School of Culture and Communication - Theses
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ItemThe decorative works of Sir Edward Poynter and their critical reception( 1999)This thesis examines the decorative works of the nineteenth century British artist Sir Edward Poynter (1836-1919). His achievements as a decorative designer received considerable recognition during his lifetime but in more recent years have been overshadowed by his reputation as an academic painter. The neglect of this important component of Poynter's oeuvre by twentieth century scholarship is partly due to the destruction or dismantling of several of his major decorative commissions. Other schemes which were the focus of extensive public debate during the Victorian era — such as Poynter's designs for the Central Hall of the Palace of Westminster, the Lecture Theatre apse at the South Kensington Museum and the decoration of the dome of St Paul's Cathedral — were either not realised or only partially completed. This thesis aims to establish the extent and significance of Poynter's decorative career by a comprehensive analysis of the individual commissions and their historical context. These works encompass a variety of media, including painted furniture, stained glass, mosaics, ceramic tiles and frescoes. The accompanying catalogue and illustrations document the commissions with particular reference to their design and the stages of their execution. The thesis also locates Poynter's decorative schemes in the context of the wider debate regarding the nature and role of mural decoration during the second half of the nineteenth century. It elucidates, in particular, the crucial role played by materials and techniques in the contemporary reception of decorative works. Another important issue that arises from this study is the previously unrecognised importance of the Gothic Revival movement for the development of Poynter's career. Its influence is apparent in his belief in the role of architecture as a unifier of the arts, and in the emphasis in his decorative designs upon eclecticism and craftsmanship. Poynter's extensive involvement with the South Kensington Museum also had a major impact upon his decorative aesthetic. The strong Renaissance orientation of his mature work, which focusses on pictorial and narrative values, was directly reinforced by that institution. Poynter emerges from this study as an important but neglected figure in the history of nineteenth century British art, whose career illuminates both the positive and negative attitudes to mural decoration that characterise this period.
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ItemShakespeare in Australia: the making of a colonial literary institution from 1788 to 1901( 1997)In the 1980s and 1990s Shakespeare scholarship in Britain and North America has produced powerful analyses of the ways in which Shakespeare operates as a cultural institution. In analysing Shakespeare as a cultural institution it is less the meanings of his plays or poems that are examined than the role that Shakespeare plays in securing important social and institutional relationships, both inside and outside the academy. This thesis adds to that body of scholarship an analysis of Shakespeare as a cultural institution in colonial Australia during the period from 1788 to 1901. Its aim is to examine the historical conditions for the development of Shakespeare's preeminent signifying power with a focus on the ways in which the "transportation" of Shakespeare from Britain to the Australian colonies occurred. The thesis develops the argument that the transportation of Shakespeare to the Australian colonies and his reproduction within the colonies were important enabling conditions for the formation of a colonial public domain. In the early years of colonial settlement the presence of Shakespeare in the colonies enabled them to exhibit evidence of the development of colonial culture both to imperial eyes and to the colonists themselves, while later in the century a number of literary and cultural organisations were established with the affirmation of Shakespeare as one of their central goals. Colonial reproduction of Shakespeare therefore helped to secure channels of communication between the colonies and the metropolitan centres of the British Empire and influenced the formation of central colonial cultural institutions - the theatre, criticism, and literature, for example - through which this communication occurred. At the same time, colonial Australia's Shakespeare helped the colonies to negotiate tensions and contradictions in their relationships with the metropolitan culture, in part because the colonies' constructions of Shakespeare registered complex interactions between discourses of colonialism, nationalism and imperialism. This thesis draws upon recent work in Shakespeare studies, postcolonial studies and Australian studies, and on original archival research into nineteenth-century Australia. Its analysis of Shakespeare as a colonial cultural institution aims to contribute to our understandings of Shakespeare's continuing influence in Australian culture and to revitalise discussion of established topics in Australian literary studies.
