School of Culture and Communication - Theses
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ItemVariations of difference(University of Melbourne, 2009)
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ItemRe-landscaping the historical novel : imagining the colonial archives as postcolonial heteroglossic fiction( 2009)This thesis comprises a critical dissertation (Part A) and an extract from my novel, Eugene's Falls (Part B). Eugene's Falls was published by Arcadia (Australian Scholarly Press) in 2007. Eugene's Falls is a Bildungsroman retracing the Australian journeys of colonial landscapist Eugene von Guerard. It deploys narrative techniques of historiographic metafiction, polyphony and parody to deconstruct the heroic colonial quest tale. The critical dissertation situates the novel against recent theories of intercultural subjectivity, postcolonialism, and the advent of the so-called `history wars'. This thesis argues that Bakhtin's theories of novelistic polyphony, theories of focalisation building on Gerard Genette's work, and postmodern narrative techniques have a renewed importance for postcolonial historical novels created in a context of the `history' and `culture wars'. These frameworks and techniques not only enable the writer to render ethical portrayals of Indigenous-speaking subjects; most importantly, they enable postcolonial novelists to expose the archive imaginatively. At the heart of the (Australian) section of the novel is the issue of imaginatively interrogating all forms of archival evidence—rethinking `what counts, what doesn't, where it is housed, who possesses it, and who lays claim to it as a political resource' (Burton 139). As Antoinette Burton suggests, `this is not theory, but the very power of historical explanation itself (139).
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ItemGlory boxes: femininity, domestic consumption and material culture in Australia, 1930-1960( 2009)This thesis investigates glory boxes as cultural sites of consumption, production, femininity, sexuality, economy and transnationalism between 1930 and 1960 in Australia, a period of considerable economic and social change. Glory boxes were the containers and collections kept and accumulated by many young single women in anticipation of their future married and domestic lives. The nature and manifestations of the glory box tradition have uniquely Australian qualities, which had its roots in many European and British customs of marriage preparation and female property. This study explores a number of facets of women's industrial, communal, creative and sexual lives within Australian and international historical contexts. These contexts influenced glory box traditions in terms of industrialisation, changing consumer practices, the economics of depression and war, and evolving social definitions of femininity and female sexuality. Glory boxes provide an effective prism through which to scrutinise these broad social and economic developments during a thirty year period, and to highlight the participation of young women in cultural practices relating to glory box production in preparation for marriage. Oral testimony from migrant and Australian-born women, the material culture of glory boxes and the objects collected, and popular contemporary magazines and newspapers provide important documentation of the significance of glory box practices for many Australian women in the mid-twentieth century. Glory boxes track twentieth-century shifts in Australia in terms of a producer and consumer economy at both collective and individual levels. They reveal the enduring social expectations until at least the 1960s that the role of women was seen as primarily that of wives, mothers and domestic household managers. Nonetheless, a close investigation of the meanings of glory box collections for women has uncovered simultaneous and contradictory social values that recognised the sexual potential of women, while shrouding their bodies in secrecy. This thesis suggests that a community of glory box practitioners worked through a variety of collective female environments which crossed time, place, generation and culture. It demonstrates the impact of the act of migrating on glory box practices which were brought in the luggage and memories of many post-war migrant women to Australia. These practices were maintained, adapted and lost through the pragmatics of separation, relocation and acts of cultural integration. This research has identified the experiences of young single women as critical to expanding understandings of the history of domestic consumption in Australia, and the gendered associations it was accorded within popular culture. It has also repositioned the glory box tradition as an important, widely practised female activity within feminist historiography, by recognising its legitimacy as female experience, and as a complex and ambivalent symbol which defies simplistic interpretations.
