School of Culture and Communication - Theses
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ItemHow to do things with sadness : from ontology to ethics in Derrida(University of Melbourne, 2010)
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ItemWays of listening : dramaturgy as deep mapping in intercultural-Indigenous performance(University of Melbourne, 2010)
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Item“Revolting Developments”: productive shame in the graphic narratives of Phoebe Gloeckner and Aline Kominsky-Crumb( 2019)“Revolting Developments” presents the first extended, comparative analysis of Aline Kominsky-Crumb and Phoebe Gloeckner’s comics, prose and visual works through the critical framework of shame as an affective mode. These two innovative cartoonists, as well as being contemporaries and peers, have both produced formally and affectively disruptive representations of subjectivity over time, negotiating and subverting the gendered conventions of genre in order to instantiate a new, more productive relationship with their readers. The politics and poetics of looking and the gaze are refigured through Kominsky-Crumb and Gloeckner’s anti-confessional, testimonial representations of sexual violence and psychological parental abuse, their tentative embrace of abjection, and their resistance to prescriptive discourses of childhood. Kominsky-Crumb’s autobiographical comics refuse the categorisation of passive victimhood. Her representation of past trauma troubles the distinction between tragedy and comedy. Gloeckner’s representations of violence interrogate agency, complicity and the mutating power shifts that her young protagonists experience. Although these cartoonists approach shame differently (stylistically as well as conceptually), they both ultimately demonstrate a similar feminist politic. Orienting their texts through the history of the gendering of autobiographic strategies, the assignation of abjection, and the fragility and vulnerability of childhood, I argue that the critical lens of affect, specifically that of shame, provides a productive means of interrogating and analysing Gloeckner’s and Kominsky-Crumb’s negotiation of gendered interpellation and formal subversion of generic modes in order to represent serialised subjectivity. This thesis examines how the affective states of shame and abjection are registered and subverted in Gloeckner and Kominsky-Crumb’s work; following on from the work of Silvan Tomkins, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick and Hillary Chute it asks how these writers represent shame and how they make this affect and experience productive for the female-gendered subject. Structured through shame’s identity-constituting delineation of subjectivity, heightened sense of embodiment, and identificatory relationality, this thesis analyses Kominsky-Crumb and Gloeckner’s negotiation of autobiographic strategies, subversion of gendered and cultural abjection, and critique of the discursive construction of girlhood. Their instantiation of an alternative relational identification is limited to a racially bounded image of girls, as Gloeckner, and to a lesser extent Kominsky-Crumb, instrumentalise a covetous and objectifying American Africanism in order to exploit the association of white fragility and feminine value.
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ItemThe challenges of valuing culture in Australia, and the role of symbiosis in understanding cultural interactions( 2019)This research examines the conditions and narratives that surround cultural value, particularly within the fields of cultural diplomacy, cultural policy and the arts. These conditions and narratives are situated within the context of knowledge or innovation-based societies where, over the past two decades, a rise in cultural value discourse has occurred. Knowledge-based societies also feature post-industrial economies and, therefore, in this thesis, the tendency to value culture in terms of economics is of particular significance. In Australia, this is evident across various municipal levels, from local councils to the federal government. Through a series of case studies encompassing the Australian Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade, the City of Melbourne and a federal policy proposal for a National Programme for Excellence in the Arts, I argue a common approach to the valuation of culture is evident, and is one that is rooted in instrumentalisation—or what Yudice characterises as expediency, where ‘culture-as-resource’ is a means to an end. However, this narrow scope limits the possibility to understand more about the different types of value that culture (such as the arts) can have, particularly when it comes to aesthetic exploration of new knowledges, global networks and relationships. To explore alternative considerations of what value culture can offer to both societies and people alike, I consider European theatre collective Rimini Protokoll’s ability to display the culture of nations in their touring performance of 100% City. Here, another realisation of the value of culture is discernible. In political terms, this is cultural value that resides outside the typical state-to-public facilitation of public diplomacy and rests on a people-to-people mode of communication. As a result, I argue that the current, utilitarian vocabulary surrounding the value of culture should be expanded and developed further to reflect its operation today in the age of global networks and relationships. Such an expansion incorporates a symbiotic consideration of the interactions that occur over the course of cultural relationships and counterbalances the over-reliance on economic and political factors and evaluations. My proposal serves to further refine understandings of ‘the cultural’ within the discourse of cultural value. To do so, I draw upon the biological understanding of relationships, referred to as symbiosis, to study how cultural value is understood amongst the private and public sector actors across three key dimensions: the economic, the political and the social. As a result, I propose cultural symbiosis as a conceptual metaphor that assists in the articulation of the more complex and multifaceted relations that cultural activity can generate. This conceptualisation provides the basis for an approach that better articulates the relations of cultural activity and one that extends the neoliberal vocabulary currently used to describe culture and the discourse of cultural value.
