School of Culture and Communication - Theses

Permanent URI for this collection

Now showing 1 - 1 of 1

Performing (Un)forgiveness: the psychomachia of recognition and the return of the colonial repressed in 21st century settler gothic drama

Harmsen, Andrew Frederik ( 2018)

This project explores recent Australian plays that deploy the Gothic as a representational strategy that critiques the nation’s recent Reconciliation project. In these Gothic dramas, non-Indigenous characters and their audiences witness the return of colonial violence and are confronted by the ways in which it continues to influence and shape contemporary Australian culture. This dissertation will argue that the Australian Gothic, as a theatrical mode, is used by non-Indigenous playwrights as a way of representing a kind of Lacanian ‘psychomachia’ – a psychic allegory that dramatises a crisis of moral excess in the formation of identity. This project – a theoretical dissertation and practice-led creative component – is an attempt to recognise and theorise the emergence of a distinct, historically situated, and uniquely national mode of theatrical representation that is, as yet, not fully recognised in Australian Theatre Studies.