School of Culture and Communication - Theses
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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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Item(Re)tracing the line: familial representations in contemporary multicultural texts and immigrant fiction( 2014)This thesis is a genealogical exploration into a second-generation immigrant writer’s identity through critical and creative writing. It (re)traces the author’s own familial immigrant experience via select contemporary literature and multicultural works, analysing key theoretical ideas and critical scholarly texts by intellectuals, including Roland Barthes, Marianne Hirsch, Madelaine Hron and Gaston Bachelard. The thesis also explores and produces creative works on the themes of death and memory, place and trauma, journey and home. Chapter One, discusses death photography as the site of trauma and the “wound” (Barthes, Camera Lucida 26), and the resulting narratives produced as a response to the “punctum” (27) through the analysis of specific photographic works and texts by Chinese-Australian artist William Yang, French theorist Roland Barthes, and Australian photography curator, historian and writer, Helen Ennis. The chapter also introduces the writer’s own idea of “the personal punctum” building on the Barthesian notion of the power existing within death photographs and the “triggering” of memories through “photo elicitation” (Harper 2002) for their potential in the creation of fictional narrative. Chapter Two, through textual analysis of two contemporary Asian-Australian writers, Alice Pung’s memoir Her Father’s Daughter (2011) and Nam Le’s fictional short story “Love and Honour and Pity and Pride and Compassion and Sacrifice” (2009), trauma and second-generation immigrant writing about place, explicitly the landscape and familial homeland as “traumascape” (Tumarkin 12), are examined . The section focusses on the inter-generational effects of trauma and “postmemories of place” (own term), and the conflict arising with the appropriation of survivors’ testimonies. Chapter Three, investigates the trauma and pain as a result of the “journey” (Hron 15) in the immigrant narrative genre. It explores the ideas of “topography” and “topoanalysis” with the mapping of the first-generation immigrant’s journey back to the homeland. The emigrant’s/immigrant’s journey and the realities of the old homeland and the new imagined home are discussed through Shaun Tan’s graphic novel The Arrival (2006), and Péter Forgács’ documentary Hunky Blues (2009), about the Hungarian mass migration to America. Framing the dissertation are selected creative works. The non-fiction interleaves are bridging devices, linking critical theory with creative practice, enabling meditation on the aforementioned critical themes provoked by my father’s death. The fiction includes chapters from Our Fathers, a contemporary-historical novel of a boy escaping post revolution Hungary, and his death in Brisbane fifty years on. The fiction ties both past and present through themes of family history, trauma, inter-generational transfer of memories and postmemories, place, and the idea of home.
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ItemIndelible: a movement based practice-led inquiry into memory, remembering and representation( 2005)Indelible is a performance and dance research project. It has three outcomes or pathways, presented on DVD-ROM, via which the user-reader can experience multi-modal perspectives on remembering, memory, and representing performative ideas, events and actions. These pathways are video, writing and interactive and together they form a series of hypermedia framings by which the corporeal and philosophical underpinnings of the project are witnessed. The research is considered to be practice-led, in which my practice consists of choreographic strategies, physical actions, media-based processes, and writing. Within these core representations I have sought to confront the methodological and theoretical paradox affecting performance makers electing to recontextualise their work beyond live processes. How might the absence or disappearance of a so-called live work contribute to the overall design and representational practices underlying the outcomes? In this sense the three pathways that comprise Indelible generate a complex network of artistic, scholarly, poetic, and methodological layerings or enfoldings in which the user-reader is presented with possibilities for experiencing the vital subjectivity and inherent fallibility of memory and remembering. (For complete abstract open dopcument)
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ItemThe aesthetics of counter-memory: contemporary art and Australian refugee histories after Tampa( 2013)This thesis provides the first in-depth examination of experimental methods for memorialising Australian refugee experiences in works by the contemporary artists Rosemary Laing, Dierk Schmidt, Lyndell Brown and Charles Green. As this thesis argues, each of these artists’ methods for memorialising refugee experiences is distinguished by the use of montage (the conjoining of disparate materials and references). By bringing together—or montaging—cultural documents from a variety of sources at both a historical and geographic level, these artists create deeply fragmented images of refugee histories. Representations of refugee experiences such as those involving the Tampa, the “children overboard” affair and SIEV-X are juxtaposed and sutured with a range of other seemingly incongruous histories from the nineteenth, twentieth and twenty-first centuries. In engaging strategies of montage and juxtaposition, this thesis finds that the artists examined therein develop a distinct paradigm of experimental memorialisation—termed here the aesthetics of counter-memory. Developed through a critical engagement with discourses on contemporaneity, globalisation, migration and memory, this thesis’ development of the notion of the aesthetics of counter-memory offers a historical and theoretical framework for understanding the import of Laing, Schmidt and Brown and Green’s experimental methods of memorialisation. In contrast to the notion of the “counter-monument”, which focuses on analysing official and state-sanctioned memorials, the notion of the aesthetics of counter-memory addresses the possibility of art directly intervening in the politics of memory of that which escapes collective consciousness: that is, the politics of who and what is remembered and why. As this thesis shows, in grappling with the politics of memory, the aesthetics of counter-memory refuses didactic or agitprop modes of communication and is instead structured by affective and poetic forms of address. The aesthetics of counter-memory determines our experience of migratory flows, place and inter-subjectivity through a series of analogies, resonances, ligatures, networks and border-crossings. It places montage and juxtaposition—the conjunction of heterogenous and at times seemingly incongruous things—as central to a critical understanding of experiences of place, migration and exile in the twenty-first century. In mapping the emergence of the aesthetics of counter-memory this thesis theorises and analyses a new paradigm of contemporary art and its impact on remembrances of recent refugee histories.