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ItemBeyond the femme fatale: the mythical Pandora as cathartic, transformational force in selected Lulu, Lola and Pandora texts( 2009)The Pandora myth lies at the very heart of our cultural self-definition. The phrase 'Pandora's box' is commonly used to denote any form of multiple/uncontrolled disaster, continually reinscribing, at least at the unconscious level, the idea of femininity—and of female sexuality in particular—as alluring and desirable, but also dangerous, irrational, uncontrolled and chaotic, the source of all the world's ills. Of the myriad of textual and artistic manifestations of Pandora since her inception, those that portray her as femme fatale have received the most attention; that Pandora also offers Hope has largely been neglected. This project explores an idea of Pandora which is much more complex and multi-faceted than her traditional casting as early femme fatale. Taking as general background Julia Kristeva's notion of intertextuality and Judith Butler's concept of identity and gender as performatively constructed, multiple and even 'contradictory', this intertextual study interrogates a cluster of interconnected works that incorporate major aspects of the Pandora myth. The investigation demonstrates that Pandora's 'chaos', resisting all attempts to box and frame it, can be read as a cathartic, transformative force which is not always destructive, but may also be productive, generative and even redemptive. The works examined are drawn mainly from the cinema and span the twentieth century. All of these texts feature either a Lulu or related Lola character, or Pandora herself, as female protagonist. Because of the wealth of attention already devoted to the figure of the femme fatale, my primary focus is the texts of the Lulu/Lola/Pandora selection that portray Pandora as Redeemer. A detailed study of these texts in terms of the Pandora myth explores aspects of Pandora that exceed the boundaries of her traditional framing as harbinger of disaster. This broader perspective on Pandora not only enhances the overall conception of the myth and of the Redeemer works, but also adds resonance to the femme fatale texts themselves.
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ItemWho is behind the camera? The cinema of Giorgio Mangiamele( 2009)The cinema of independent film director Giorgio Mangiamele has remained in the shadows of Australian film history since the 1960s when he produced a remarkable body of films, including the feature film Clay, which was invited to the Cannes Film Festival in 1965. This thesis explores the silence that surrounds Mangiamele’s films. His oeuvre is characterised by a specific poetic vision that worked to make tangible a social reality arising out of the impact with foreignness — a foreign society, a foreign country. This thesis analyses the concept of the foreigner as a dominant feature in the development of a cinematic language, and the extent to which the foreigner as outsider intersects with the cinematic process. Each of Giorgio Mangiamele’s films depicts a sharp and sensitive picture of the dislocated figure, the foreigner apprehending the oppressive and silencing forces that surround his being whilst dealing with a new environment; at the same time the urban landscape of inner suburban Melbourne and the natural Australian landscape are recreated in the films. As well as the international recognition given to Clay, Mangiamele’s short films The Spag and Ninety-Nine Percent won Australian Film Institute awards. Giorgio Mangiamele’s films are particularly noted for their style. This thesis explores the cinematic aesthetic, visual style and language of the films. It also explores the influence of the cultural context in which the films were made and from which the film director originated. It looks at wartime Sicily, and specifically the film director’s natal city Catania; the neorealist period in post-war Rome; and the city of Melbourne to which the film director relocated in 1952. Finally, the research looks at the filmmaking experience whilst working for the Film Unit of the Papua New Guinea Government in Port Moresby.
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ItemSydney Dance Company: a study of a connecting thread with the Ballets Russes( 2009)This thesis addresses unexplored territory within a relatively new body of scholarship concerning the history of the Ballets Russes in Australia. Specifically, it explores the connection between the original Diaghilev Ballets Russes (1909- 1929) and the trajectories of influence of Russian ballets that visited Australia. This thesis addresses unexplored territory within a relatively new body of scholarship concerning the history of the Ballets Russes in Australia. Specifically, it explores the connection between the original Diaghilev Ballets Russes (1909- 1929) and the trajectories of influence of Russian ballets that visited Australia. This study sketches the origins of the Ballets Russes, the impact its launch made on dance in the West, and how it progressed through three distinguishable phases of influence. It summarises the important features of the visits to Australia of Russian ballet companies from Adeline Genee in 1913 to the culturally altering impact of the revived Ballets Russes companies over three extended tours between 1936 and 1940. It charts the formation of viable ballet companies in Australia, commencing with Kirsova in 1939 and Borovansky in 1940, to the Australian Ballet in 1962 and the Sydney Dance Company led by Murphy between 1976 and 2008. Drawing on distinctions between classical and contemporary dance, it attempts to demonstrate the groundwork of example established by the Russian ballet, and, particularly, the revived Ballets Russes visits up to 1940. Data for this thesis was drawn from a personal interview with Graeme Murphy, original documentary research in public collections in Australia, government and Sydney Dance Company archives, newspapers and secondary literature.
