School of Culture and Communication - Theses
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ItemClosing the distance. Identity and self-representation in the Japanese literature of three Korean writers in Japan: Kim Sok Pom, Lee Hoe Sung and Kim Ha Gyong.( 2008)The theme of cultural identity is topical in the academy and society at large but it is especially significant for the Korean diaspora in Japan. This thesis investigates the means by which Japan-based second-generation Korean novelists Kim Sok Pom, Lee Hoe Sung and Kim Ha Gyong characterize 'zainichi Korean identity' in six semi-autobiographical novels written in Japanese between 1957 and 1972. I argue that a close reading of The Death of the Crow (1957) and The Extraordinary Ghost Story of Mandogi (1971) by Kim Sok Pom, The Cloth Fuller (1971) and For Kayako (1970) by Lee Hoe Sung1, and Frozen Mouth (1966) and Delusions (1971) by Kim Ha Gyong allows for an in-depth understanding of the experiences of Koreans born in Japan before 1945 and the effects of racial oppression on minority identity formation. Specifically, I evaluate and compare the methods by which ethnicity and images of the self are articulated by these three writers in their creative fiction. The thesis argues that, despite the diversity of the views the three writers off er on ethnicity and cultural identity, a theme which they all share is how to overcome the problem of identity fragmentation - the problem of negotiating incongruous hybrid Japanese/Korean identities. Ambivalent experiences of belonging or dislocation, vis-a-vis both Japan and Korea proper, surface as a continual source of concern for second-generation zainichi Korean writers and their protagonists. How hybridity and difference are articulated as a lived experience by Kim Sok Pom, Lee Hoe Sung and Kim Ha Gyong is at the heart of this thesis. Their protagonists are Japanese-appearing Korean men, who move between the two worlds of Japanese and (zainichi) Korean culture, and search for a unified identity, or at least contemplate what such an identity might be. In effect, they attempt to 'close the distance' between competing and conflicting images of the self while at the same time pointing to a new politics of identity and sense of belonging, where diversity no longer suggests distance but the possibilities inherent in a truly inclusive society.
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Item"I lost the world where I belonged. Now I don't belong anywhere": writing Third Culture experiences( 2007)In 1990 the Hubble Telescope was launched into outer space, and for the first time, human beings were able to see the universe more clearly. It was also the year that I started to understand myself in relation to the rest of the world. I have always felt like an outsider because I left my country of origin when I was an infant. However, 1990 was the year that my family began moving from country to country more frequently. I eventually lost my ability to identify with my first culture. I was thirteen and I became a Third Culture Kid. I am now a Third Culture Adult (or Adult Third Culture Kid). This thesis explores the writing of Third Culture experiences. I have chosen to discuss Isabel Allende’s work because, as a diplomat’s daughter, she has lived in Latin America, Europe, and the Middle East during her childhood (Allende 2003: 106-109). Specifically, I will discuss her memoir of her first culture, My Invented Country (2003) and her novel, The House of the Spirits (1985). I will discuss Allende’s writing in relation to what Julia Kristeva calls “the stranger within”, by which she means the uncanny within the self that Sigmund Freud also calls the unheimlich or “unhomely” (Kristeva 1991: 191). Allende’s writing, particularly The House of the Spirits, which is full of magical images, is an example of the uncanny stranger within as it might be expressed through storytelling. I will discuss Allende’s writing in relation to Jerome Bruner’s storied self because Allende’s stories are undoubtedly affected by her Third Culture self. Lastly, I will discuss my own writing in relation to the Third Culture experience. I will also relate all of these things to David C. Pollock and Ruth E. Van Reken’s discussion of the experience, its challenges and benefits, and its defining link to the life of the Global Nomad.
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ItemThe formation of an abstract language in the early painting of Roger Kemp( 1985)The development of an abstract language in Roger Kemp's early painting reflects the manner in which Kemp assimilated elements of the two main currents of European abstraction. The more intellectual, structural current stemming from Cézanne was strongly developed through his initial training in design. It was strengthened through his experience of George Bell's teaching of Significant Form, and his contact with designers from the Melbourne Technical College. His knowledge of Mondrian's theory of dynamic equilibrium and of Russian Rayonism reinforced his structural edge. Parallel to this line of development ran a more expressive awareness of colour and form. Academic training under Bernard Hall in the Aesthetic tonal tradition, and experience of Symbolist theories of synaesthesia through the art of Rupert Bunny disciplined Kemp's intuitive approach. Ambrose Hallen's Fauvist style and the decorative folk element in Vassilieff’s art also influenced Kemp's expressive power. These two currents, by no means distinct in themselves, intermingled in Kemp's own development. His early work shows the complex interaction of temperament and training through which he expressed his personal vision of dynamic equilibrium.
