School of Culture and Communication - Theses
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ItemThe performance of perversion in Kafka's literature and its adaptations( 2019)The interpretation of Kafka’s literature has always presented major problems for critics, who have attempted to simplify the figures and metaphors contained in the stories by offering possible explanations. Starting from the view of Kafka’s perversions as logical absurdities in a specific time and place, this thesis interrogates their role as a dominant element in Kafka’s poetics. I argue that performativity and performance are central to representations of perversion in Kafka and its effects over the fictional characters. I use a predominantly psychoanalytic approach to Kafka’s life and a post-structuralist analysis of his stories and their filmic and theatrical adaptations. The frequent perverted elements and the predominance of perverse performances, particularly revealed through the presence and need of a spectator, are explained by the different stages of Kafka’s life. Through this analysis it can be concluded that Kafka’s perverted view of life originates in his relationships with other people, particularly figures of power. Perversions abound in Kafka’s literature, but here I focus on gender, animality and Law. I argue that gender, animality and law/punishment are strictly connected by the need for a performance to define them. My work establishes perversion as the originating factor of Kafka’s narrative. His intent is to challenge standards by performing their perversion and showing how this has nefarious consequences only when an audience is present. If there were no performative expectations based on arbitrary standards, there would be no perversions to confuse and shock the audience and no punishment would be needed for the perverted individuals.
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ItemExtreme males: autistic masculinity in three bestsellers( 2015)Inspired by Simon Baron-Cohen’s theory that autism can be understood as an extreme version of typical male behaviour, this thesis will examine whether this view is reflected in the representation of autistic males in best-selling fiction (“Extreme Male Brain” 248). It will investigate autism representations in the context of hegemonic masculinity, by comparing the behaviour of Christopher Boone from The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, Jacob Hunt from House Rules, and Don Tillman from The Rosie Project to Linda Lindsey’s masculinity norms. These include anti-femininity, emotional reticence, success, intelligence, toughness, aggressiveness and an obsessive heterosexuality (Lindsey 241-7). While Christopher's surprising violence, extreme intelligence, insensitivity and stubbornness are masculine traits, his asexuality disqualifies him from being an extreme male. Jacob’s masculinity is shown in his aggressiveness, intellect and physique, but is undermined by his ambiguous sexuality and patchy career history. Don’s physical appearance, heterosexuality, stoic attitude and intellect are all masculine qualities, unlike his need for social guidance and apparent virginity at the novel’s beginning. All three characters are white and compensate for a lack of emotional awareness with hyper-rationality. Their paradoxical masculinity may account for their novels’ success. This thesis finds that these three fictional autistics are not extreme males by the standards of hegemonic masculinity.
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ItemAestheticising deformity: an essay on Cute and the Young-Girl( 2018)This dissertation makes an argument for understanding Cute as a distinguishable aesthetic category whose emergence across the course of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries is intimately related to visual and verbal discourses of idealised girlhood. It performs its thesis through employing Cute to aide analysis of contemporary art photographic representations of the Young-Girl. The project sits at the intersection of art history, gender studies, queer studies and girlhood studies, and offers an original and significant contribution to each. The dissertation is broadly split into two sections. The first is a delineation of Cute as aesthetic category. This section outlines both the history of Cute, its emergence and development, and the aesthetic, non-aesthetic and cultural properties of Cute, their role in defining and distinguishing Cute as aesthetic category. The second section considers what Cute as aesthetic does in contemporary art photography focussed on the body of the Young-Girl. Unfolding over three art photography series, each created by a single young woman artist, this analysis is categorised according to the culturally-specific manifestation of Cute and the Young-Girl represented. Tomoko Sawada’s ID400 (1998-2001) meditates on the relation of Cute (kawaii) and the Young-Girl (shōjo) in Japan. The relationship of the Young-Girl (girl) to Cute (cute) in the US is explored through Holly Andres’ The Fallen Fawn (2016). The transcultural aesthetic of Cute and its relationship to the social category of the Young-Girl is considered from the vantage of postcolonial settler-nation Australia through Tracey Moffatt’s Invocations (2000). The dissertation argues Cute exists as a dual aesthetic category – both in the realm of popular culture as everyday aesthetic, and in the realm of visual art as art aesthetic. In the realm of popular culture, Cute evidences an aestheticised deformity; a violent alteration inflicted on bodies to make them simultaneously more inferior along culturally-constituted lines of infantilisation and feminisation, and – because of this inferiority – more economically and emotionally valuable and desirable. In the realm of visual art, this aesthetic experience is elongated, extended, re-directed, and the affect of what would be an otherwise disturbing image becomes a pleasurable sensuous experience which nevertheless retains a recognition of both the deformity, and the processes that aestheticise it. The interplay between these two affective experiences – between Cute as everyday and art aesthetic – enables the possibility of Cute to stage a subversive cultural critique. Inherently interdisciplinary, located within the realm of sensuous experience and affect, and concerned with abstract representations of cultural relations of power, identity, sexuality and bodies, this dissertation draws its lineage of academic inquiry from no particular discipline, but rather from extended considerations of cultural phenomena such as Julia Kristeva’s Pouvoirs de l’horreur; Mikahil Bakhtin’s Rabelais and His World; Roland Barthes’ Mythologies; Carol Mavor’s studies of fairytales, the colour blue, and boyhood, and; Guy Debord’s La societé du spectacle. Its contribution is the interpretation of Cute as contemporary cultural and aesthetic phenomena. It strives towards a treatise on the subject of Cute and the Young-Girl.
