School of Culture and Communication - Theses
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ItemThe environment in English versions of the Grimms' and Hans Christian Andersen's fairy tale literature, 1823–1899( 2016)This dissertation explores the intersections between literature and environmental history in nineteenth-century English versions of Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm and Hans Christian Andersen’s fairy tale literature. While the success of the Grimms’ and Andersen’s fairy tale literature in England can be attributed to the inclusion of Christian principles, the privileging of individualism, the omission of licentious content and the focalisation of child protagonists, this dissertation argues that the tales were also valued for presenting an environmental ethos. English versions of the Grimms’ and Andersen’s fairy tales relayed anthropocentric ideas about nature which competed with a developing sense of environmentalism during a period of rapid environmental change. While these tales idealised the tremendous possibilities offered by the environment, nature is not prioritised above human interest; rather, these versions effectively highlight humanity’s destructive disposition by disempowering female and animal characters. By focusing on depictions of nature during a century of environmental devastation, this thesis contributes to our understanding of humanity’s relationship with the natural world as relayed in literary texts.
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ItemMaurice Blanchot: three terrors( 2018)This thesis studies the political and critical writings of Maurice Blanchot from 1933 to 1949, a period in which he underwent a number of fundamental intellectual changes that were most famously but not only political. Its overarching trope is that of the terror, which appears in three very different guises, in 1936, 1941, and 1947, playing a central role in Blanchot’s engagement each time. The terror is one of the major metaphorical complexes of twentieth century French letters. It is essentially a nested series of discourses (and medical and juridical metaphors) about how discourse connects to reality or only to itself, which makes it essentially reflexive, as well as immediately political, literary and philosophical. In it the twin heritages of revolution and Romanticism are repeatedly struggled over and re-worked into their modern forms. My thesis elaborates Blanchot’s reckonings with this complex as a means to demonstrating the precise nature of his various changes. The goal is not to explain his political ‘turn’ but to specify the categorical modifications to his thinking that it presupposes. I trace the increasing sophistication of Blanchot’s political and literary thinking, arguing that initially Blanchot’s national revolutionary politics are formally anti-Semitic in that the prerequisite for national restoration is the violent expurgation of what is foreign. It is only with his encounter with thinkers like Jean Paulhan and Brice Parain in the 1940s that he develops an account of how terror and rhetoric, or destruction and articulation, mediate but do not limit one another, and begins to conceive of literature as the sovereign creation-destruction of realities via their interaction. It is his encounter with Hegel that enables him to re-link this conception to history by arguing that it directly corresponds to revolution, a view founded on Hegel’s basic homology between language and history. I argue that Blanchot’s identification of himself with revolution, as well as his negative reading of Hegel (his refusal of ‘achieved’ sense and development generally), sets a kind of absolute positioning named ‘ambiguity’ from which Blanchot will endeavour to think henceforth: it leads directly to his tendency to proceed by the unfolding of paradoxes and to the inescapably plural meaning of his 1950s (anti-)categories such as the neuter. It also precludes the possibility of a fixed division between literature and the political, which I argue is sufficient grounds for ruling out modelling his turn on a transition from one to the other. Such a reading, which is more explicitly materialist than most of those proposed to date, provides a different basis from which to approach Blanchot’s celebrated 1950s critical writings: namely, that they are suffused with the absolute experience of the identity with literature and revolution that Blanchot ‘becomes’ in the late 1940s. It also implies that Blanchot was preoccupied with thinking the link between literature and history throughout his career, and that even the rarefied nature of some of his writings is due to this very issue and his responses to it, rather than to his indifference to such a link.
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ItemThree books: voice, literature, and mind( 2019)THREE BOOKS: Voice, Literature, and Mind (2013–2018) The Absent Therapist / The Inevitable Gift Shop / Murmur The Absent Therapist is a kaleidophone of voices – internal monologues, meditations, expostulations – that stir, argue, wander and pronounce. They may be thought of as sketches of the mind in flight – a vocal fugue that both suggests longer stories (how much more remains to be said) and bears glancing witness to the irretrievable or unknowable (how much has been lost). A companion “memoir by other means”, The Inevitable Gift Shop examines provisionality, detachment and obliquity in literary criticism and the composition of the self. It draws on philosophical and artistic models of brevity (on Auden’s notational essays and Shakespeare’s sonnets, for example) to renew an engagement with sensibility – the “faculty for feeling” – and with problems of voice, mind, belief and consistency as they arise in writing. A third, closely-related section, Murmur, is a discursive novel. It draws on aspects of the later life and work of the logician and computer science pioneer Alan Turing, sentenced to a regime of organotherapy (chemical castration) in 1952 for Gross Indecency with another man. Turing told his Jungian analyst that he’d been dreaming vividly throughout the organotherapy, and the novel presents these dreams as versified hallucinations, framed by letters to the woman (Joan Clarke) he nearly married during the Second World War. Turing and his avatars appears as Alec Pryor. His fiancée becomes June Wilson. In correspondence, Pryor and June use their experience as cryptanalysts to investigate the possibilities of AI: the stumbling blocks are point-of-view, consciousness, and the reality of pain. Murmur constitutes an extension of philosophical material explored in The Inevitable Gift Shop.
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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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ItemContesting womanhood: the American New Woman in literary and popular culture, 1890-1930( 2015)Who was the American New Woman and why was she important to female literary writers from the period 1890 to 1930? My thesis explores this question by focusing specifically on the relationship between literary writings and the popular culture portrayals of the New Woman appearing in American magazines, many of which were in the form of advertisements and visual illustrations. I critically examine selected works of five American female writers who engaged with this figure in notably different ways, exploring among other things the socio-historical contexts of their literary works in order to understand why the ideology of the New Woman was so appealing and so pervasive, why it spawned so many different responses from female writers and why it changed so dramatically over time. Beginning with major works by Kate Chopin and Charlotte Perkins Gilman, followed by Jessie Fauset and Edith Wharton and finishing with Nella Larsen, the thesis argues that in America the changing nature of the New Woman in popular culture helped lay the framework for female literary writers to imagine and create new forms of American womanhood. It further contends that although she was often stereotyped in popular culture, the New Woman’s identity proved to be more flexible in literary works and that this complexity extended to both “white” and “black” writers. An additional contention is that unlike white women writers, African-American women writers were obliged to suppress their sexuality since to do otherwise was to reinforce the stereotype of animality that had been projected upon them since the era of slavery.