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ItemChinese New Year pictures: the process of modernisation, 1842-1942( 1997)The thesis is a study of a traditional popular art form of China known as New Year Pictures. Although the production of these woodblock printed images virtually ceased early this century, the relevance of this art form in contemporary China has continued. The New Year Picture is often hailed as a prototype for modern forms of visual expression. A renewed interest in this old art form has also prompted widespread conservation of the New Year Picture at the same time as making it the subject of scholarly pursuit. This study evaluates the relevance of New Year Pictures to contemporary art and society by focussing on prints produced in the period spanning the century from 1842 to 1942. This period is definitive of the changes that occurred within the popular art form. The year 1842 marks the end of the Opium War with Britain and the signing of the Treaty of Nanjing, permanently changing China’s international relationships. This, in turn, impacted greatly upon Chinese society and culture. The 1942 was the year of Mao’s “Talks at the Yan’an Conference on Literature and Art”. In mapping out strategies for artists to participate in the communist transformation of Chinese society, the “Talks” articulated an approach to Chinese art and culture that would permanently alter the way in which artistic traditions were to be utilised, both in a practical way and in the sense of how the past was to be perceived.
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Item"Representing" Anglo-Indians: a genealogical study( 1999)This dissertation examines how historians, writers, colonial administrators, social scientists and immigration officials represented Anglo-Indians between 1850 and 1998.Traditionally, Anglo-Indians have sought to correct perceived distortions or misinterpretations of their community by disputing the accuracy of deprecatory stereotypes produced by ‘prejudicial’; writers. While the need to contest disparaging representations is not in dispute here, the present study finds its own point of departure by questioning the possibility of (re)presenting an undistorted Anglo-Indian identity. (For complete abstract open document)
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ItemThe uncentred self: image and awareness in the Middle English religious lyrics( 1995-05)This thesis presents a new approach to the alterity of medieval texts in a psycho-literary analysis of the modes of consciousness informing one group of those texts, the Middle English religious lyrics. In a bilateral analysis, Part I establishes criteria for evaluating modes of ego and relates these criteria to what is known about medieval culture and mentality with examples from the lyrics; Part II examines textual evidence from these poems for indications of notions of the self and the way the self is experienced. The thesis argues that a major source of medieval alterity lies in the ready access in the Middle Ages to modes of consciousness comparable to that identified by the archetypal psychologist James Hillman as an imaginal ego. The imaging of various aspects of the self is surveyed: body-consciousness, modes of perception, and major self-awareness-enhancing experiences of life-suffering, woundedness, sickness, old age, and death. Hypnotic aspects of the lyrics are found to be particularly significant in maintaining this consciousness. (For complete abstract open document)
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ItemThe legend of the Goodfella Missus: white women, black society, 1840-1940( 1991)The legend of the Goodfella Missus is a gendered myth dear to white Australian history. The most constant motif of the Goodfella Missus is her acclimatization to and affection for all that is different in the antipodes. Concepts of aboriginality are inextricably mixed with her vision of the strange landscape and its flora and fauna. She has had a hallowed place in the Australian annals. The power and persistence of the legend, with its repressive ideology of charity and chastity, is the subject of this thesis. It is a study of race, class and gender in the context of colonization. The stereotypes of aboriginality remain remarkably constant over the century, though place, time and Aboriginal society may be radically different. The gender boundary is the most troubling and revealing because of its ambiguity in the interstice between black and white, servant and mistress, matriarch and monster. Much of the evidence has had to be recuperated, reinstating a selection of verbal and visual images of what white women could come to know of Aboriginal life. My argument works as much through repetition and resonance as it does through explication and exegesis. The historical patterning of three generations of women’s images forms a kind of unhappy hearth history, from Emigrant Gentlewoman of the 1840s, to Australia’s Daughter of the 1870s, and Modern Woman of the early twentieth century.