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ItemSetting out with dreams of home: German tourists in the Australian desert( 2009)This thesis investigates German tourists’ encounters with the Australian desert from an interdisciplinary and cross-cultural perspective. Bringing together theories and methodologies from fields such as human geography, tourism studies, psychoanalysis and cultural analysis, it explores how touristic subject formation is embedded in material and symbolic landscapes and places; that is, how such encounters are influenced by both sensual experiences and specific cultural settings. By integrating the representational perspective of cultural analysis with approaches from non-representational theory, the analysis of individual tourist experiences and performances contributes to a productive dialogue between these two theoretical positions. In thus offering a more inclusive understanding of tourist subjectivities and the tourist encounter, this thesis addresses the need to advance the study of the more-than-representational geographies of tourism. The cross-cultural perspective engages with different understandings of human-environment relationships – arising from the German, Indigenous and non-Indigenous Australian cultural backgrounds – and applies these in the study of tourist encounters in Australia. An examination of the literatures of human geography and tourism studies establishes an understanding of the tourist as a socialised and embodied human subject rather than merely a consumer category. Drawing also on contributions from anthropology, philosophy, and cultural and literary studies, I argue that identity and subjectivity are constituted in the complex and dynamic networks of cultural images and socio-political relations as well as individual, embodied encounters with places. In an expanded reading of the hero’s quest as a cultural model, the tourist journey is analysed in the terms of a ‘postmodern quest’ that initiates the cumulative processes of identity formation that happen in tourist encounters. The notion of the encounter is based in the principles of non-representational theory and is employed to extend the analysis by the performative, embodied and affective dimensions of spatialised identity formation. In order to capture the multifaceted dimensions of touristic Self‐place encounters, a number of methodological approaches were used. The focus was on qualitative and interpretive data collection using semi‐structured and in‐depth interviews, participant observation and questionnaires. A second set of data is represented by cultural texts, such as filmic and literary texts, mythical imagery and tourist representation. Moreover, the nature of the tourist encounter and this thesis’ argument – that tourist subjectivities are constituted in spatially, culturally and individually distinctively placed encounters – required fine-grained analysis of individual case studies. Developing the notion of the body’s posture in space and using phenomenological models such as that of wayfinding and the quest, I apply these expanded concepts of subjectivity in my case studies of German tourists in Australia to understand their experiences within their specific cultural and material contexts. The analysis explores processes of knowledge production and the various kinds of subjectivities these create. It illustrates how Self and identity are constantly (re)assembled in the tourist encounter, generating a notion of a hybridised subjectivity that is at once mobile and emplaced. In presenting close investigations of individual tourist encounters within distinct cultural and geographical contexts, this thesis develops an original methodology that furthers the understanding of postmodern subjectivity through an emplaced analysis of embodied and culturally situated subjectivities.
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ItemThe archaic shudder?: toward a poetics of the sublime( 2009)This cross-disciplinary investigation moves toward that sub-genre in aesthetics, the theory of creativity. After introducing my study with a re-reading of Heidegger’s essay, ‘The Origin of the Work of Art’, I appropriate into a collection of poems ideas from Plato, Kant, Heidegger, Wittgenstein, and a range of post-philosophical theorists. Next, after Murmur and Afterclap, in the critical section of my investigation I formulate a poetics of the sublime, and move closer to my own specialist term, poeticognosis. With this term, I set out to designate a particular style of apprehending-into-language, after wonder, as it pertains (I argue) to creative producers. Section One - Murmur and Afterclap: The poetry submitted here does not arise simply out of a theoretical position or theoretical concerns, and it is not in any sense exemplary or programmatic. It is, however, related in complex ways to the issues raised later in the critical section of my investigation, and indeed has provoked necessitated my theoretical discussion (rather than the other way around). The poems contained in this section of my investigation draw from the many documents I have encountered in my attempt to shape a discourse with philosophy. In his essay, ‘What is Enlightenment?’, Kant exhorts his fellow philosophers to ‘(h)ave courage to use your own understanding!’ I have followed Kant’s advice here, but not as a philosopher might. The understanding I use in Murmur and Afterclap is a style of intuitive and extra-logical responsiveness. Undertaking my own archaic shuddering, I have attempted to maintain a reflective gaze (I use the verb in both mimetic and meditative senses). The poems that result have unfolded, after wonder, as moments of defamiliarising epiphany. Section Two - The Archaic Shudder? Toward a poetics of the sublime: I conduct this critical section of my investigation in two parts. In the first, ‘Dialectics and Logic: two modes of the genre “philosophy”’, I address the materiality of language as my most pressing concern. I take up a discussion of theoria and gnosis in order to locate genre difference, and discern the sublime as an extra-logical style of apprehending (and agree with Kant, that the apprehensions of poets may well be sublime). Next, I recuperate Heidegger’s interpretation of techné as a mode of know-how that separates both phenomenology (apprehending, seeing, knowing) and approaches to language. I speculate the sublime is an active component in creative phenomenologies at work, as thinkers apprehend-into-language, into genre, after wonder. In part two, ‘Toward Poeticognosis? Re-thinking the sublime’, I read the poetries of Carson and Hass against pseudo-Longinus’ textual and Burke’s affective sublime. Reading across this range of poetries and philosophies, my investigation into imaginative processes speculates on language, genre, phenomenologies, and on the ‘transcendental power of imagination’ (Kant). Is there any difference between thinking poets and poetic thinkers? I come to valorise a sublime process – extra-logical, gnostic, and more-than-rational – as integral to that difference. I conclude this critical section of my investigation with an appraisal of Rilke’s ‘Sonnets to Orpheus’, which I take as a historicising moment in poetic wondering. At this point, I reify my own term, poeticognosis, as a style of responsiveness to wondering that remains particular to creative production.