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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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ItemConduct unbecoming: reconfiguring gender and genre in 1990s Hollywood cinema( 2017)This study identifies an interplay between gender and genre in a 1990s Hollywood production context, and demonstrates how this undermines gender and genre categories. Late twentieth century post-classical Hollywood cinema experienced significant industrial changes which produced a range of different aesthetic practices. This study will demonstrate that the reconfiguration of the representation of women and femininity in this period has resulted in significant changes to Hollywood genre filmmaking practices. This investigation will make an original contribution by arguing that the intervention of female protagonists into conventionally male roles and genres has prompted some important changes and innovations to the codes and conventions of genre. The analysis will demonstrate how an interplay between gender and genre is enunciated through postmodern appropriation and subversion. An increasing use of genre hybridity, allusion, pastiche, parody and intertextuality has frequently relied on a subversive use of gender, in terms of women and femininity, in order to alter genre conventions. This is not viewed as a symptom of a decline in Hollywood filmmaking practices, but rather as a sign of a postmodern Hollywood aesthetic that addresses changing socio-cultural attitudes to women and femininity. The study examines a range of genres traditionally featuring male protagonists. It explores the direct relationship between unconventional female protagonists, playing roles usually reserved for men, and the resulting changes and innovations to genre conventions. Identifying the interplay between gender and genre highlights the interactive nature of the relationship between these elements and foregrounds the importance of understandings of gender on the codes and conventions of genre. As a result of these changes, the notion of gender oriented genre becomes increasingly reconsidered, especially in terms of the positions of identification that are offered to spectators. The study will focus on how these changes have been influenced by feminism and queer theory and are a response to important movements in the historical and socio-political context under investigation.
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ItemBadiou and Lacan: evental colour and the subject( 2014)This thesis is an analysis of colour as an event with painting and its subject form. It addresses three questions. The first two are: can colour be an event in painting as colour and does its subject form encompass its viewers? The analysis begins with a historical summary of how colour in painting, often aligned with woman and the feminine, has been disparaged and marginalized in Western art. Plato’s theory is examined because he is blamed for the marginalisation of the image and colour, and Lacan’s discourse theory is used to analyse colour’s disparagement and explore how Plato’s philosophy correlates with Lacan’s master and university discourses. The thesis then explores Badiou’s theory on the event and Lacan’s on suppléance to demonstrate how colour becomes an artistic event with a painting and how a viewer becomes a part of the artistic subject form. I argue both pigmented colour and a viewer embody the artistic subject because a truth of the being of colour, in a new relational tie between them, is universalized with others. In different words, the viewer doesn’t just participate in the idea of the being of colour and thus remain caught in the prevailing discourse: she is the localizing point because of a specificity which tempers the singularity of her sight. Theories of Badiou and Lacan are employed to justify these assertions and to address a third question: what kind of philosophy prohibits compossibility with Lacan? I argue Badiou’s philosophy isn’t compossible with Lacan because unlike Lacan’s theory Badiou’s is emancipatory and indifferent to an individual’s symptom. My argument requires I present an application of Lacanian discourse theory and theory on nominations and suppletions to critique of Badiou’s philosophy. I specifically refute Badiou’s claims that there is no subject in Lacan’s theories and that the artistic subject is only with the art work.
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ItemFaces in the shadows: an investigation into the anonymous diary A Woman in Berlin and A Rose in Winter, a fictional retelling of the Rosenstrasse Protest( 2013)This thesis represents the first in-depth academic examination of A Woman in Berlin, an anonymous diary first published in 1954 which detailed the experiences of a woman who experienced first-hand the chaotic weeks of April, May and June 1945 in the German capital, including the arrival of the Russian troops and their treatment of civilians. Her numerous diary entries, which cover a period of eight weeks and contain graphic accounts of the suffering she and others underwent, have frequently been quoted in historical descriptions of the period. Thus their historical value is beyond question, making the lack of investigation of the text even more surprising. To remedy this deficiency, several elements of A Woman in Berlin have been selected which, when examined, will give the reader a far deeper understanding of both diary and diarist. Chapter I considers the various tropes and themes that a reader may detect in the diary, looking at whether the traditional ideas associated with those genres are fulfilled, and how this fulfilment or subversion of it leads to the categorisation of the diary, as well as what this means for the reader. The second chapter focuses on the numerous intertextual references that appear in the diary, evaluating what their inclusion says about both the diarist’s literary knowledge and also her feelings at the moment that prompted her to include them in her recollections. The reader’s understanding of the diarist is further expanded in the third chapter by an examination of the various paratextual elements that make up the diary, in particular the illustrations that appear on the various covers, the fore- and afterwords written by people who seek to conceal the truth of the diarist’s identity and yet let slip numerous details about her, and finally the reaction that has greeted the diary upon its various publications. By focusing on these details, this investigation aims to give the reader an insight into both a fascinating retelling of history and also of a nameless diarist. The creative piece that forms the second part of this thesis is a fictionalised retelling of a little-known historical event known as the Rosenstrasse Protest. This uprising took place in Berlin during the end of February and early March 1943, when, having been prompted by the mass-arrest of the remaining Jews in the German capital, non-Jewish women gathered outside the building in which their husbands were being held and, for seven days, despite bombing raids and the constant, threatening presence of the SS, held a public protest. Despite annual memorial services held to remember this event, as well as a film directed by Margarethe von Trotta that told the story, which premiered in 2003, this event remains all but unknown, particularly to English-speaking audiences, and therefore ripe for retelling. With the event narrated in diary format, the reader is able to employ many of the techniques adopted in the critical study of A Woman in Berlin to come to participate in the unfolding narrative of A Rose in Winter.
