School of Culture and Communication - Theses
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ItemLife and more life: the strategic hierarchies of Australian literary vitalism( 2008)This thesis argues that Australian literary historiography has largely overlooked the significant impact of literary vitalism on twentieth-century Australian writing, and attempts to redress this with a study of the ways in which principles of vitalist philosophy were used by Australian writers to gain certain strategic advantages in four key twentieth-century literary debates and conflicts. This strategic and functional approach to literary vitalism diverges from the genealogical approach taken by Vincent Buckley in his 1959 essay, `Utopianism and Vitalism in Australian Literature,' which traces various strands of vitalism across generations of writers. Buckley's essay nevertheless remains significant to this thesis because the three strands of literary vitalism Buckley identifies are linked to corresponding literary debates. The vitalist sexuality championed by Norman Lindsay is associated with the censorship debates of the 1930s; William Baylebridge's vitalist nationalism applied vitalist notions of evolution to a nationalist agenda that attempted to resist British cultural dominance; a version of heroic vitalism, which appeared first in the work of Christopher Brennan, provided Buckley with a critical framework for supplanting the nationalist literary canon with a metaphysical canon during the Cold War years. A fourth strand of industrial vitalism, which Buckley omits from his study because of his distaste for the politicisation of literature by the social realist writers with whom it was linked, controversially used literature as agitprop in the promotion of left-wing industrial reform agendas. Instead of following Buckley in making a study of literary influence, the focus of this thesis is on writers' strategic use of vitalism as both a rationale for, and an instrument of, change. These strategic opportunities arise out of vitalism's discursive shift from biology into literature. In biology, vitalism hypothesised an answer to the question, What is life? With the entry of vitalism into literary discourse an entirely different question is addressed: What is a more vital life? This new question introduces into literature an hierarchical and biopolitical notion of life- the possibility of a more vital life or intense life. Since literary vitalism ceases to value all life equally, it becomes a means of discriminating between lives. This meant that writers were able to prioritise certain literary and social formations over others on the grounds that these were somehow more life affirming or more attuned to life. The various strategic priorities asserted by different literary vitalists were based on two main claims: that vital norms have a natural or normative priority over social norms, and that the vital force, while connecting each person with the whole of life, endows upon a chosen few some particular advantage over the rest of humankind. The literary vitalists were interested in change at both the individual and collective levels. Vitalism was linked to social evolution and progressivism and to ideas about self-improvement and self-fulfilment. For those literary vitalists who recognised that life has its own momentum, the emphasis on change meant cooperating with the push of life, a collective force in which all humanity participates in the general evolutionary movement of the whole of life. For other writers the push of life gives way to a teleological pull towards a predefined goal, thereby introducing a finality inimical to the vitalist dynamic. Here the literary vitalists became involved in life management strategies that were biopolitical in the Foucaultian sense, where human life itself becomes the political target and stake, and the lives of individuals are taken charge of and regulated in the name of the well-being of the population, with individuals encouraged to align their personal aspirations and conduct with the cultural imperative to act upon themselves in the interests of the social whole. Central to vitalism's appeal to Australian writers was its promise to liberate life from repressive forces. For the true vitalist, this liberation must inevitably follow from the movement or force of life itself. But more often the literary vitalists thought to accelerate the movement of life by driving it towards particular progressivist or individualist goals. Rather than opposites, these two versions of the movement of life in the work of the Australian literary vitalists tend to dovetail into one another. This is the double aspect or `double horizon' of life which Foucault observed in The History of Sexuality, where life is not only the force which is resistant to power but also the object of power. This thesis is also a study of the literary vitalist tendency to conflate the movement of life with the drive towards progressivist goals. This commitment to progressivism proceeds through the regulation and management of life and works to block the dynamic of change and to constrain the very forces that the vitalists had set out to liberate.