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ItemA critical biography of George Johnston( 1987)A Critical Biography of George Johnston discusses the relation between the life and the work of Australian novelist George Henry Johnston, 1912 - 1970. The early chapters of the thesis are concerned to give an outline of Johnston's family background in the Melbourne suburb of Elsternwick, his schooling, his work as a lithographer and as a reporter, and his first marriage, all of which are compared with Johnston's autobiographical fiction covering the same period in his life. Following this, the narrative traces Johnston's years as a war correspondent overseas, and his development as a writer of documentary books on war subjects. Some space is given to his later reflections on the role of war correspondent. After the war, Johnston married Charmian Clift, with whom he had three children, and with whom his career as a writer of fiction got underway when they began writing novels in collaboration. Clift was to have a profound influence on Johnston's life and writing. In 1951 Johnston and his family went to London, where he was a newspaper executive. The chapters dealing with this period show the increasing strain on Johnston of attempting to write novels while working, and the damage it began to do to his health. In 1954 he gave up journalism, and with his family went to live as a full-time author on the Greek island of Hydra. From about this time Johnston and Clift wrote separately, and Johnston's attempts to become a highly paid international novelist met with only sporadic success. The financial strain, and the temptations of living in a community of foreign artists, affected Johnston's marriage and eventually his health, and in 1959 TB was diagnosed. From this time Johnston became introspective, deeply unhappy, and much more serious about his writing. His writing had so far been of mediocre quality at best, and this thesis gives only descriptive space to it. But from 1959 on his new seriousness began to make itself felt, and his writing grew in stature as it increased in autobiographical focus. The development of this is discussed in detail. With his health bad and his life in disarray, Johnston grew nostalgic about his past in Australia, and out of this came his most acclaimed novel, My Brother Jack, written in 1963. There is a substantial chapter dealing with the complex forces that produced this work. Its success in Australia brought Johnston home in 1964, and when Clift and the children joined him later, there was renewed optimism that they could get their lives back in balance. This was the case for a year or so, but again Johnston's poor health, worsened by smoking, intervened. His last years were spent turning the fictionalized autobiography begun in My Brother Jack into a trilogy. The tortuous nature of this material, and his worsening illness, requiring lung surgery, slowed his progress, but its importance to him, which is discussed at length in the closing chapters, sustained him. He was devastated by Clift's suicide in 1969, and lasted only another year himself, just failing to complete the final volume of his trilogy.
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Item'Pilgrims of the picturesque': the amateur woman artist and British colonialism, circa 1750-1860( 1996)Until recent feminist revisions of art history, British and British colonial amateur women artists have been almost totally ignored. Although biographical information is available about them, there is no general study which analyses their collective position and role in British and colonial societies. This is the broad aim of the thesis. It examines the construction of the subject of the British, middle-class, amateur, woman artist from the late eighteenth-century, her art training and employment opportunities, and her role in establishing amateur artistic culture in the colonies of Australia and India. It is an interdisciplinary study because amateur women artists typically produced hybrid, non-canonical, visual works that cross over into the fields of science and literature. The thesis explores the way amateur women’s various leisure and work practices were linked, discursively and practically, using an interdisciplinary approach which draws on feminism, postcolonialism and Foucault’s analysis of discursive practices. These approaches to historical study have in common an analysis of power in relation to the subject. Here, the power dynamics of class, race and gender are analysed in relation to the subject of the amateur woman artist. The thesis traces a key development in the ideological construction of the amateur woman artist to the 1790s in Britain, using the evidence of female conduct and other manuals. These promoted a rational, religious, domestic and maternal model of femininity, influenced by Evangelical religious ideas and gendered concepts of nature. ‘Feminine’ leisure pursuits, such as drawing, were redefined as self-disciplinary practices which would help achieve a desirable type of modern, middle-class, female subjectivity. This discourse extended into the construction of ‘feminine’ artistic genres in commercially available drawing-manuals and was practically reinforced by the conventions of amateur women’s private art training. The thesis revises definitions of the amateur woman artist, particularly the conventional split made between the amateur of the ‘female’ private sphere and the professional of the ‘male’ public sphere. These categories overlapped in middle-class women’s artistic employment. Moreover, their status was different in the nineteenth-century. While amateurs are now devalued relative to their professional counterparts, amateurism was then a mark of class superiority. The stigma attached to professional status for women, and the structural obstacles put in the way of their achieving it, meant that amateur and professional women artists trained, worked and presented themselves in similar ways. In the so-called ‘private’ sphere, it can be seen that women’s domestic, amateur, art production served the community rather than the self and therefore belonged as much to the public as to the private sphere. The thesis examines questions of white, middle-class women’s agency in raced, classed and gendered systems of colonial power. In Australia and India, male and female amateurs were central in founding artistic cultures, which were an instrument of class hegemony. Gendered hierarchies are evident within these class-based amateur cultures. In reading women’s representations of colonial lands and other races, the thesis argues that their conventional adoption of the picturesque mode of description, ostensibly a protest against ‘male’ violence and ‘progress’, was ambivalent and, ultimately, compliant with it.