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ItemPleasure revolution possibility( 2011)The early work of Bertolt Brecht is relegated to an inferior position in the canon often placed in the category of juvenilia and given the deprecating description of anarchistic or immature. This thesis examines three of the early plays—Baal, In the Jungle of Cities and the Life of Edward II of England―chosen for their open form of dramaturgy and for their subject matter. The aim of producing new readings of these plays is to assess their contribution to the understanding of the discourse on sexuality, race and class the rhetoric of benevolence and the performativity of power. Judith Butler’s work which reconsiders the basis for assumptions made about how gender is constituted is apposite for this assessment not only because her work challenges foundations but because I establish that there is an alignment between the analytical frameworks used by Butler and the dramaturgical methods used by Brecht. The creative work of the thesis draws inspiration from this alignment and attempts to develop a dramaturgy, a set of practices, informed by Brecht, Butler and the demands of the material. It is my contention that Butler’s theory of performativity, and its relevance to aesthetic contexts, remains under-developed for its potential to revolutionize practice. Further, I suggest that Butler’s theory and Brecht’s early dramaturgy comprise the modality through which the particular agency of theatre can be seen to communicate the complex processes at work in the way the social world is made. The creative work takes form as a script framed by a description of the developmental process and methodology, together with a possible treatment which incorporates techniques devised to problematize and challenge key theatrical paradigms. The framing also outlines the way in which the alignment between Brecht and Butler tests and defines the limits of Brechtian Gestus—which privileges the performer—the limits of self knowledge, and consequently, knowledge of Others. The title of the thesis refers not only to the pleasure of creative thinking and play with which the theory is approached but to the way in which foundational fictions and cultural sedimentation are dissolved. The concept of revolution is used to describe the expansion of analytical frameworks used by both Brecht and Butler in their ground-breaking and sustained efforts to explicate processes such as subject formation, agency and the processes of abjection. Possibility is perhaps the most difficult of the three notions to define. I advocate for the sense of the word which focuses not on utopian fantasy or science fiction but on the pragmatics of that which is actually negotiable or achievable within the mangle of power and knowledge.
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ItemNarratives of emergence( 2010)This thesis is a two-pronged creative and critical exploration of the mother-daughter relationship and female subjectivities as they emerge from or remain entwined within that relationship. Within this analysis, I also explore the tensions between female subjective crisis and agency, as they extend from the mother-daughter relationship. The critical component focusses on two autobiographical texts of twentieth-century French author, Violette Leduc. These texts, L’Asphyxie (1946) and La Bâtarde (1964), were originally published in French. However, I refer to the translations by Derek Coltman. Primarily, my questions investigate the ambivalence of the mother-daughter dynamic in Leduc’s texts and the impact of this ambivalence on female subjectivities. With the aid of object-relational theory and the psychoanalytic theories of Julia Kristeva, Judith Butler and Luce Irigaray, I explore how Leduc’s psychological patterns inform her textual practice and narrative temporality. In doing so, I propose that Leduc’s writing conveys female subjective crisis as a manifestation of the psychic struggle between the unconscious influences of both the paternal and maternal imaginaries and her personal, human desires for liberation from homogenous and suppressive sex/gender categories. I conclude that through a process of writing that engages “negative narcissism,” mimesis, and transgressive sexuality as modes of resistance, Leduc negotiates a stronger sense of herself, as an empowered figure of resistance, both inside and outside the text. The creative component, Spin is an autobiographically based novella dealing with similar complexities in the mother-daughter relationship. I approach subjective crisis from multiple angles, in its relationship to embodiment, gender, sexuality, agency and desire. Set in contemporary Melbourne, the narrative is staged around the residual pain of familial dysfunction. I explore melancholic attachment, alienation and the ambivalence of the mother-daughter dynamic from the perspective of a daughter, struggling to escape the legacy of a disturbing Tasmanian childhood, with a mentally unwell, absent mother and a father with Asperger’s syndrome.