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ItemUncollected verse: an analysis of the decline of the national poetry anthology( 2007)In this thesis I show that there has been a decline in the production of "national poetry anthologies" in Australia since the end of the 1990s and seek to understand the reasons behind this decline. The first chapter examines changes in the economics of publishing and asks how these impact on literary texts, including the poetry anthology. I argue that with the increasing influence of a neo-liberal, deregulated industry context, production is concentrated within a smaller number of firms and that these firms concentrate on titles that might become blockbusters and are reluctant to produce texts — like anthologies — which will never be bestsellers. This is in spite of the fact that, I argue, there remains demand for them. I consider other factors including the introduction of a GST in 2000; the arrival of Nielsen BookScan, also in 2000; changes at Oxford University Press in the late 1990s; and adjustments in Australia Council funding since 1996, which I argue have aided the decline. The second chapter looks at cultural changes that have threatened the legitimacy of the national poetry anthology, including the "new" reality of social fragmentation in Australia and moves within the intellectual environment to express a more complex, diverse image of national culture. The challenge posed to national poetry anthologies by thematic anthologies produced in the 1970s and 1980s is also considered. In Chapter Two, I go on to provide a close textual reading of the eight major national poetry anthologies produced between 1986 and 1998 by focusing on their "paratextual" apparatus, including the Introduction, the cover, the publisher's and anthologist's reputations and the critical reception of these works. In the past, commentaries have tended to look at the selection of poems or poets in an anthology but these paratextual elements shape our reading of the poems in powerful ways and so deserve careful examination. In considering these anthologies, I argue that national poetry anthologists in the 1980s and 1990s were, for the most part, unable to make the anthology reflect social diversity and this made the anthology appear out-dated and irrelevant to contemporary reality. In the conclusion I argue that there is a need for the form of the national poetry anthology to change in order to try to accommodate current social and intellectual conditions.
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ItemUnsettlement: a new reading of Australian poetics( 2012)This is a thesis that takes the notion of ‘unsettlement’ in opposition to the settlement of English literature in Australia, and reads a number of remarkable colonial texts in this light. This is not a review of texts critical of settlement, such as may be found in Henry Lawson and others, though I do examine texts by canonical writers such as Charles Harpur and Dorothea Mackellar. I take Philip Mead’s argument for a contemporary unsettlement of Australian literature as my starting point: in order to demonstrate the historical beginnings and resources of such unsettlement. Settlement literature is embodied in national anthologies – and more than one of my case study texts comes from such anthologies. Many of the texts derive from the life-writing genres of letters and diaries; I also consider a poem, a note, songs, a game, drawings, letters inscribed on clubs, and messages left on trees and water tanks. The texts are written by Indigenous, Chinese, and Anglo-Celtic Australians; their writers practise a range of literacies. The very broadening of the terms of literature that allows the inclusion of texts such as Ned Kelly’s The Jerilderie Letter and Bennelong’s ‘Letter to Mr Philips’, means a shift in focus to historical significance: I focus on the nature of the poetics of these texts. My emphasis is therefore on the constitution of individual texts as such: their grammar, punctuation, visuality and materiality. The key concept I employ is borrowed from French theorists Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari – that of assemblage — and I ask how these unusual assemblages work to disassemble settlement. In reading the punctuation, I also adapt Roland Barthes’s theory of the punctum. Other key terms are deployed as necessary on a case-by-case basis (such as the neobaroque, in the final chapter). The chapters are structured thematically, through a range of tropes that are theorised in relation to settlement. These are: the hunt, the plough, invention, secrets, boredom, the field, settlement itself, and homelessness. In each chapter I read one or two of the select texts (except for the last, in which I look at several) in terms of the chapter’s theme. This thesis offers a ‘new reading of colonial poetics’: many of the texts have never previously been considered in terms of their specifically aesthetic features. I establish connections between canonical writers and those who are not usually considered writers at all. In focusing on the materiality of texts, within a context of poetics, this thesis attempts to open up the field of colonial poetry, and introduce new aesthetic possibilities.
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ItemWomen reading 1936: a creative writer’s reading of Return to Coolami, Jungfrau, and The Australian Women’s Weekly( 2012)This thesis focuses on three texts that were published in 1936: Dymphna Cusack’s novel Jungfrau, Eleanor Dark’s novel Return to Coolami, and that year’s fifty-two issues of The Australian Women’s Weekly. Cusack’s and Dark’s novels form part of today’s Australian feminist literary canon and are typically understood with the benefit of historical hindsight, especially in regards to their authors’ biographies. Furthermore, academics often turn back to these novels and writers in order to elaborate their own political and cultural agendas and theories. In this thesis, I argue that the original readers of these novels would never have read them in such ways and that such analyses, whilst fascinating and valuable, seldom discuss the problem of their own anachronism. In order to benefit my own and others’ reading and fiction writing practices, I wish to imagine what these novels meant to the audience for whom they were originally crafted. Influenced by New Historicism’s ‘anecdotal’ approach to history – where canonical literary texts are ‘defamiliarised’ through their juxtaposition against various contemporaneous, non-canonical texts – I use The Australian Women’s Weekly to create an original, evidence-based ‘window’ of insight into Australian life and culture in 1936. Within this context I speculate upon the ‘imaginative universes’ of Australian women in order to gain new insight into Dark’s and Cusack’s novels’ original meanings. In the first part of this thesis I discuss my methodology and analyse the novels’ original reception. In the second part of this thesis, I contemplate reading experiences from the past by reconstructing the ‘World of the Weekly in 1936’. Whilst I cannot claim to avoid anachronistic and subjective readings in this thesis, I have assiduously attempted to limit both by allowing the themes in the Weekly to lead my interpretations, by anchoring all of my interpretations in primary sources, and by exploring how my writerly movement between different rhetorical modes can expose and problematise the borders between the time-bound reader and the time-travelling text.