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ItemThe mediatization of Malcolm X( 2010)In the aftermath of the end of Cold War, the ideological restructuring that took place fundamentally affected the representation of one of the African American public figures of the 1970’s that was portrayed as deviant by the media and yet up that until that enjoyed time relative obscurity: Malcolm X. After the Spike Lee biopic, interest in his figure was rekindled albeit in an entirely new direction after the Watts Riots of 1992. Due to this shift, a cultural commodification of his figure undermined the subversiveness of his message and two decades later, there is still need for an extensive discussion to re-conceptualize the subtle reinforcement of hegemonic structures in the mediatization process and address the political context in the commodification of Malcolm X. In that vein. this article applies the notion of mediatization of the figure of Malcolm X on film and television as analyzed through the lens of cultural commodification.
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ItemThe other side of realism: David Foster Wallace & the hysteric's discourse( 2014-05-08)“Hysterical Realism” was coined by James Wood in 2000 to pejoratively name the intermillennial “inhuman” maximalist turn in American and British fiction. I recuperate the term as a critical category, redefining it at the intersection of Lacanian psychoanalysis and Lukácsian realism. David Foster Wallace’s fiction is a thoroughgoing aesthetic deployment of the hysteric’s discourse: it inhabits and intervenes in discourses presumed to be legitimate, staging an immanent critique of the mechanisms of the emerging Deleuzian “society of control”. Wallace’s hysterical realism is the “other side” of realism; neither “narration” nor “description”, it is both a polyphonic, mimetic torrent of language that must be read with careful discrimination, and the internal, “symptomatic” undermining of the Lacanian master’s and university discourses. It is a realism capable of legitimately resisting the 21st century intensification of capitalism’s capture of the symbolic order.
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ItemArt collectors in colonial Victoria 1854-1892: an analysis of taste and patronage( 1976)My examination of the holdings of private art collections in Victoria before 1892 is confined to British and European art. It was to Britain that taste was oriented, and the emerging group of Australian painters made little impact upon those patrons and collectors recognized as being the cultural leaders of the community. It would have been difficult to incorporate my research on collectors of Australian art in an essay of this length. I have therefore confined myself to a number of general observations set out in Appendix E. These may be useful in better understanding a part of the background against which British and European art was collected. I have limited my discussion to the dates 1854 to 1892. The former date was chosen because it was in that year that private collectors first publicly exhibited pictures in their possession. I have chosen the latter date because by 1892 the recession had taken a firm hold, and it can be confidently said that the first period of wealth had passed. By 1892 art and its market had all but ceased to be a topic of discussion in the Melbourne journals. I will concentrate on the 1880's; my Chapter on the period before 1880 is meant to be no more than a preface. The topic has been approached from two points of view. Chapters I to III concentrate on individual collectors, and attempt to establish, and then clarify, the various currents of taste which prevailed. My first concern was to identify the principal collectors, and then establish the extent of their holdings. The three broad groups that I have defined are discussed in Chapter III, and I have devoted Appendix A to summarizing this essential background information, while at the same time extending the number of collectors discussed. I will be searching both for evidence of motives for collecting, and for the way in which qualitative standards were established, though the results are generally disappointing. I have then approached the topic from an entirely different angle. I felt it important to take a broad approach and examine in more general terms the various influences which worked upon collectors. This has extended to the role of Melbourne's International Exhibitions, to the receptiveness of the community at large to foreign art and, perhaps most importantly, to the state and role of the art market in Melbourne in the 1880's. In doing this I was compelled to leave out detailed discussion of a number of collectors whose pictures might seem to merit a more considered treatment. It would have been possible to devote the entire essay to the first process of identification, and of compilation of holdings. Considering the exploratory nature of the essay, I decided it would be more useful to sketch in a wider background which could then be used as a basis for further research. I will argue that in general Melbourne collectors in the 1880's, while becoming increasingly receptive to foreign art, clung tightly to a wellentrenched, traditional taste for landscape. I will be exploring the background to a fairly wide resistance to modern figurative art, especially "Olympian". Although the 1880's represented the period of Melbourne's greatest wealth collectors did not, in fact, reassess their attitudes to the notion of "high" art. I will argue that from the market's point of view particularly the period was one of unfulfilled expectations. There have been limitations upon my ability to accurately assess the state and holdings of private Melbourne collections. Very few have remained intact - the crash of the 90's saw to that. For this reason I have had to rely almost exclusively on contemporary documents, and as my work progressed it became increasingly clear that the various catalogues and press reports were fraught with inaccuracies and inconsistencies. Thus, great