School of Culture and Communication - Theses
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ItemYours faithfully; Werther for the English language stage( 2003)Although numerous English literary translations of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s ‘nobility in suicide’ - themed, epistolary, psychological and therefore “untheatrical” (Atkins 1949) novel Die Leiden des jungen Werthers (1774) have been published – none of the resultant English stage translations have ever been described as faithful to the original. The various obstacles to the creation of a faithful translation for the English language stage were analysed. The first obstacle is caution by Christian playwrights regarding the proscribed theme of nobility in suicide. Related to this is the second obstacle; the fear of producing ‘imitative’ suicides, which have been labelled ‘The Werther Effect’ by sociologists (Phillips 1974). Other obstacles are form-related rather than theme-related and include the absence of an authoritative English literary translation and the difficulties in translating to the stage the psychological and epistolary novel. With reference to Goethe’s three–tiered model of translation (translated by Lefevere 1977) and cinema academic Geoffrey Wagner’s ‘Three modes of adaptation’ (Wagner 1975) this writer has attempted to write a ‘prosaic’, ‘transpositional’ and unaugmented stage translation by identifying and addressing each of the obstacles, the hypothesis being that if these obstacles were systematically addressed and overcome, then an English language stageplay closely equivalent in meaning to the prominent ideas, themes and form of the novel – that is, a work arguably faithful to the novel – could be created. The research lead to the resultant creation The Sorrows and Sufferings of Young Werther; a Stageplay which is submitted as the creative work component (30%) of the writer’s Master of Creative Arts thesis at the University of Melbourne, Australia, in September 2003.
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ItemThe theme of melancholy in Wordsworth's poetry( 1974)My concern in this essay is to focus attention on an aspect of Wordsworth's work to which I have given the general name of a "theme of melancholy". I wish to suggest by this not some habitual melancholy of attitude, or an elegiac note, though both of these are involved in the theme, but rather something which is inherent in all his work, present as one of the shaping conditions of his poetry. We speak of Wordsworth as a revolutionary, poet above all as one who was concerned with the release of feeling, and who achieved that release in great and lasting modes; yet I believe that, if we are to say this, we must also take account of the pervasiveness of this "melancholy" in his work. The considerations involved in such an account must have an important bearing on our sense of his work as a whole, and they seem to me also to offer terms in which we may explore the reasons for the extreme difference in quality which is manifested in it.(From Introduction)
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Item"Jim Crowism" in Richard Wright's early fiction( 2007)During the Great Depression in America, Jim Crow laws and customs were intensified and came to affect African Americans in almost all facets of their lives. This thesis argues that Richard Wright's early fictional works—Lawd Today! (1965), Uncle Tom's Children (1938) and Native Son (l940)—portray the new violent measures adopted by whites, but they also represent an attempt to understand the destructive physical and psychological impact they had on African Americans. I argue that beginning with Lawd Today! the reader is able to track a development in Wright's thinking on the matter of how African Americans should both think about and respond to white violence. Thus in the first of these works, the attention is on understanding the causes of domestic violence in the African American community, with black on black violence being seen as a direct response to white cruelty and hypocrisy. At the same time, Wright appears to offer no alternative vision for coping with white violence other than the two extremes of submission or violent resistance, a bleak scenario, which in turn helps account for the novel's heavy use of irony and satire. The collection of short stories titled Uncle Tom's Children, by contrast, poses several alternative modes of response to the hopeless cycle of physical violence so graphically depicted in Lawd Today! I argue that by offering the reader a series of characters, some of whom have learnt to perform the role of submission—thereby becoming a sort of subversive Uncle Tom, so to speak—and some of whom plot their escape to the North, Wright aimed to introduce his fellow African Americans to the possibility of a non-violent form or response which from the point of view of retaining identity and dignity and getting one's own way, was a considerable improvement on the option of submission. In addition to this, he used other characters to show that a second possibility existed in the form of carrying out both planned and spontaneous acts of violence directed at white property and the bodies of the white oppressors themselves; an initiative aimed at stirring up African Americans if not to the point of outright rebellion then at least to abandon their passive and subservient attitude. In Native Son, the third text of this group, I argue that Wright contrived to present the reader with a character who embodies the transition from submissiveness to outright rebellion. The main protagonist, Bigger Thomas, begins by trying to emulate whites but because he is unable to control his own frustration in the face of white social power and privilege, he ends up murdering a white woman. To the extent that Wright portrays the experience as cathartic and as restoring the black protagonist's sense of pride, such actions lend themselves to being interpreted in a positive light. Conversely, to the extent that Wright portrays his character finally recognizing the humanity of his white oppressors and being brought to trial for his crime, the novel can be interpreted as a warning against violent and ill-considered forms of revenge. Underpinning my argument is the idea that in these early novels Wright anticipated many of the concepts that were to form the basis of Frantz Fanon's theory of decolonization. In addition, I argue that a particular set of postcolonial concepts, namely those formulated by W. E. B. Du Bois (1868-1963), Albert Memmi (1920-), Paulo Freire (1921-1997), Suzanne Lipsky, Homi K. Bhabha (1949-), and Henry Louis Gates, Jr., (1950-), all having to do with the loss and recovery of identity, constitute an appropriate framework through which to read Wright's early fictions since the destructive forms of racism that African Americans endured during the Jim Crow era were in many regards identical to those perpetuated by European colonialism in other parts of the globe. Finally, in order to give specificity to the racism that Wright was both highlighting and analyzing, and to demonstrate that there was a clear evolution in his thinking about the problems of rebellion and violence, I read these early novels in relation to the historical events of the Jim Crow period itself as these have been presented and elaborated by recent social historians and Wright's critics.
