School of Culture and Communication - Theses

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    Ideal and real: illusion and reality in Stanley Milgram's accounts of the Obedience to Authority experiments
    Perry, Gina ( 2010)
    Through a close reading of Stanley Milgram's published and unpublished accounts of the Obedience to Authority experiments I will demonstrate that Milgram shaped the story of his research, excluding material that might subvert the positivist ideal. In the creative component, using unpublished qualitative material that Milgram gathered from his subjects during the course of his research, I will reclaim the stories of the silent, de-identified subjects and explore the experience of the experiment from their point of view. The two components of the thesis will work side by side to demonstrate the gap between official accounts of the experiments and what actually occurred and how Milgram constructed a credible narrative of his experiments that silenced competing narratives.
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    The search for a narrative truth; a study of the reader as creative thinker
    Jones, Thomas Kenneth ( 2010)
    The creative component of this thesis, entitled ‘The Eagle Scouts of America’ is the beginning of a novel centred on a political scandal in 1970’s America. The narrator seems eminently reliable. He is unabashed in his telling of lies and plans to lie and manipulate, to the extent that the reader is inclined to believe and trust him. However, while the reader becomes guilty in participating in the deception, it does not occur to the reader that the narrator may be lying or manipulating them as well. Restrictions on the length of this thesis means only the first five chapters of the novel have been included. The theory component is a study of the features of unreliable narration and how readers need to respond to gain the most enjoyment and insight that this form of narrative has to offer. I suggest that, when the truth does not exist within the narrative itself, the reader is encouraged to think creatively and develop their own reader based narrative truth. Upon starting a new novel, which contains a first person narrator, the reader begins with the expectation, that the narrator will be truthful and accurate in their account. When this expectation is not fulfilled, the reader’s experience of the text and his or her role in relation to the text are reformed, not only permitting but requiring of the reader an engagement in creative thinking about the narrative. With specific reference to Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov and The Debt to Pleasure by John Lanchester, I look at the ways a reader can use what is contained in the unreliable narrative to determine for him/herself an understanding of the truth.
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    Narratives of emergence
    Hills, Katherine Janet ( 2010)
    This thesis is a two-pronged creative and critical exploration of the mother-daughter relationship and female subjectivities as they emerge from or remain entwined within that relationship. Within this analysis, I also explore the tensions between female subjective crisis and agency, as they extend from the mother-daughter relationship. The critical component focusses on two autobiographical texts of twentieth-century French author, Violette Leduc. These texts, L’Asphyxie (1946) and La Bâtarde (1964), were originally published in French. However, I refer to the translations by Derek Coltman. Primarily, my questions investigate the ambivalence of the mother-daughter dynamic in Leduc’s texts and the impact of this ambivalence on female subjectivities. With the aid of object-relational theory and the psychoanalytic theories of Julia Kristeva, Judith Butler and Luce Irigaray, I explore how Leduc’s psychological patterns inform her textual practice and narrative temporality. In doing so, I propose that Leduc’s writing conveys female subjective crisis as a manifestation of the psychic struggle between the unconscious influences of both the paternal and maternal imaginaries and her personal, human desires for liberation from homogenous and suppressive sex/gender categories. I conclude that through a process of writing that engages “negative narcissism,” mimesis, and transgressive sexuality as modes of resistance, Leduc negotiates a stronger sense of herself, as an empowered figure of resistance, both inside and outside the text. The creative component, Spin is an autobiographically based novella dealing with similar complexities in the mother-daughter relationship. I approach subjective crisis from multiple angles, in its relationship to embodiment, gender, sexuality, agency and desire. Set in contemporary Melbourne, the narrative is staged around the residual pain of familial dysfunction. I explore melancholic attachment, alienation and the ambivalence of the mother-daughter dynamic from the perspective of a daughter, struggling to escape the legacy of a disturbing Tasmanian childhood, with a mentally unwell, absent mother and a father with Asperger’s syndrome.