care should be taken in accepting attributions. Contemporary scholarship in the field of Victorian art seems to be in a state of flux, and no clearly defined, commonly accepted critical terminology has yet emerged. In describing the various genres and types I have not imposed a strictly uniform system, but have preferred to use a variety of terms which might better help to describe the pictures, many of which I have been unable to illustrate. Because of the limits imposed on an essay like this I have decided not to include a discussion of the development of British aesthetic theory through the nineteenth century, of changing attitudes to landscape and such. I have used the word "taste" in its broadest sense. Ruskin, for example, early recognized the inherent "freedom" of the concept, and argued in Modern Painters "that taste was an instinctive preferring, not a reasoned act of choice". In fact, the publication of Richard Payne Knight's treatise on taste in 1805 marked the final demise of the eighteenth century concept of taste as an intellectual perception governed by reason When the term was used by authors and journalists in Melbourne in the 1880's it was invariably conceived in this broad Ruskinian sense. The problems that I will be identifying and discussing relate principally to questions of motive, and not the establishment of qualitative criteria.
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ItemBadiou and Lacan: evental colour and the subject( 2014)This thesis is an analysis of colour as an event with painting and its subject form. It addresses three questions. The first two are: can colour be an event in painting as colour and does its subject form encompass its viewers? The analysis begins with a historical summary of how colour in painting, often aligned with woman and the feminine, has been disparaged and marginalized in Western art. Plato’s theory is examined because he is blamed for the marginalisation of the image and colour, and Lacan’s discourse theory is used to analyse colour’s disparagement and explore how Plato’s philosophy correlates with Lacan’s master and university discourses. The thesis then explores Badiou’s theory on the event and Lacan’s on suppléance to demonstrate how colour becomes an artistic event with a painting and how a viewer becomes a part of the artistic subject form. I argue both pigmented colour and a viewer embody the artistic subject because a truth of the being of colour, in a new relational tie between them, is universalized with others. In different words, the viewer doesn’t just participate in the idea of the being of colour and thus remain caught in the prevailing discourse: she is the localizing point because of a specificity which tempers the singularity of her sight. Theories of Badiou and Lacan are employed to justify these assertions and to address a third question: what kind of philosophy prohibits compossibility with Lacan? I argue Badiou’s philosophy isn’t compossible with Lacan because unlike Lacan’s theory Badiou’s is emancipatory and indifferent to an individual’s symptom. My argument requires I present an application of Lacanian discourse theory and theory on nominations and suppletions to critique of Badiou’s philosophy. I specifically refute Badiou’s claims that there is no subject in Lacan’s theories and that the artistic subject is only with the art work.
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ItemFloating writers: hybridity and travel in the work of Pico Iyer, Caryl Phillips and Suketu Mehta AmalgaNations: how globalisation is good( 2014)Critical section: Floating Writers Contemporary travel writing remains under-theorised from a critical perspective, despite a recent surge of analysis. The critical section of this thesis argues that the emergence of postcolonial and hybrid travel writers such as Suketu Mehta, Caryl Phillips and Pico Iyer represent a positive departure point from the pervasive discourses of Orientalism identified by Edward Said in historic Euro-centric travel accounts. Employing Homi Bhabha’s articulation of hybridity as an ambiguous discourse capable of destabilising colonialist tropes, and Mary Louise Pratt’s description of transculturation as a means for understanding unequal cultural exchanges, the thesis argues that hybridity has been used creatively in each of the texts analysed, producing usefully destabilising approaches to the globalised and postcolonial world and reinventions of the authorial presence of the travel writer. Each of the writers in the corpus approaches the decolonisation of travel writing in heterogeneous ways, from Phillips’ postcolonial ‘writing back’ to empire, restoration of elided voices and deep ambivalence about the possibility of a true return to precolonial times, to Iyer’s demonstration of how hybridities emerge out of transcultural exchanges such as the resistance to or adaptation of Western culture, to Mehta’s leveraging the liminality of the postcolonial expatriate in order to lay claim to a greater authenticity. Taken as a corpus, the three authors analysed represent a promising but partial decolonisation of a once-colonial genre of non-fiction. Creative section: AmalgaNations The creative section of the thesis comprises two of the four parts of my book of creative non-fiction and travel reportage, AmalgaNations: How Globalisation is Good (Hardie Grant, 2014). The first part, ‘South Korea’, is an immersion in and investigation of the professional videogaming industry in Korea, which revolves around the American game, StarCraft. The section uses interviews and first-person narrative to depict a newly emerged hybrid subculture, in which American culture has been repurposed for Korean ends. The second section, ‘Philippines’, is a first-person investigation of why the devoutly Catholic Philippines is so tolerant of non-hetero sexualities. The section uses interviews and personal reflection to articulate a different form of hybridity: the co-existence of seemingly incompatible modes of thought amongst heterosexual, gay, lesbian and transsexual Filipinos.