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ItemFrom Baudelaire to Sebald via the Australian diaspora: migrancy, exile and reflective literary memories( 2012)While many studies in memory scholarship engage with memory as a discrete entity, this thesis engages with the field of memory’s literary representation. The thesis highlights literature’s active reflection upon memory, as well as its echo of the concerns with memory experienced more broadly in the late-twentieth century. Positioning itself at the intersection of twentieth-century literature and memory studies, this thesis argues that literary texts have made nuanced contributions to understandings of memory’s myriad roles and recent rise, in ways that are commonly unrecognised in memory studies scholarship. Informed by theories of temporality and place as well as by those of memory, the thesis embarks on an engaged, associative reading of different texts from three contexts of twentieth-century experience — the post-Second World War, the post- colonial and the post-migration. This reading reveals literature’s engagement with memory’s presence as well as its absence and, crucially, literature’s conjoining and complication of these qualities of memory. Looking to philosophies of memory and temporality in my first chapter, I examine the work of Maurice Merleau-Ponty as well as the work of Walter Benjamin, analysing how poetic form interrelates with representations of memory and time. This discussion provides a grounding and point of comparison for my second chapter, which engages with the work of Walter Benjamin from a somewhat different perspective, examining his semi-autobiographical prose on memory and modern place. By demonstrating the work of Benjamin’s writing in relocating the memory of place to a literary space, my discussion reveals memory’s interrelationship to prose as well as to poetry. These two chapters, entailing engagement with theories of temporality as well as with memory, reveal memory’s dynamic relationship with modern place and time, and with the temporal processes of writing itself—interrelations which bring to the fore memory’s complexities and absences. This discussion is the foundation for my study of memory in the late-twentieth century, where I engage with the presence as well as the promise of memory in writing, in the context of memory’s current fascination and recent rise. Moving to the work of W.G. Sebald, I argue that After Nature, his lesser-studied poem, realises the promise of memory in the post-war present, whilst also articulating the difficulties and losses of memory. This tension and duality, present to a lesser extent in Sebald’s prose, is productive of questioning insight into memory as well as writing. Moving to a further consideration of memory’s challenges and potentialities, I examine memory in the work of the post-colonial writer, J.M. Coetzee. Looking beyond the more thoroughly explored theme of history, this chapter examines memory in Coetzee’s memoirs and fiction, discussing the voice and presentation of childhood in Boyhood, and the fraught representation of the memories of others in the novel Foe. Examining memory in one further, literary context of the twentieth century, I explore the poetry and prose of the migrant Australian writer, Antigone Kefala, demonstrating how a reflective representation of post-migration memory entails a questioning of any one place as a point of home, and an ongoing experience of memory in the diaspora. In a final reflection on memory’s recent representations, I turn to a discussion of memory in contemporary art film. Noting the migration of memory themes and concerns across disciplines, I then consider how the structures of memory in film reorient and enrich approaches to memory in literature. Recent films, like recent writing, ask for a reflective engagement with memory that is conscious of representation as a means of record and of remembering, as well as a means of reorienting conceptions of memory, so that memory’s losses and absences as well as its presences are encountered.
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ItemPresent past, past present: history, memory and identity in six contemporary historiographic novels( 2010)This thesis examines a selection of novels, published from 1990 onward, which engage with past-present relationships, considering the roles history and memory play in connecting us to the past. Examining a range of texts including Amin Maalouf’s Ports of Call (1999), A. S. Byatt’s Possession (1990), Margaret Scott’s Family Album (2000), Joy Kogawa’s Obasan (1994), Sebastian Faulks’ Birdsong (1994) and Bernhard Schlink’s The Reader (1997), I argue that each of my chosen novelists recognizes the socio-political manipulation behind historical narratives and that they affirm the importance of the past to characters in the present, who seek an understanding of their identities in relation to their heritage. Taking issue with Kerwin Lee Klein and Pierre Nora’s idea that history and memory are utterly antithetical and mutually exclusive, I argue that my selected novelists present both history and memory as subjective narratives. In the texts, the conflicts between historical accounts and memories reveal the inevitable discords between socio-political analyses and personal perception. Employing Hayden White’s argument of subjective history and key memory theories by Sigmund Freud, Dori Laub, Annette Kuhn, Louisa Passerini and E. Ann Kaplan to examine the contradictions between history and memory in each novel, I contend that the novelists regard the conflict as a form of positive disagreement. Each novel features characters who are stimulated to delve into the past to trace secrets and to solve mysteries, at the same time entering into a broader critique of the recording of ‘official’ histories. Importantly, while my chosen writers reveal doubts about the reliability of history, they do not attempt to supplant it with memory. Instead, they move towards a process of reconciliation, whereby history and memory complement and inform one another. In this thesis, I contend that by representing a sequence of quests to uncover the past, the novelists do not seek to assert historical certainty. What they foreground in the novels is the importance of building an emotional connection between the past and the present. Bringing readers to participate in their characters’ very private experiences—their struggles, their quests for the past and their reconfiguration of social and personal identities, these writers emphasize and celebrate the gap between history and memory. Each of my chosen novelists explores how history and memory teach us empathy with those who have come before, animating history and heritage so that far from being consigned to the past, they can inform the present.