School of Culture and Communication - Theses
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ItemVariations of difference(University of Melbourne, 2009)
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ItemThe Forty-seventh r�nin and an existential guide to travel(University of Melbourne, 2008)
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ItemTemporality and Australian narratives of racial science; or, thesis as lynch mob(University of Melbourne, 2008)
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ItemSeparatism to soap opera ; lesbian communities and the community gaze in cinema and television.(University of Melbourne, 2008)
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ItemThe billycan in Australian poetry(University of Melbourne, 2007)
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ItemSonic intersections : subjectivity within punk aesthetics(University of Melbourne, 2007)
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ItemFeeling all white: contesting 'homely' nationalisms in Australian public broadcast television( 2015)This thesis examines recent public broadcast television that addresses contemporary race relations and multiculturalism in Australia. The work draws on anthropologist Ghassan Hage’s theorisation of ‘homely’ and ‘governmental’ articulations of belonging to examine how the white national subject is produced as a manager of ‘others’, as well as how recent programming has challenged this discourse. The thesis discusses two ‘docu-reality’ programs, Go Back to Where You Came From (2011) and Dumb, Drunk and Racist (2012), showing how they shore up the ideal viewer through a rhetoric of ‘ordinariness’ as naturalised whiteness. I examine how the series draw on a set of racial ‘flashpoints’ to focalise white affect and to undermine the racism of these events by locating racist violence in the past, and by deflecting racist attitudes onto white working-class subjects. In contrast, I analyse a comedy program, Legally Brown (2013–2014), which employs a shifting mode of address to confound and destabilise managerial whiteness. Using this comparative example, I show how the series challenges and displaces the other programs’ notions of ‘ordinary Australians’ by playing with ‘Brown’ stereotypes and by satirising whiteness. In this way, I suggest that the series opens up space for future programming which refuses to recuperate ‘well-meaning whiteness’ as its central affect.
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ItemConvergence and contingency: Morse Peckham in the history of theory( 2015)The writings of Morse Peckham (1914-1993) constitute a highly original and ambitious intellectual project, a wide-ranging but conceptually unified inquiry, originating within the study of literature but eventually encompassing theories of art, language, power, and social structure. During the time that Peckham undertook this project the institutional and intellectual context in which he worked was being transformed by the rise of “Theory”, but the full scope of his work and its relation to this phenomenon has never been examined in detail. This thesis studies the development and reception of Peckham’s work over four decades, and its conjunction with the emergence and consolidation of Theory. It asks what Peckham’s idiosyncratic project—one that was very different from Theory and yet strikingly analogous in many of its concerns and conclusions—can tell us about the cultural and historical circumstances subsuming both developments. By focusing on four areas of significant overlap in the themes and motivations animating Peckham’s project and Theory—the legacy of Romanticism; the reaction against formalism at the end of modernism; semiotic theories of language; and the political implications of an antifoundationalist epistemology—this thesis investigates the bases of their convergence. It argues that a principle articulated in Peckham’s work, that of openness to the new as a necessary breach in all structures of knowledge and action, unifies the different aspects of his inquiry and the aesthetic, epistemological and political concerns of his theory. Such a principle, it argues, can also be identified operating in a diffuse and generalised way within Theory, and helps to describe the particular pattern of its development. Relating Peckham’s work to Theory thus provides both a means of understanding the scope and trajectory of his project, and a unique and valuable perspective on the history of Theory. It is a perspective that allows for a conceptualisation of Theory’s emergence from a broader historical and intellectual situation, but also a sharpened sense of its specificity and contingency as a particular response to those circumstances.
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ItemInspired recklessness and spirited perversity: transformations of the wilful child in neo-Victorian literature( 2015)Though Victorian fiction is rife with doomed wilful children, the same cannot be said of neo-Victorian fiction. Taking this narrative difference as my point of departure, my thesis investigates the transformation of the Victorian figure of the wilful child in neo-Victorian fiction, through a detailed examination of the ways in which wilfulness manifests, or fails to manifest—through spatial practices, thoughts, speech, and self-narrative. Using Peter Carey’s Oscar and Lucinda (1986), A.N. Wilson’s A Jealous Ghost (2005), A.S. Byatt’s The Children’s Book (2005), Carol Birch’s Jamrach’s Menagerie (2010) and John Harding’s Florence & Giles (2010) as case studies, I examine differences in wilful and will-less children’s responses to various forms of adult control, and what impact these responses have on the characters’ narrative trajectories. By drawing attention to repeated narrative patterns of resistance and oppression in the neo-Victorian genre, I track a significant shift in contemporary textual responses to the wilful child, alongside a reverse response to the will-less child. I argue that while the wilful child in Victorian fiction is depicted as a wretched figure of excess, neo-Victorian fiction displaces this abjection onto the child with a lack of will. In neo-Victorian fiction it is will-lessness, not wilfulness, that has severe repercussions. Drawing on Turner’s model of liminality and Kristeva’s concept of abjection, I argue that will-lessness, as it is experienced by children in neo-Victorian fiction, is linked with negative liminality and subsequent troubled identity. Ultimately, I contend that wilfulness plays a pivotal role in the survival of the child who occupies the liminal physical and emotional spaces of neo-Victorian fiction. The neo-Victorian fictional child must cultivate strength of will if he or she is to flourish. In neo-Victorian fiction, wilfulness enables children to plot different pathways for themselves, and allows them to actively manipulate adult regimes of control for their own gain. As a direct result of their drive to will their own way, I contend that wilful children in neo-Victorian fiction repeatedly engage in “surreptitious creativities” and “tactics,” which develop in spite of “networks of surveillance” (de Certeau 96) put in place by adults. In this way, they actively engage with—and manipulate—the socially coded rules of childhood. This thesis seeks to demonstrate that in contrast to Victorian fiction, neo-Victorian fiction reinterprets wilfulness as a positive, enabling trait. I argue that the authorial manipulation of character tropes, point-of-view and narrative sequencing in neo-Victorian fiction ultimately underscore children’s right to exist wilfully.
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ItemPlaying against type: approaches to genre in the work of Brian Castro, Helen Garner and Kate Jennings & Crack me up: a memoir, of sorts( 2015)Using frameworks of genre and feminist theory, this thesis shows how Australian authors Brian Castro, Helen Garner and Kate Jennings contest assumptions about what the “novel” is and can be, in order to create hybrid, politically and culturally provocative, works. It also analyses commentaries by these authors, who show how genre influences the way their “novels” have been read, critiqued and received. A creative memoir, Crack Me Up, accompanies the critical dissertation.