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ItemGhosts of Ned Kelly: Peter Carey's True History and the myths that haunt us( 2011)Ned Kelly has been an emblem of Australian national identity for over 130 years. This thesis examines Peter Carey’s reimagination of the Kelly myth in True History of the Kelly Gang (2000). It considers our continued investment in Ned Kelly and what our interpretations of him reveal about Australian identity. The paper explores how Carey’s departure from the traditional Kelly reveals the underlying anxieties about Australianness and masculinity that existed at the time of the novel’s publication, a time during which Australia was reassessing its colonial history. The first chapter of the paper examines True History’s complication of cultural memory. It argues that by problematising Kelly’s Irish cultural memory, our own cultural memory of Kelly is similarly challenged. The second chapter examines Carey’s construction of Kelly’s Irishness more deeply. It argues that Carey’s Kelly is not the emblem of politicised Irishness based on resistance to imperial Britain common to Kelly narratives. Instead, he is less politically aware and also claims a transnational identity. The third chapter explores how Carey’s Kelly diverges from key aspects of the Australian heroic ideal he is used to represent: hetero-masculinity, mateship and heroic failure. Carey’s most striking divergence comes from his unsettling of gender and sexual codes. The paper argues that Australians continue to invest in Kelly because he provides an opportunity to stabilise an identity threatened by changing perspectives on history; in Kelly, we see the changing shape of our ideal selves.
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ItemThe purpose of futility: leadership in Australian Great War narratives( 2011)The Purpose of Futility identifies and explores unique aspects of the Australian literary commemoration of the Great War. In particular, this thesis investigates the representation of leadership in Australian Great War prose narratives, showing how Australian leaders are depicted as purposeful through three major strategies: the Australian leaders’ investment of impossible or suicidal tasks with meaning; the Australian soldiers’ continued self-conception as a volunteer, egalitarian citizen army; and the Australian attitude to the war as work rather than a crusade. The thesis is presented in two parts, reflecting the dual research methodology of theoretical investigation and creative response. The theoretical component explores literary and historical sources as well as theoretical frameworks of leadership. In this section, Australian Great War narratives are considered against the critically-acclaimed benchmark of the canonical Great War novels such as Robert Graves’ Goodbye To All That (1929) and Siegfried Sassoon’s Memoirs of an Infantry Officer (1930), and a number of important differences are delineated and discussed. The central pivot of this section is the discussion of leadership tropes, which demonstrate how Australian narratives encompass purposeful leaders in the context of an horrific and costly war. The creative component consists of selected sections from a novel which interrogates leadership’s complexities as they are experienced through the life story of an AIF volunteer who returns from the war to face a different life, armed with new perspectives and understandings.
