interactions and technological mediations as aesthetic experience. Through observation, interviews, participation and dramaturgical analysis, this thesis interrogates the roles and agencies of artists, participants, technologies and institutions in interactive and participatory performances. The detailed description of these performances provides substantial insights into the entanglement of human and non-human actors within participatory art, and the important aesthetic and political implications of these contemporary participatory practices.
-
ItemLost property: the marginalisation of the artefact in contemporary museum theatre( 2015)The use of performance as an interpretive tool in museums has a long, although largely under-researched, history. Central to this thesis is the paradoxical observation that performance in museums, or ‘museum theatre’, regularly fails to engage with collection items. The title of the thesis, ‘lost property’, refers to both the apparent displacement of collection objects as the subject of museum theatre and the complexities of performing historical artefacts in a museum without reducing their significance to the status of a theatrical prop. Traditionally, the object has been central to the concept of ‘museum’. With the advent of a new museological approach to the running of museums, the exhibition object seems to have taken a subordinate role to the presentation of ideas and concepts through exhibition design and interpretation. This thesis draws on disciplinary literature, case studies, site visits and interviews with museum theatre practitioners to identify and examine the factors that have contributed to the shifting focus of performance based on objects to performance based on ideas.
-
ItemThe political sacrament of the body in 21st century performance( 2014)My study of sacramentality and contemporary performance begins with the problem of the body. What does it mean for the body to ‘appear’ in situations of aesthetic performance? Does appearing in the context of ‘live art’ and performance share something of what it means to appear and act as a political body, or a body coming before the law? The premise of my thesis is that to appear as a body before the law, or in the polis, or at the theatre or museum as an object or agent, involves participating in a sacramental thinking about the body and its relation to institution. I will show how ‘the body’ in each of the performance case studies labours through a secular and displaced reiteration of the Christological ‘corpus, such that the display of the ‘body in pain’ is positively valued and applied as political critique. The iteration of the ‘body in pain’ is expressed by the various artists and performers through acts of endurance, mimetic sacrifice; self-injury and referential torture. I will argue that this iteration of the performing body draws explicit focus to scripted encounters with institution and citizenship, through acts of willed and unwilled abjection, illegitimacy and ‘criminality’.
-
ItemFriendology: the negotiation of intimacy on Facebook( 2012)How does Facebook influence intimacy as it relates to identity and relationships? I answer aspects of this question through a grounded ethnography of Australian Facebook users. Research into social network services has produced a range of disparate concepts, in part due to highly specific quantitative investigations. Though some ethnography has been produced, there remains a need for finegrained, qualitative research. This thesis responds to these issues, combining ethnographic methods with Grounded Theory techniques in order to produce a conceptually rich account of everyday social processes. Six participants were recruited, interviewed multiple times, observed on Facebook, and had their Facebook profile information downloaded. A Grounded Theory was inductively developed in which intimacy, identity and friendship emerged as core concepts. The benefits of this approach are a focus on process and the clarification of ideas through abstraction and conceptualisation, rather than thick description. Facebook influences identity and friendship, I argue, by making intimacy problematic. Interpersonal intimacy is a primary quality which defines friendships, and my participants self‐reflexively perform intimacy on Facebook in order to reproduce their friendships. I conceptualise this endeavour in terms of spatiality and social capital. However, participants encounter a host of sociotechnical contingencies which jeopardise this process. These can negatively affect interpersonal intimacy in a variety of ways. In response, participants develop reflexive techniques to ‘negotiate intimacy’. I give a detailed constructionist account of these, focusing on how participants control spaces, mobilise resources of identification, and develop self‐protecting forms of public, social intimacy. These processes respond to broad problems and describe nascent norms, rather than individual tactics. Hence, I believe they are indicative of a ‘culture of reflexive intimacy’. This is a ‘friend culture’ stemming from changes in the nature of modern relationships which are institutionalised on Facebook. Hence, Facebook is a ‘friendology’, a friendship technology, but also a realm in which the logos of friendship becomes an object of reflexive thought and action. Although the apogee of this thesis cannot capture this culture’s broad structures, I explore how they may emerge through symbolic interactions in a novel socio‐technical environment in respect to a particular cultural group.
-
ItemPleasure revolution possibility( 2011)The early work of Bertolt Brecht is relegated to an inferior position in the canon often placed in the category of juvenilia and given the deprecating description of anarchistic or immature. This thesis examines three of the early plays—Baal, In the Jungle of Cities and the Life of Edward II of England―chosen for their open form of dramaturgy and for their subject matter. The aim of producing new readings of these plays is to assess their contribution to the understanding of the discourse on sexuality, race and class the rhetoric of benevolence and the performativity of power. Judith Butler’s work which reconsiders the basis for assumptions made about how gender is constituted is apposite for this assessment not only because her work challenges foundations but because I establish that there is an alignment between the analytical frameworks used by Butler and the dramaturgical methods used by Brecht. The creative work of the thesis draws inspiration from this alignment and attempts to develop a dramaturgy, a set of practices, informed by Brecht, Butler and the demands of the material. It is my contention that Butler’s theory of performativity, and its relevance to aesthetic contexts, remains under-developed for its potential to revolutionize practice. Further, I suggest that Butler’s theory and Brecht’s early dramaturgy comprise the modality through which the particular agency of theatre can be seen to communicate the complex processes at work in the way the social world is made. The creative work takes form as a script framed by a description of the developmental process and methodology, together with a possible treatment which incorporates techniques devised to problematize and challenge key theatrical paradigms. The framing also outlines the way in which the alignment between Brecht and Butler tests and defines the limits of Brechtian Gestus—which privileges the performer—the limits of self knowledge, and consequently, knowledge of Others. The title of the thesis refers not only to the pleasure of creative thinking and play with which the theory is approached but to the way in which foundational fictions and cultural sedimentation are dissolved. The concept of revolution is used to describe the expansion of analytical frameworks used by both Brecht and Butler in their ground-breaking and sustained efforts to explicate processes such as subject formation, agency and the processes of abjection. Possibility is perhaps the most difficult of the three notions to define. I advocate for the sense of the word which focuses not on utopian fantasy or science fiction but on the pragmatics of that which is actually negotiable or achievable within the mangle of power and knowledge.