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    "Many imitated him, no one surpassed him": the critical reception of Jules Bastien-Lepage's paintings in Britain and Australia in the late-nineteenth century
    Su, Tzu-Hsiu ( 2010)
    Due to my personal enthusiasm for peasant paintings, such as Millet’s The Gleaners and Lepage’s The Potato Gatherers, this thesis aims to investigate the contemporary reception of Jules Bastien-Lepage’s Naturalist paintings techniques and their influence. The thesis will explore the extent and the manner in which the contemporary art worlds demonstrated concern for peasant motifs and rustic landscape paintings. In addition, this examination offers a broader perspective through which to appreciate one artistic manifestation of eclecticism of the late nineteenth century – the significant development of plein-air Naturalism. To a further degree, to discover the nature of Bastien-Lepage’s influence occupies an important position in this thesis; this influence can be evidenced in his technical employment of subject matters, tonality and brushwork. The first chapter of this thesis will conduct a contemporary review to examine the manners in which Bastien-Lepage manipulated these techniques. It is also recognized that a group of contemporary British artists paid homage to his Naturalist style. Hence, an examination of their experiments with this comparatively progressive mode of depiction will be presented in chapter two. The discussion is mainly centred upon three of the most prominent painters – George Clausen, Henry La Thangue and Stanhope Forbes. Given the colonial relationship with the British Empire, the Lepage-influenced Naturalist practice was able to be spread to the Australian art world through the touring exhibitions from the mid 1880s to the early 1890s. As stated in the Australian contemporary press, in The Advertiser, it demonstrated that the aim of these exhibitions was to “offer the Australian public an opportunity of becoming acquainted with English art of the time”. Thus, the final chapter will explore the ways, and the extent to which local art critics and painters responded to Bastien-Lepage’s artistic influence. To conclude, the thesis aims to explore the essence of this French master’s contributions to contemporary art worlds by examining the critical reception of his art and influence.
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    The literary works of G. W. L. Marshall-Hall: 1888–1915
    Lorenzon, Matthew Donald Adrian ( 2010)
    The literary oeuvre of the first Ormond Professor of Music at the University of Melbourne, George William Louis Marshall-Hall, registered the key philosophical, scientific, and political debates that raged in English and Australian periodicals during the period 1888–1915. His works, encompassing lectures, poetry, articles, and marginalia, also show Marshall-Hall reacting to his social surroundings, playing an active part in the intellectual communities of London and Melbourne. The thesis divides the author’s literary development into three periods, detailing each period’s principal works and the social and historical catalysts that caused his shifts between them. In the first section, 1888–92, it is argued that Marshall-Hall’s use of the philosopher of evolution Herbert Spencer in his London writings 1888–90 was influenced by his family’s scientific legacy and the progressive publishing rationale of the publisher of The Musical World Francis Hueffer. By participating in London’s Wagnerian literary culture he developed the evolutionary justification of Wagner’s works that he then took to Australia. In Australia 1891–92, conservative newspapers challenged Marshall-Hall’s Wagnerian and Spencerian writings. In response, he revaluated his ideas using the mystical metaphysics of Arthur Schopenhauer. In doing so, he can be seen drawing again from his family’s scientific legacy, which is referenced throughout Schopenhauer’s works. The second period, 1893–1899, is characterised by Marshall-Hall’s rejection of Spencer and Schopenhauer’s systematic philosophies in favour of a Nietzschean rhetoric drawn from the first translations of Friedrich Nietzsche’s works. This intellectual shift is seen as a response to what Marshall-Hall saw as the hypocrisy of idealist progressives, in particular the solicitor and criminal anthropologist Marshall Lyle, who communicated with Marshall-Hall through annotations in a volume of Nietzsche’s works. In the third period, 1900–1915, Marshall-Hall’s conservative reaction against the growing Australian labour movement is detailed, as well as his radical swing to the left upon his return to England in 1912. It is shown that the outbreak of the First World War led to his ultimate rejection of European philosophy by the time he returned to Australia in 1914, after which he adopted a mystical nationalism reminiscent of his original Wagnerian beliefs until his death in 1915.