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ItemWomen writing traumatic times( 2014)This thesis is a critical and creative investigation into the literary representation of post-traumatic emergence and proceeds from an examination of recent developments in trauma theory in the context of feminist literary criticism and Australian fiction. The critical enquiry uses a psychoanalytic feminist framework to focus on four novels: Barbara Baynton’s, Human Toll (1907), Sue Woolfe’s, Painted Woman (1990), Morgan Yasbincek’s, liv (2000), and Alexis Wright’s, Carpentaria (2006). I examine the particular generic, narrative and conceptual strategies each writer uses in their work to describe and inscribe creative emergence from the effects of historical, intergenerational and cultural trauma, and the subsequent impact on modalities of subjectivity. Principal themes that are evident from this research are the deployment of generic merging to subvert expectations of power relations and engender the development of new paradigmatic writing forms, and the presence/lack of agency from within the traumatic space. In the varying employment of écriture féminine in these novels, which are examples of Bildungsroman, Künstlerinroman, and parodic epic, respectively, the writers generate radical language through which to testify to trauma and suggest that from abjective experience, empowerment and transformation are not only possible, but also essential. These writers attempt to reframe embodied experience through experimentation with assumptions around signifying practices, as they interrogate their position for its relation to power and feminine subjectivity. The creative project that accompanies this literary-critical dissertation is a novella entitled The Saltbush Thing, which performs many of the literary practices visited in the dissertation in a related thematic narrative exploration. The story centres on the changing relationship between three generations of women of a dysfunctional Australian family, who each enact a creative emergence from trauma that has multiple layers and causes.
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ItemMontage Vietnam: documentary aesthetics and the dialectic of popular radicalism( 2014)This thesis is the first in-depth study of the politics of exposition in explicitly political, populist documentary, taking as case studies three pivotal documentaries of the Vietnam era - Emile de Antonio’s In the Year of the Pig (1968), Peter Davis’ Hearts and Minds (1973) and The Newsreel Film Collective’s Summer 68 (1969). Three different aesthetic approaches are linked by the filmmakers’ desire to undermine dominant representations of ‘the television war’ whilst consciously avoiding relegation to the art-house for fear of ‘preaching to the choir’. As such, the desire to reach as wide an audience as possible is continually offset by the politics of visual pleasure and documentary realism. This thesis offers an examination of how these tensions play out, termed here the dialectic of popular radicalism. These films’ political aesthetic can be mapped by examining their dialectical relationship to both mainstream entertainment and news services, as well as European modernism. This map will use the mechanics of each film’s metalanguage as its defining structure. Through a recalibration of Comolli and Narboni’s influential ‘Cinema/Ideology/Criticism’ (1969) - via the varied lenses of documentary, genre and Soviet film theory - a politicised understanding of Keith Beattie’s ‘documentary display’ will be produced. It is my contention that the dialectic between popular and radical sensibilities manifests in varying degrees of visibility of each film’s metalanguage, or textual ‘voice’, to use Bill Nichols’ 1981 formulation. This visibility is at the heart of these films’ political aesthetic. Solidifying Nichols’ conception of voice as the metalanguage of the popular political documentary provides a concrete means of understanding documentary realism in relation to rhetoric: rather than looking through documentary’s window onto the world, it draws focus onto the window itself. Taking lessons from Marxist aesthetic and film theory as well as the works themselves, this thesis encourages an antagonistic approach to traditional structures of representation in documentary, while taking into account the dynamic nature of aesthetic radicalism and the need for rhetorical intelligibility. If accepting cinema as a continuously evolving textual system necessitates the abandonment of static notions of classicism, it follows that we must also jettison those regarding documentary progressivity.