School of Culture and Communication - Theses
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ItemThe topographical parenthesis: articulations of space in the novels of Henry James( 2019)Taking as its cue the “topographical parenthesis” of Washington Square (1881), this thesis proffers the parenthesis as a critically underrated topographical and rhetorical category that is constituent of the novels of Henry James. It argues that the Jamesian novel prioritises the parenthetical, which I classify as the concealed, the unconsummated, the residual, the queer, the feminine, the childish, the nostalgic, the detail and the digression. I argue that these parenthetical figures permeate the literary topography of James’s novels— what I call his “articulations of space”—and that in this parenthetical topography, the author enhances his own narratorial mobility, shifting between points of identification and negation, and engaging with novelistic conventions of realism, romance and decadence. I propose a critical investment in the parenthetical that matches the author’s own. Engaging formalist, intertextual, queer and feminist frameworks, I present six close readings of James’s novels ranging from the early through to the late stage of the author’s career. I demonstrate the centrality of the parenthesis in James’s work as a technical device honed by the author, and its methodological value as an organising device with which to approach the subjects of authorship, genre, influence, production, revision, reception and criticism that are integral to Henry James studies and to literary studies more widely.
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ItemSpectres of Modernism: authorship, reception and intention in Witter Bynner and Arthur Davison Ficke’s spectra hoax( 2017)This thesis draws from a range of primary materials relating to the Spectric School, a hoax poetry movement concocted in 1916 by poets Witter Bynner and Arthur Davison Ficke, to reconcile the movement’s relationship to the backdrop of modernist print culture. Specifically, it argues that Bynner and Ficke exploited a breakdown of discourses surrounding modernist conceptions of authorship, identity, and intention in their construction of the hoax movement. Additionally, this thesis considers the hoax alongside contemporary appraisals of the movement, and argues that the hoaxers’ subversion of what it meant to be an author exposes a growing disjunction during the modernist period between a culture of reviewing and modernist conceptions of authorship. Finally, this thesis considers Bynner and Ficke’s use of a hoax movement as a medium to further their poetic aims and avers that the hoaxers’ retrospective recasting of their motives alongside the development of the hoax complicate current critical valuations of the movement. Through considering Bynner and Ficke’s recasting of poetic intention, I challenge readings of the hoax that interpret it as having had a clear didactic purpose in parodying modernist poetry, and instead argue that the Spectra Hoax serves as an interface of meanings that complicates attempts to inscribe clear notions of authenticity, authorship and intentionality onto it.
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ItemTelling tales : Helen Demidenko and the autobiographical pact & "The Pact"( 2010)As arguably the most notorious liar in contemporary Australian literature, Helen Demidenko has been the subject of hundreds of articles, and at least four books. Her 1995 novel The Hand that Signed the Paper had already won three literary prizes and attracted significant critical attention due to its controversial subject matter, when her fraudulent identity was revealed. The critical section of this thesis draws out the implications of the ‘Demidenko Affair’ by exploring Philippe Lejeune’s theory of the autobiographical pact, genre theory and contemporary book promotion and marketing practices. Using Gerard Génette’s notion of paratexts, and Stanley Fish’s idea of interpretive communities, I argue that many reviewers of The Hand that Signed the Paper read the novel as though it was an autobiography, and that this reading position contributed to the vehemence of the condemnation its author received when her fraudulent identity ‘Helen Demidenko’ was revealed. I use genre theory to analyse the tendency to ‘read autobiographically’, which emerges from a cultural context which includes the growing popularity of non-fiction books and the prevalence of book promotion strategies which draw on the author’s persona to lend credence to their book. The creative section of this thesis has a narrator who shares much of my biography: she is around the same age, grew up in the same area as I did and has a similar name. When she returns to her hometown after a decade-long absence and reunites with old friends, she discovers that the story she has told herself about her past is only one version of events. The exploration of a notionally autobiographical theme is overlaid by a fictional narrative structure which enables an ambiguous rendering of the ‘identity’ of author, narrator and protagonist proposed by Lejeune.