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ItemThe Secret Object of Sacrifice after Luce Irigaray( 2019)This thesis studies the concept of “new sacrifice” in the work of Luce Irigaray. According to Irigaray, the patriarchal order is founded on the masculine subject’s hidden sacrifice of the woman-object—the secret object of sacrifice. She proposes that the emergence of a new sacrificial order requires the formation of a new sociality and economy, one which sacrifices the patriarchal order and in turn allows for the cultivation of the feminine. Critics argue that Irigaray’s vision is utopian and that she does not clarify the way in which a new sacrificial—theorists also use the word “nonsacrificial,” however for this thesis I use Irigaray’s own phrase “new sacrifice”—order may emerge. I argue that Irigaray’s account of a new sacrificial process of becoming occurs through a mystical encounter with abjection, where the object becomes (a new kind of) subject. To support this argument I turn to Kristeva’s theory of abjection, and Moten’s theory of Blackness in the preliminary chapters of this thesis. The differences and similarities between the work of these theorists and that of Irigaray allow me to identify a latency in Irigaray’s work in regard to the secret object of sacrifice, its transformation, and the emergence of a new sacrificial order. After comparing philosophical texts, I apply the theory I have developed to literature and film texts.
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Item'Once we had bread here, you gave us stone'. Food as a technology of biopower in the stories of Jack Davis, Ruby Langford Ginibi, and Alexis Wright( 2019)This thesis presents the first comprehensive study of food in the works of Indigenous Australian storytellers. It uses Foucault’s analyses of biopower as a grid of intelligibility through which to describe food’s various functions and effects as they are recorded, reproduced, refracted, and resisted in Jack Davis’s, Ruby Langford Ginibi’s, and Alexis Wright’s storytelling. The thesis reads food as a technology of biopower: a means by which life ‘passe[s] into knowledge's field of control and power's sphere of intervention’ (Foucault 1978, 142). Following a Foucaultian methodology, it presents close and contextualised readings of the ways that food is instrumentalised as a technology of biopower and the functions, effects, and networks of biopower that result in and through the storytellers’ works. The specific topics the thesis engages include accounts of rationing and food-centric resistance in Davis’s plays, food insecurity and obesity discourse in Langford Ginibi’s life stories, and food’s relationship with alcohol and imperilment in Wright’s stories. It traces continuities between the storytellers’ treatment of food as well as identifying the way food generates and is implicated in evolving configurations and networks of biopower. It explores various resistance strategies and their efficacy in and through their stories, as well as the new subjects, hegemonic relations, institutions, forms of government, and fields of power-knowledge that result.
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ItemLights and shadows in Australian historical fiction: how does historical fiction deal with how Australia comes to know its past?( 2019)This thesis examines how recent Australian historical fiction, particularly that of Kim Scott and Kate Grenville, re-imagines and reframes Australia’s past and how it offers new ways of relating to that past. It does so with an emphasis on the perceived disconnect between what is available to archive-based academic historiography and the current understanding of the historical issues most relevant to modern Australians. It is presented in three sections. The first section focuses particularly on how fiction writers address the historical archives, with examples drawn mainly from works about the early frontier between Indigenous and settler Australians. It examines how different fiction styles and techniques address the construction of history, particularly the contrast between traditional realist narrative fiction and more postmodern techniques, with reference to parallel movements in the writing of non-fiction history. It asks how the concept of the “truth” about the past is dealt with differently in historical fiction, compared to historiography. This section concludes that historical fiction, particularly fiction that uses less traditional forms offers culturally useful ways of addressing modern questions about the past, and relationships with the past. The second section of the thesis is an extended examination of the process of creating a work of research fiction based on historical material. It begins with a short historical account of the subject of the author’s research, and goes on to offer a detailed examination of the research process. It considers in more depth the issue of archival research as it relates to the creation of stories in the past. The original research for this thesis was carried out both online and in physical archives, and the second section discusses how the archival research process influenced the fictional work in terms of both form and content. The second section also discusses how the works and techniques examined in the first section influenced the creation of the research fiction, with additional discussion of the genre of fictional historical biography. The final part of the thesis is a creative work in the form of an extended extract from a historical novel, based on the life of the 19th century historical figure Edward Oxford. The novel, titled Lights and Shadows of Melbourne Life, is a first-person narrative that incorporates both real and fictional archival material. It interrogates questions of memory, identity, colonial attitudes to migration to Australia, and through its inclusion of archives and “archives”, contrasted with the narrator’s commentary, deals with questions of archival reliability.