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    Telling tales : Helen Demidenko and the autobiographical pact & "The Pact"
    DENHAM, MELINDA ( 2010)
    As arguably the most notorious liar in contemporary Australian literature, Helen Demidenko has been the subject of hundreds of articles, and at least four books. Her 1995 novel The Hand that Signed the Paper had already won three literary prizes and attracted significant critical attention due to its controversial subject matter, when her fraudulent identity was revealed. The critical section of this thesis draws out the implications of the ‘Demidenko Affair’ by exploring Philippe Lejeune’s theory of the autobiographical pact, genre theory and contemporary book promotion and marketing practices. Using Gerard Génette’s notion of paratexts, and Stanley Fish’s idea of interpretive communities, I argue that many reviewers of The Hand that Signed the Paper read the novel as though it was an autobiography, and that this reading position contributed to the vehemence of the condemnation its author received when her fraudulent identity ‘Helen Demidenko’ was revealed. I use genre theory to analyse the tendency to ‘read autobiographically’, which emerges from a cultural context which includes the growing popularity of non-fiction books and the prevalence of book promotion strategies which draw on the author’s persona to lend credence to their book. The creative section of this thesis has a narrator who shares much of my biography: she is around the same age, grew up in the same area as I did and has a similar name. When she returns to her hometown after a decade-long absence and reunites with old friends, she discovers that the story she has told herself about her past is only one version of events. The exploration of a notionally autobiographical theme is overlaid by a fictional narrative structure which enables an ambiguous rendering of the ‘identity’ of author, narrator and protagonist proposed by Lejeune.
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    The act of writing: the art of dreaming & Plague Room
    Belanger, Paul Michael Lee ( 2010)
    There are numerous accounts of creative writers claiming to write from a dream-state, but these accounts have never been examined as scientific fact and have instead, to date, been primarily accepted or dismissed as nothing more than anecdote. This paper is the result of a wide ranging survey of neuro and cognitive science as well as applied psychology, and it examines how findings in these fields support the long held contentions of the many writers who believe that the mind writing can be more similar to the mind dreaming than it is to normal waking-thought. Beginning with a connectionist account of cognition, I discuss how the same cognitive faculties necessary for thought are also found in dreaming and writing. Understanding how conceptual spaces arise from physical stimuli and how these spaces can then be built into larger units of thought enables an examination of how brain stimulation and constraint leads to varying states of consciousness as represented by a waking-dream continuum. Expanding on these basic principles, Alan Hobson’s AIM theory of dreams is then probed to show how the elements of activation, input and modulation can be tuned to move a subject between states of consciousness. Ultimately, with dreaming and writing both understood in terms of the connectionist mind, and with the knowledge of how the elements of AIM determine a subject’s current state of consciousness, I explore the methods of Gertrude Stein, Jack Kerouac, and Robert Olen Butler to show that their writing practices sufficiently alter those tunings so as to move the mind from a waking-state into a dream-state. Turning from theory to practice, the creative portion of this thesis represents my attempts to incorporate these dream-states into my writing. Borrowing the power of the jewel center from Kerouac, the freedom of automaticity from Stein and the practice of dream-storming from Butler, I used a sustained hypnogogic state to explore potential writing spaces, trying out characters and turns of plot until finally – with the intent of meditation – I began writing and redreaming the story over the many drafts that it took to get the vision to fully coalesce. The result of these endeavors is the novel Plague Room, and it is my hope that it possesses the full strength of a dream-state and that the reader finishes wondering if what they’ve experienced was real or if it was mere reverie.
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    Thomas De Quincey and the serpentine line
    Stanyon, Miranda ( 2010)
    This thesis provides the first examination of the roles played by the serpentine line in De Quincey’s work, where it shapes representations of textuality, autobiography, aesthetics, epistemology and hermeneutics, and characterises a digressive sublime that forms both texts and individuals. When De Quincey began writing, Hogarth’s serpentine line was widely disseminated and threaded into the weave of European culture. This is perhaps why De Quincey’s explicit references to Hogarth are sparse and the relationship between the two artists has been neglected by critics. Nonetheless, the serpentine line as image and structure convincingly characterises important strands of De Quincey’s work. It offers him, as it had Hogarth’s Renaissance forebears, a concordia discors. In his hands, the undulating line becomes a flexible image of harmony in discord or discord in harmony, and a visual ground for the dynamic, dialectical antitheses