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ItemThe development of pessimism in the works of Mark Twain( 1976)The tendency towards pessimism in the 19th century novel is one of the most fascinating of the broad movements in literature, largely because its manifestations are so varied. The later novels of Dickens and Madam Bovary and Crime and Punishment would seem to have little in common and yet, like so many other novels of the period from about 1850 to the First World War, they are marked by a sense of the waste of human potential, a sombreness and narrowing in what life has to offer. We naturally feel that there must have been something in the age itself which inclined those who recorded it towards a pessimistic outlook. Yet how we are to comment on this general tendency is a difficult matter. I feel that little of value can be achieved by identifying general qualities of the age and looking back to find their influence on a variety of writers, at least not by those whose primary interest is literature and not history, however closely the two are linked in this perspective. Rather, certain qualities of the late 19th and early 20th centuries can perhaps be suggested by studying the careers of particular writers and noting the ways in which their impressions and judgments about life and their own times converge. Although a comparative study of a number of writers, with this point of view in mind, would represent a fuller working out of my interest, I feel that it would be quite inappropriate to the length of this thesis and I am confining myself to a study of Mark Twain. Twain is a figure of exceptionally wide significance in relation to the issue of pessimism as a general tendency in the 19th century. In part, this is because of the explicitness with which Twain expresses his growing pessimism. In this he resembles Tolstoy, for by the end of their careers both writers had reached a position of explicit, cosmic pessimism; a position registered particularly forcefully by their readers because it seems, at least superficially, to contrast sharply with their best known works - Anna Karenina and Huckleberry Finn - which are particularly beloved by all readers for their rendering of some of the simplest and most deeply felt of life's pleasures and values. But in what his pessimism reveals about the times in which he lived Twain is of more direct significance than Tolstoy. For although his later years were marked by exceptional difficulties and sorrows in his personal life, it is not in terms of private suffering that he develops his pessimistic outlook, but in terms of his beliefs about nature and society. (From Introduction)
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ItemThe life and work of Ludwig Becker (1808-1861): with a critical analysis of his Australian oeuvre and an appreciation of his contribution to artistic and scientific developments in Victoria( 1978)Ludwig Becker’s name has long been associated with the Great Exploring Expedition of 1860-61 and the work he executed during the Expedition as artist, naturalist and geologist. But details of his life and training have been obscure and work undertaken prior to the Expedition relatively unknown. Becker was no superficial or flamboyant character but a true scholar. He appeared content to remain in the background, sharing his knowledge and contributing much to the cultural life of early Melbourne, always the worker while others took the honours. During the research for this study of Becker’s life and work I realised that it would be enhanced by extending the critical analysis into the scientific field. I sought some guidance from scientific specialists. I acknowledge with gratitude the advice given me by Mr John Calaby, Division of Wild Life Research, C.S.I.R.O., Canberra; and Mr Alan West, Curator of Anthropology, both of the National Museum of Victoria. Help provided on a specific point is acknowledged in the relative note. The scientists confirmed that Becker was able to identify correctly almost all living species of the animal world that he sketched, providing a considerable amount of data which they can hardly fault. In all other respects this thesis is an original work. It provides a biographical study of Becker in three sections. The first covers his life prior to his arrival in Australia; the second covers nine years spent in Tasmania and Victoria; and the third tells of the part he played on the Expedition until his death. There is a lengthy critical appraisal of his artistic work, the German tradition which moulded him and comparisons with other artists, especially William Strutt. There is also a chapter on his promotion of the arts in Victoria. Appendices, including hitherto unknown (in Australia) biographical details of Hermann Beckler, with whom he was closely associated on the Expedition, as well as full notes to the text, provide additional information and sources. The second volume contains the Catalogue of Becker’s work. That prior to the Expedition cannot claim to be complete but does give the fullest information available to date. The catalogue of the sketches of the Expedition is complete. These sketches and other documentary material, including reports, letters and meteorological observations on which I have based my study of this section are in the collection of the Royal Society of Victoria, now part of the special collections held in the La Trobe Library, State Library of Victoria. Also in the La Trobe Library are the Minutes in manuscript of the Victorian Society of Fine Arts which I believe worthy of inclusion as a lengthy appendix in this study.