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ItemVisions of the island: the mimetic and the ludic in Australian postcolonialism( 2000)This thesis examines three Australian postcolonial historical novels: Peter Carey's Oscar and Lucinda and Jack Maggs, and Patrick White's Voss. I argue, first, that in these texts colonial identifications/resistances are grafted onto a binary logic that I define as mimetic; second, that the three novels reprocess colonial mimetic structures in a ludic or playful mode; and, third, that the postcolonial ludic at once deconstructs and reconfigures colonialism's mimetic logic. My analyses focus on British Victorian mimetic structures to address these three levels of argument. In Oscar and Lucinda the figure of Edmund Gosse evokes the pattern of "role modeling," which relates to Britain's historical and literary authority over colonial Australia, and to the project of Christianizing the natives. I maintain that Carey disjoints the functional binaries underlying these topoi ("authoritative" history/"unauthoritative" history, Christian/non-Christian) to articulate perspectivism, rather than authoritativeness, through the persona of his narrator, and mutual transformation, rather than conversion, through characters like Oscar and Mary Magdalene. In Voss, Ludwig Leichhardt's and Alec Chisholm's rival histories foreground the "Hero worship" pattern, which pertains to the thesis of British racial superiority and to the assertion of "white" power over the Aborigines. I argue that White confuses the terms of the implied dichotomies (British/non-British, white/black) by his construction of a collective hero and by pluricontextualization. Jack Maggs focuses on Charles Dickens's portrayal of Magwitch in Great Expectations to examine the 'juridical morality" that determined the convict stain complex and colonial Australia's inferiority vis-à-vis Britain. I contend that the novel revises binary repartitions like judge/criminal, moral/immoral, and gentleman/convict, in order to reapportion the convict stain complex according to a ternary, rather than binary, justice. While my thesis acknowledges the body of knowledge of colonial derivation that postcolonial Australia inherited, it also purports to signal that, in the three novels discussed, the mimetic logic which generated this body of knowledge yields to a ludic reconceptualization. The postcolonial ludic vision, then, proposes an epistemological mode that valorizes loci of intersection, convergence and coincidence.
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ItemPlayful ambiguities: racial and literary hybridity in the novels of Brian Castro( 2010)This thesis studies eight of the nine novels of Brian Castro, a contemporary Australian writer born in Hong Kong in 1950, and focuses on the theme of hybridity in his work. Starting with the observation that many of Castro’s characters are mixed-race, the thesis reflects on his suggestion, in his critical essays, that hybridity is deployed at a literary level in his fiction. It seeks to answer three major questions: how is racial hybridity represented in the novels? Why does Castro use a form of literary hybridity in his fiction? And what connections can be established between racial and literary hybridity in his work? The present study argues that hybridity is a useful concept which can be productively applied to literary studies and is particularly appropriate to discuss Castro’s novels. It focuses on two aspects of his literary practice: his use of hybridity as a literary device and his ambiguous representation of the mixed-race body. It argues that racial and literary hybridity are uniquely complementary in the novels and that Castro’s playful resort to hybridity represents a form of resistance to literary canons, racial categorisation and national politics. In this sense, the thesis not only extends the study of Brian Castro’s novels, it also brings new insights to hybridity theory, thus contributing to postcolonial, literary and critical race studies.
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ItemRealism as a contemporary response to the modern: left-wing cultural attitudes and the concept of modernity in Australia, 1930-1965( 1982)This thesis is an examination of the language of cultural transformation as that process is inscribed in the 'cultural' discourse of the Communist Party of Australia (CPA) and in the related discourse of those writers and publications which emerge from the Party, are situated on its fringes, or break with it, sometimes to form sites of opposition.
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ItemSex and power in Australian writing during the culture wars, 1993-1997( 2009)I address a selection of texts published in Australia between 1993 and 1997 which engage with feminist debates about sex and power. These texts are important, I argue, because they signpost the historical moment in which the culture wars and globalisation gained force in Australia. A key word in this thesis is ‘framing’. The debates which my texts engage with have (much like the culture wars in general) commonly been framed as conflicts between polarised political factions. These political factions have, in turn, been framed in terms of generations; that is, an ‘older’ feminism is pitted against a ‘newer’ feminism. Each generation of feminists supposedly holds quite different views about sex. I argue that my texts actually provide an insight into how various feminist perspectives on sex diverge and intersect with each other, as well as with certain New Right discourses about sex. My selected texts also suggest how the printed text has helped transport feminism within and outside Australia My texts fit into two broad genres, fiction and scholarly non-fiction. The texts are: Helen Garner’s The First Stone (1995), Sheila Jeffreys’ The Lesbian Heresy (1993), Catharine Lumby’s Bad Girls (1997), Linda Jaivin’s Eat Me (1995) and Justine Ettler’s The River Ophelia (1995). I engage with various critical responses to these texts, including reviews, essays and interviews with the authors. I draw also from a range of theoretical sources. These include analyses of the culture wars by the American theorist Lillian S. Robinson and the Australian scholars McKenzie Wark, David McKnight and Mark Davis. Davis has provided a useful overview of how the metaphor of ‘generational conflict’ circulated in Australian culture during the 1990s. I draw on Arjun Appadurai’s model of “global cultural flows” and Ann Curthoys’ history of feminism in Australia. I engage with research into the increasingly ‘globalised’ nature of Australian writing, as well as a number of feminist works on the relationship between sex and power