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ItemCreativity and power: creativity as strategy and value in modern discourse( 1996)In this thesis I develop a discussion based on the view that creativity constantly finds, loses and reconstructs itself through historical conflicts over who knows what it is and who can authoritatively practise it. My thesis is that creativity exists as a discourse—with all the instabilities that this entails. The thesis is composed of six main chapters, each discussing moments of annexation, rupture and conflict over modem understandings of creativity: * Psychoanalysis claimed a new understanding of creativity. Much of Freud's writing depended upon literary sources, but at the same time his ideas and projects aimed to replace the insights of artists with the interpretations of the analyst. This discussion follows the tensions, contradictions and disruptions over the understanding of creativity in Freud's writing and later in analytic practice. * Surrealism took flight in France inspired by Freud's insights but dismissive of his understanding of creativity as a manifestation of neurosis. My argument is that Surrealism claimed for itself a version of the creative self as both Freudian and monstrously anti-Freudian. Though apparently reclaiming creative freedom from Freudian inhibitions, Surrealism remained in awe of notions of creativity as an ideally 'feminine' arena occupied by men. Thus Surrealism, like psychoanalysis, was a discourse of both revolution and restriction. * Jacques Lacan sought creative freedom within a calcifying psychoanalytic movement and attempted a reconciliation between Surrealism and psychoanalysis. This involved him in the strange poetics of the short analytic session and in the contorted prose of his lectures on Borromean knots and elephant excrement. His discourse embodied contradictions and dilemmas in modem understandings of creativity. * The heavy use of alcohol by (mainly male) American writers and artists in the 1930s and 40s can be understood as one resistant and ambivalent response to the new understandings of creativity, in particular creativity's relation to a Freudian unconscious and to Freudian-Surrealist notions of the artist as mad or ill. * In each of these chapters the presence of the author has been weakened, threatened or made more complex. Recent debates over the place of the author in relation to creative works are extended here to show how the problem of origin is replicated in critical and theoretical writing. The elusive problem of origin in our experience of creativity recurs in the very texts which set out to explicate these problems.
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ItemThe Lacanian body: studies of the unconscious in paintings and aesthetics( 1990)Insofar as this dissertation aims to explore aspects of a Lacanian aesthetics, its direction is to show what is at stake in a reading of works of art once one accepts as given that the unconscious is an aspect of the human condition and therefore must be accounted for in any explanatory theory of our interactions in what are called matters of aesthetics and the viewing of works of art. The basic procedure is to explore aspects of Lacanian psychoanalytic theory (such as the symptom, the death drive, jouissance, and desire, as well as the structures of neuroses [obsession, hysteria], perversion and psychosis), and to allow these to be elucidatory of the work of a select number of twentieth century artists. The intent is to give an understanding of how one sees things differently when the unrealised - the unconscious - is both apprehended and theorised, and thus to bring into a new viewing qualities both of those paintings and of one's own observation that perhaps have not been examined in accounts depending upon explanations that do not allow for the findings of psychoanalysis. Crucially, the unconscious/the unrealised is approached from its place in what is (unfortunately) called the clinic, that is, from the intricate and painful search taken there to discover what it is for each of us to have become our own human being, and how we each are to proceed once we have con1e to see that we are played in our lives by jouissance. The dissertation is somewhat ironically called The Lacanian Body: Studies of the Unconscious in Paintings and Aesthetics. While Lacan did not make a distinction between the mind and the body, but was concerned with the soul, one of my major tasks has been to rectify what has seemed to me to be an inappropriate emphasis on the conscious aspects of mind/language in academic studies of Lacanian theory. I deal centrally with the psychoanalytic symptom and jouissance for the place that they have in a system of meaning in their relation to language and speech, with the body posing one of the limits to the emergence of that meaning.