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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ItemDaryl Lindsay : vision for Australian art(University of Melbourne, 2008)
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ItemThe characterisation of oil paintings in tropical southeast Asia(University of Melbourne, 2008)
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ItemCosmopolitanism and fictionality in eighteenth-century literature : Montesquieu, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, and Oliver Goldsmith(University of Melbourne, 2007)
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ItemDivide and embody : the moment of putting pen to paper in J.M. Coetzee's Elizabeth Costello novels(University of Melbourne, 2007)
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ItemA fragile thing : marketing remote area Aboriginal art(University of Melbourne, 2005)This dissertation examines the marketing of Australian Aboriginal art from remote area communities with a particular focus on the new marketing practices that have evolved in response to government policies. I will argue that the pressures to achieve economic sustainability are leading art centres to put greater emphasis on business rather than artistic development. Indigenous communities do not view art centres solely as businesses, but as mechanisms for cross-generational and cross-cultural communication. I will argue that the marketing of their art is a means of communicating their culture to a broader audience as well as creating employment opportunities within their communities. Chapter 1 defines the role of art centres, examines the contribution of art centres and arts advisors in the marketing of Indigenous art, and explains the role of different tiers of government in creating the infrastructure for the Indigenous art market. Chapter 2 argues that the economic rationalist perspective disregards the cultural, social and environmental issues facing Indigenous communities. It traces the shaping of the Indigenous tine art market through government policy and funding programs, Then it examines the impact of government funding arrangements in skewing community priorities through three funding scenarios: the development of a culture centre, withdrawal of government subsidy from an art centre and the exhibition Balgo 4-04. Chapter 3 surveys approaches to the marketing of art that achieve cultural outcomes rather than business results recounting examples of innovative marketing from Warlayirti Artists Aboriginal Corporation (WAAC), which were initiated with both business and cultural objectives. Chapter 4 explores the motivations of Indigenous communities in establishing art centres. It traces the history of Turkey Creek and the formation of the Warmun Art Centre and its marketing strategies. Chapter 5 addresses the economic issues faced by art centres in competing with private dealers in the marketplace. This study reveals the uniqueness and fragility of art centres operating in remote areas. I argue that the art centres' existence, and the fundamental role they play in maintaining the integrity of the market place through their marketing strategies, is threatened by the business model. In so doing, I question the current direction of government policy.
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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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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.