School of Culture and Communication - Theses
Permanent URI for this collection
Search Results
1 - 2 of 2
-
ItemThe menstrual imaginary and 'The Butcher's Daughter'( 2016)A number of important writers and artists focus on the once taboo subject of menstruation in their work, drawing attention to the topic of women’s bleeding and the female cycle. A menstrual imaginary is a latent poetic source of inspiration in women writers and artists, an imaginary domain outside of language, which is drawn on through symbolism, particularly through references to blood, to eruptions of blood, and women’s cycles, as well as all procreative functions. Whilst, Julia Kristeva theorises menstruation on the side of the abject, my work alternatively seeks to rescue women’s menstruation from the patriarchal abject. Moreover, I draw on the writings of Hélène Cixous who argues for the importance of a voice of ‘milk and blood,’ although it is mostly at a subterranean level that we can find evidence for a menstrual narrative running through her work. I use Cixous as a springboard for exploring the concept of a feminine writing in red ink, in direct contrast to her ‘white ink,’ as well as consider the domain of woman’s ‘volcanic unconscious,’ in relation to the creation of a menstrual imaginary. Furthermore, I read important classical texts such as the stories of Persephone and Demeter, Medusa, Oedipus and the Sphinx, and the fairy tale Little Red Riding Hood, against-the-grain for a menstrual imaginary. I also survey a number of poets and writers who explicitly adopt menstrual imagery and blood to depict a menstrual imaginary. Finally, I write my own menstrual imaginary in the form of a poetry manuscript.
-
ItemThe act of writing: the art of dreaming & Plague Room( 2010)There are numerous accounts of creative writers claiming to write from a dream-state, but these accounts have never been examined as scientific fact and have instead, to date, been primarily accepted or dismissed as nothing more than anecdote. This paper is the result of a wide ranging survey of neuro and cognitive science as well as applied psychology, and it examines how findings in these fields support the long held contentions of the many writers who believe that the mind writing can be more similar to the mind dreaming than it is to normal waking-thought. Beginning with a connectionist account of cognition, I discuss how the same cognitive faculties necessary for thought are also found in dreaming and writing. Understanding how conceptual spaces arise from physical stimuli and how these spaces can then be built into larger units of thought enables an examination of how brain stimulation and constraint leads to varying states of consciousness as represented by a waking-dream continuum. Expanding on these basic principles, Alan Hobson’s AIM theory of dreams is then probed to show how the elements of activation, input and modulation can be tuned to move a subject between states of consciousness. Ultimately, with dreaming and writing both understood in terms of the connectionist mind, and with the knowledge of how the elements of AIM determine a subject’s current state of consciousness, I explore the methods of Gertrude Stein, Jack Kerouac, and Robert Olen Butler to show that their writing practices sufficiently alter those tunings so as to move the mind from a waking-state into a dream-state. Turning from theory to practice, the creative portion of this thesis represents my attempts to incorporate these dream-states into my writing. Borrowing the power of the jewel center from Kerouac, the freedom of automaticity from Stein and the practice of dream-storming from Butler, I used a sustained hypnogogic state to explore potential writing spaces, trying out characters and turns of plot until finally – with the intent of meditation – I began writing and redreaming the story over the many drafts that it took to get the vision to fully coalesce. The result of these endeavors is the novel Plague Room, and it is my hope that it possesses the full strength of a dream-state and that the reader finishes wondering if what they’ve experienced was real or if it was mere reverie.