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ItemSubcinema: mapping informal film distribution( 2009)This thesis investigates the politics of film distribution from a transnational perspective. Distribution, the most profitable sector of the film industry, is a rich site for cultural analysis. Distribution networks do more than deliver content to audiences; they shape film culture in their own image by regulating our access to cinema, creating demand for future production, and structuring our habits and tastes. The existing literature on film distribution focuses almost exclusively on multiplex, arthouse, and home video circuits. This thesis aims to broaden the scope of distribution research by taking into account informal, nontheatrical networks in grey and black economies. Providing evidence of the empirical significance of these “invisible” global markets, I offer a new model of media circulation (subcinema) which I develop through three case studies of film industries in Africa, the Asia-Pacific, and Latin America. The broad argument is that analysing film from the vantage point of distribution can open up a space for a different kind of transnational film studies, one founded on a materialist model of how audiences access cinema. The first chapter of the thesis critically reviews existing scholarship on film distribution and draws on political economy, anthropology, film history, and media economics to develop a theory of distribution as a cultural technology. The second chapter examines the evolution of the Hollywood distribution model and the strategies used by the major studios to sell their product to domestic and international audiences, highlighting the bottlenecks that are characteristic of the conventional “windowing” system. In chapter three, I set out a broad theoretical framework for the study of informal film distribution, developed in dialogue with the social science literature on informal economies, and I identify the six key characteristics of subcinematic networks—instantaneity, deterritoriality, invisibility, textual instability, distraction, and “cockroach-capitalist” structure. The remaining chapters analyse three informal/semi-formal distribution systems from a comparative perspective. In chapter four, a case study of the straight-to-video release model used for low-budget American and Australian genre films explores the complex transnational economy in which these films are financed and circulated, and the challenge this fast-and-cheap film culture poses to theories of cultural value. In chapter five, the unique system of Nigerian video film distribution is analysed in terms of its efficiency as a circulatory network and as a driver of social and economic change. In chapter six, competing discourses around media piracy are interrogated through an analysis of black-market DVD trade at Tepito market in Mexico City, a case study which foregrounds the importance of pirate literacies. Combining industrial analysis, cultural theory, and interviews with distributors, these case studies critically theorise subcinematic networks in terms of their social and political impact, the challenges they pose to existing theories of reception and spectatorship, and their feasibility as alternative industrial templates for future film industries.
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ItemHitler comedy / Hitlerhoff( 2009)The critical component of this thesis, “Hitler Comedy”, is a dissertation on the intersection between comedy theory in general, and the specific practice of Hitler comedy. Focusing on Bertolt Brecht’s play The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui (1941; directed by Heiner Müller in 1995), and Dani Levy’s film Mein Führer: the Truly Truest Truth About Adolf Hitler (2007), my argument critiques existing “instrumentalist” theories of comedy as didactic and morally reductive. Moving beyond prevailing conceptualisations of comedy as corrective and/or forgiving, my dissertation emphasises the centrality of pleasure, displeasure and disruption for audience members in the process of their experiencing Hitler comedies. The creative component of this thesis is a script and a DVD recording of Hitlerhoff, a theatre and multimedia work that combines the characters of Adolf Hitler and David Hasselhoff into a single hybrid figure. Hitlerhoff is a spectacular black comedy that uses comedy to entertain and unsettle, and to disrupt audience members’ expectations. Hitlerhoff is a practical demonstration of the ability of “irresponsible” comedy to act as a potent catalyst for “responsible”, ethically engaged discussions.