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ItemVisions of the island: the mimetic and the ludic in Australian postcolonialism( 2000)This thesis examines three Australian postcolonial historical novels: Peter Carey's Oscar and Lucinda and Jack Maggs, and Patrick White's Voss. I argue, first, that in these texts colonial identifications/resistances are grafted onto a binary logic that I define as mimetic; second, that the three novels reprocess colonial mimetic structures in a ludic or playful mode; and, third, that the postcolonial ludic at once deconstructs and reconfigures colonialism's mimetic logic. My analyses focus on British Victorian mimetic structures to address these three levels of argument. In Oscar and Lucinda the figure of Edmund Gosse evokes the pattern of "role modeling," which relates to Britain's historical and literary authority over colonial Australia, and to the project of Christianizing the natives. I maintain that Carey disjoints the functional binaries underlying these topoi ("authoritative" history/"unauthoritative" history, Christian/non-Christian) to articulate perspectivism, rather than authoritativeness, through the persona of his narrator, and mutual transformation, rather than conversion, through characters like Oscar and Mary Magdalene. In Voss, Ludwig Leichhardt's and Alec Chisholm's rival histories foreground the "Hero worship" pattern, which pertains to the thesis of British racial superiority and to the assertion of "white" power over the Aborigines. I argue that White confuses the terms of the implied dichotomies (British/non-British, white/black) by his construction of a collective hero and by pluricontextualization. Jack Maggs focuses on Charles Dickens's portrayal of Magwitch in Great Expectations to examine the 'juridical morality" that determined the convict stain complex and colonial Australia's inferiority vis-à-vis Britain. I contend that the novel revises binary repartitions like judge/criminal, moral/immoral, and gentleman/convict, in order to reapportion the convict stain complex according to a ternary, rather than binary, justice. While my thesis acknowledges the body of knowledge of colonial derivation that postcolonial Australia inherited, it also purports to signal that, in the three novels discussed, the mimetic logic which generated this body of knowledge yields to a ludic reconceptualization. The postcolonial ludic vision, then, proposes an epistemological mode that valorizes loci of intersection, convergence and coincidence.
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ItemOdilon Redon and "les maîtres d'autrefois"( 1986)Redon's copies after the Old Masters have received no study in the literature to date; they comprise, however, a significant section of his oeuvre. His numerous cop s are here studied as a body and related to a re-analysis of his artistic theories. His singular output is tied closely to visits to the Louvre and the use of photographic reproductions of works of art to stimulate his creative processes. Redon deliberately bombarded himself with a mass of artistic stimuli which he then utilised as elements of a visual vocabulary to create his own distinctive style. His use of art-historical imagery is part of a conscious process in which continuity of artistic tradition is stressed through echoes and referents to masterpieces in his compositions. A substantial part of his oeuvre can be seen as a commentary on past art and its potential guiding role for those artists of his day who sought a return to the mysterious and the poetical. A reconstruction of his milieu shows that many of the visual references from the Old Masters which he includes in his work were intended for the discernment of a select group of friends and collectors with similar art-historical interests. The process of quotation and extensive use of iconographical precursors is aligned to an aesthetic philosophy in opposition to the "materialistic reproduction" of the Impressionist school. Redon provides the key to an alternative view of late nineteenth century interests. His aim was to produce an art inspired deliberately by art as much as nature; his means thus became also his message.