so important to Romanticism. In a further iteration, De Quincey’s serpentine lines model an oscillation that incorporates without collapsing many of the dichotomies of the post-Kantian world. It thus performs on an aesthetic level the very kind of two-in-oneness demanded by post-Kantian and Romantic dilemmas. To establish the serpentine line’s particular relevance to De Quincey, as well as his deviations from his predecessors, I chart the historical trajectories of the serpentine line from the Renaissance figura serpentinata into the nineteenth century, with particular emphasis on Hogarth’s paradigmatic definition and exploration of the line in his Analysis of Beauty (1753). This genealogy reveals the serpentine line’s repertoire of associations and possibilities, the contrary roles it could be cast in and lines it could be made to deliver—radical, conservative, fluid, static, progressive, aimless, translational, nationalist, chaotic and orderly. The central text through which I read De Quincey’s reworkings of this tradition is the late autobiographical work Suspiria de Profundis (1845). Hogarthian principles of variety, intricacy, lively movement and pursuit are evident in Suspiria’s pervasive images of wavy lines; but De Quincey’s serpentine lines are also shaped by his distinctive concerns in literature, theology, science, and philosophy, particularly the philosophy of Kant. De Quincey’s engagement with Kant is elucidated by an examination of ‘On the German Literature and Kant in particular,’ another autobiographical text shaped by serpentine lines—this time primarily structurally, in the undulating course of the digressive textual sublime. Analysis of this essay throws light on the Kantian cast of De Quincey’s epistemology, particularly in Suspiria’s ‘Palimpsest,’ which imagines the mind as a text. Conversely, the last scene in Suspiria illuminates the Kantian cast of De Quincey’s aesthetic hermeneutics. Suffused by serpentine lines, Suspiria’s final pages dally with a German Romantic transformation of the serpentine line into an ironic arabesque, but finally reject this involuted, utopian figure of total chaos or total sense for a progressive English serpentine line, infinitely oscillating between chaos and order, forgetting and remembering, death and resurrection, nonsense and sense, relevance and irrelevance, heteronomy and autonomy, identity and difference.
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    Rubiginous and The Appeal of the Liminal
    MULHALL, MAYA ( 2010)
    Rubiginous charts various narratives from the life of Ruby; it interweaves dream and reality, fairytale and memory to present an idea of the experience of a life where a small girl grows up without a mother. The mystery of her father’s beard and the horror of her own hair are ever present as Ruby experiences life as a child and an adult. The underlying tension leads to eventual escape and fulfillment as Ruby creates an identity of her own and realises there really are no answers. The Appeal of the Liminal introduces and explores the idea of the liminal and moves to explore the appeal of the liminal through chapters on Curiosity, The Liminal in Language and the idea of Appeal itself. It is not only an exploration, but also an enactment of the liminal in its structure and form, where the theory bleeds through the fiction to create an overall navigation of the ideas.
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    ‘Like a bird he looks upwards’: inarticulateness in fiction
    Lis, Gabrielle ( 2010)
    This Creative Writing MA has two main components: a creative work and a dissertation. Both components grapple with the problems and possibilities of inarticulateness in fiction. The creative work comprises Part One of a novel, “The Yellow Jumper”, set in contemporary Australia. “The Yellow Jumper” is a work of poetic realism that begins with, and returns to, a man sitting in the gutter in front of his terrace in Sydney‘s Surry Hills, while an un-seasonal wintertime ‘Southerly Buster’ blows. This man, Simon Leary, finds himself increasingly unable to communicate with his girlfriend, Anna, and his best friend, Muz. He is also increasingly engrossed by memories of the Murray River, near which he grew up. The inarticulateness in “The Yellow Jumper” belongs to Simon: the prose foregrounds, without mimicking, his difficulties of expression. The dissertation begins with a prologue, “Clashing in the Gap”. This prologue outlines some of the stark contrasts between “The Yellow Jumper” and American Psycho, but also emphasises how a concern with inarticulateness underlies both works. However, in Ellis’ novel, inarticulateness is deliberately formal and modal, as well as being a trait possessed by the characters. The thesis, “Tapping the Gap: American Psycho and Inarticulateness,” is informed by contemporary satiric theory and Anglo-American moral philosophy. Cora Diamond’s work furnishes me with a way of thinking about the concept “inarticulateness” - a concept that the first chapter of the thesis is concerned to define in relation to literature, especially postmodern literature. The second chapter of the thesis telescopes in on the problems and possibilities of inarticulate satire. Here, I delineate the satiric mode, and then demonstrate how American Psycho invokes and disappoints satiric conventions. Both components view inarticulateness as a tool of which creative writers may make use. The gap between experience and expression is a difficult space to inhabit; it is also, I suggest, potentially a fertile space for the creative writer.