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ItemThe environment in English versions of the Grimms' and Hans Christian Andersen's fairy tale literature, 1823–1899( 2016)This dissertation explores the intersections between literature and environmental history in nineteenth-century English versions of Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm and Hans Christian Andersen’s fairy tale literature. While the success of the Grimms’ and Andersen’s fairy tale literature in England can be attributed to the inclusion of Christian principles, the privileging of individualism, the omission of licentious content and the focalisation of child protagonists, this dissertation argues that the tales were also valued for presenting an environmental ethos. English versions of the Grimms’ and Andersen’s fairy tales relayed anthropocentric ideas about nature which competed with a developing sense of environmentalism during a period of rapid environmental change. While these tales idealised the tremendous possibilities offered by the environment, nature is not prioritised above human interest; rather, these versions effectively highlight humanity’s destructive disposition by disempowering female and animal characters. By focusing on depictions of nature during a century of environmental devastation, this thesis contributes to our understanding of humanity’s relationship with the natural world as relayed in literary texts.
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ItemRadical platforms: autonomism, globalisation and networks( 2016)This thesis engages in the work of Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri as well as others in the post-autonomist Italian Marxist tradition to critique the concept of Empire and to identify serious flaws in cryptolibertarian approaches to replacing the state with computational apparatuses. Hardt and Negri’s work proposes the existence of an international, multi-layered political structure called Empire, with a corresponding international working class called the ‘multitude’ which has been subsumed within this new global political system. The main thrust of the thesis identifies that media is underanalysed in Hardt and Negri’s work, yet there is great scope for networked media to be included as not just a component to Empire, but as constitutive of Empire’s existence. Thus the argument is that Empire is reliant on media, and would not survive without it. From this perspective, the acts of loose groups and fraternities, such as IP pirates, cryptolibertarians and cryptofascists, and anti-state groups of other sorts, to engineer software solutions to replace the state are problematic. Examples such as 3D printing, bitcoin, Wikileaks, and State-In-A-Box suggest that cryptolibertarian and related ideologies of technological solutions not only tend to be misguided, they reproduce the nature of Empire in an intensified manner. The argument of this thesis is thus that technological solutions that seek to replace the state with mediated software protocols will likely tend to simply reproduce structures of governance that are more rigid, and have less capacity for social intervention than the current structures of governance. This argument does not preclude technological methods as integral to political solutions in the future, but certainly questions those approaches that conceive of society as a set of problems to be solved.
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ItemSolving Suspicion in Mystery Films( 2019)This thesis seeks to understand how viewers engage mystery films, and how they are engaged by them. Mystery films present a problem for the viewer to solve, from identifying a killer to uncovering a conspiracy, and engage viewers in solving this problem by arousing suspicion. This feeling of suspicion represents points of fixation for viewers within a film’s narrative. Mystery films arouse suspicion using repetition, isolation, duration, and predisposition, and by playing on viewer expectations surrounding the mystery genre and type. When viewer suspicion is aroused, they engage in a form of problem solving to try and resolve ambiguity in the text and reach a solution to the problem in the film. To address these research questions, this thesis employs a range of empirical methods, including quantitative analysis of editing data, neoformalist analysis of mystery films, and a human experiment to determine how specific film practices influence viewer’s perception of suspicion. By focusing only on what can be observed and comprehended, and not on interpretations of a text, Neoformalist analysis may be considered an empirical research method. This range of methods is directed by a set of guiding principles that underpin the thesis, aimed at contributing to our understanding of the experience-of-film. In total, the thesis examines 87 mystery films from 2004-2013 to provide a comprehensive study of contemporary mystery cinema. The thesis demonstrates that viewers primarily engage with mystery films through a form of problem solving, guided by their experience of suspicion. Mystery films are constructed to arouse suspicion and encourage viewers to attempt to solve the problem at the centre of a film. Mystery films use editing structure, problem types, filmic practices, and expectations of genre to curate the viewing experience, attempting to prevent viewers from reaching a solution prematurely. This is largely achieved by cultivating recognition in viewers, ensuring they identify important clues within the film, but fail to synthesise this information into a solution. Viewers can draw on meta-knowledge in an attempt to decode and decipher these practices, leading to new forms of engagement with mystery films. Finally, this thesis illustrates the potential for an empirically informed, interdisciplinary approach to researching screen texts, and the potential for future investigations into the viewing experience.