School of Culture and Communication - Theses
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ItemHow to do things with sadness : from ontology to ethics in Derrida(University of Melbourne, 2010)
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ItemWays of listening : dramaturgy as deep mapping in intercultural-Indigenous performance(University of Melbourne, 2010)
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ItemEdith Alsop, Artist( 2013)Edith Alsop (1871 – 1958) is now considered a minor twentieth century Australian artist, but during her some fifty years of artistic activity she was much more highly regarded. Her oeuvre covers sketches, drawings, watercolours, pastels, relief prints and book illustrations. She also produced posters, commercial art, friezes and some oil paintings. The University of Melbourne holds the largest public collection of Alsop’s works, located at The Ian Potter Museum of Art. My thesis will question why she has been forgotten. I will demonstrate an active and important artistic life and an almost textbook development as a professional artist. I find that Alsop suffered from the now well-documented fate of the invisibility of women artists from about 1940. From her oeuvre I pay particular attention to her prints as a small but distinct part of her artistic output. In the 1980s, women artists were being rediscovered. I believe that her lack of rediscovery results from her minor and erratic performance as a printmaker, her concentration on drawing and watercolour (as being ‘lesser than oils’) as her favoured mediums and her lack of visibility in public collections. This thesis is by far the most extensive research into this artist to date, and therefore illuminates her life and provides an important basis, or context, for the consideration of any of her art.
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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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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.
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ItemBurrowing on the beach: satire in the poetry of A.D. Hope, John Forbes, and J.S. Harry( 2014)This thesis proposes a new method of reading satire in the work of three white postcolonial Australian poets. Making detailed use of French theorists Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s concept of the rhizome, the thesis argues that the satire of A.D. Hope, John Forbes, and J.S. Harry can be read as a dually deconstructive and generative machine. Such a view questions the existent, structural models of satire proposed by theorists in the field, as well as the stylistic designations made regarding each of these poets’ work. The thesis begins with a nominal definition of the genre of satire which is thereafter deployed in the three chapters of close-readings: it is crucial to the method that such a definition must itself be questioned by the poets themselves. Such a method, in its dual movement of proposition and self-critique, performs what this thesis regards as the very process of satire, thereby embodying the kind of reading for which the thesis argues. Chapter One examines the theme of self-sacrifice in A.D. Hope’s work and argues that it constitutes his satirical will to criticism; Chapter Two places the 1988 bicentenary of European settlement as the satiric object of John Forbes’ collection, The Stunned Mullet; and Chapter Three tracks the nomadic, satirical movement of J.S. Harry’s rabbit character, Peter Henry Lepus, and his interactions with the figure and philosophy of Ludwig Wittgenstein. The thesis therefore tries to think about the intersection of genre, poetics, and nation. In doing so, it demonstrates a model for interpreting such discourses as ecopoetics and decolonising poetics, and for revisiting texts not commonly associated with these contemporary movements.