School of Culture and Communication - Theses
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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.
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ItemThe L life: The L Word and narrating biographies( 2015)This thesis examines the reception of the television series The L Word by young adult lesbians in Melbourne. It shows the influence of the series as a media object that is significant to three aspects of these women's lesbian lifestyle construction: coming out, lifestyle development, and integration into the lesbian community. This thesis argues that, as a media object, the series helps these lesbians narrate their own biographies as they negotiate their life transitions into adulthood.
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ItemSimCity: text, space, culture( 2015)Critiques in the humanities and social sciences of the SimCity games have often stressed the restrictive and mystifying aspects of its underlying ideology. From this point of view, the ways in which these games work to encourage certain player-behaviours and discourage others serves to reinforce certain hegemonic values in urban management and planning. Other writers have contended that players possessed far greater levels of agency in challenging these ideas. This contention in critiques of SimCity is but one expression of a much wider problem in game studies. This problem is, how do we reconcile the multitude of play experiences implied by instances of player agency, with the restrictiveness implied by game structure? This thesis will strive to answer this question using the philosophical terminology of Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari's 'A Thousand Plateaus' (2003, trans. Massumi).
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ItemThe last great infertility hurdle: a critical discourse analysis of US news media frames of female age-related fertility decline( 2015)Since the 1970s, later-age childbearing has become a trend in many Western contexts, particularly as more women have steadily entered the workforce. This shift has coincided with increased media attention given to women’s age and fertility decline, a relationship often represented by means of the ‘biological clock’ trope. More recently, news media representations of female age-related fertility decline have been paired with the commercialisation of 'elective egg-freezing’, a technique which involves the retrieval and storage of a woman’s eggs for later use. To explore current print media representation of female age-related fertility decline, this thesis employs Critical Discourse Analysis to specifically examine how American print media frame female age-related fertility decline and ‘egg-freezing’ between the years 2003 and 2013. Findings are considered in relation to their reiteration and obfuscation of historically constructed discourses.
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ItemEastlake in Australia: conveying the visual art of painting to the British colony of Victoria( 2015)The impact of Sir Charles Lock Eastlake on the practice and promotion of painting in the British colony of Victoria has, to date, not been fully recognised. Although a leading European connoisseur, a successful practitioner of painting in his early career and the most significant administrator in the arts in Great Britain in the first half of the nineteenth century, his values, which comprised a comprehensive understanding and advancement of the language of painting as intellectual and rational, were only partially reflected in the colony. These values are currently most, but not completely apparent in the collection of nineteenth century painting in the National Gallery of Victoria. Eastlake was invited by colonial administrators in the middle years of the century to acquire the initial paintings for this collection. The works, purchased in London and sent to the colony, reflect Eastlake’s understanding of the language of painting and were intended to influence the practices of artists in the colony. This thesis demonstrates that paintings were copied in the years after their acquisition by students and amateur painters in the colony and influenced some of the later purchases for the National Gallery of Victoria. But it also argues that these early purchases ultimately had only minimal impact. Alongside the initiative to acquire paintings for Victoria, there was a little-known effort by some colonists to promote the installation of mural decoration in the Houses of Parliament in Melbourne. This was to be a parallel enterprise to the mural decoration of the new Palace of Westminster in London, the planning for and execution of which Eastlake was supervisor. Although written reports and remnants of drawings from the London mural enterprise arrived in the colony, and despite promotion of their installation in the written media and in government bureaucracy, it will be shown that no mural decoration in the Houses of Parliament in Melbourne was proceeded with.
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ItemAlice contrariwise: constructing the child and its image from 1865 to the present( 2015)This thesis considers the remarkable longevity of the figure of Alice from Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland, and argues that her persistence is the result of the acquisition of a transtextual life. In the writing of others, in images, film and pop cultural movements, Alice has acquired a second life. Detached from her text, Alice remains nevertheless recognisable and, as I will argue, has come to function as an index of the child. This thesis argues that Alice’s transtextual life is a consequence of her embodiment of the nineteenth century Romantic ideology of childhood. Beginning by placing Alice and her text in their social and historical context, I consider the changing attitudes toward the figure of the child that came to dominate the nineteenth century and the challenges posed to its ideology of childhood by actually existing children, particularly those of the working classes. The thesis then turns to Carroll’s Alice texts themselves, arguing that both Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1865) and Through the Looking-Glass and what Alice found there (1872) provide a portrait of the child in which the complex interaction between innocence and experience lying at the heart of Romantic childhood is played out, as the text tries and fails to contain Alice within a fantasy of endless childhood. My third chapter examines Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita (1955) and its invocations of Alice’s image. Lolita highlights the importance sexuality has come to occupy in our contemporary definitions of innocence and experience, as well as prefiguring anxieties about images of children that have been visited upon Carroll’s own photographic work. The thesis concludes by examining a selection of adaptations of Alice and her image from the late-twentieth and early-twenty-first century and how these translations of Alice’s figure reflect and respond to changing attitudes and understandings of childhood.
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ItemBurrowing on the beach: satire in the poetry of A.D. Hope, John Forbes, and J.S. Harry( 2014)This thesis proposes a new method of reading satire in the work of three white postcolonial Australian poets. Making detailed use of French theorists Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s concept of the rhizome, the thesis argues that the satire of A.D. Hope, John Forbes, and J.S. Harry can be read as a dually deconstructive and generative machine. Such a view questions the existent, structural models of satire proposed by theorists in the field, as well as the stylistic designations made regarding each of these poets’ work. The thesis begins with a nominal definition of the genre of satire which is thereafter deployed in the three chapters of close-readings: it is crucial to the method that such a definition must itself be questioned by the poets themselves. Such a method, in its dual movement of proposition and self-critique, performs what this thesis regards as the very process of satire, thereby embodying the kind of reading for which the thesis argues. Chapter One examines the theme of self-sacrifice in A.D. Hope’s work and argues that it constitutes his satirical will to criticism; Chapter Two places the 1988 bicentenary of European settlement as the satiric object of John Forbes’ collection, The Stunned Mullet; and Chapter Three tracks the nomadic, satirical movement of J.S. Harry’s rabbit character, Peter Henry Lepus, and his interactions with the figure and philosophy of Ludwig Wittgenstein. The thesis therefore tries to think about the intersection of genre, poetics, and nation. In doing so, it demonstrates a model for interpreting such discourses as ecopoetics and decolonising poetics, and for revisiting texts not commonly associated with these contemporary movements.