School of Culture and Communication - Theses
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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.
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ItemR.S. Thomas: poetic horizons( 2014)This thesis engages with the poetry of R.S. Thomas. Surprisingly enough, although acclaim for Thomas as a major figure on the twentieth century’s literary scene has been growing perceptibly, academic scholarship has not as yet produced a full-scale study devoted specifically to the poetic character of Thomas’s writings. This thesis aims to fill that gap. Instead of mining the poetry for psychological, social, or political insights into Thomas himself, I take the verse itself as the main object of investigation. My concern is with the poetic text as an artefact. The main assumption here is that a literary work conveys its meaning not only via particular words and sentences, governed by the grammar of a given language, but also through additional artistic patterning. Creating a new set of multi-sided relations within the text, this “supercode” leads to semantic enrichment. Accordingly, my goal is to scrutinize a given poem’s artistic organization by analysing its component elements as they come together and function in a whole text. Interpretations of particular poems form the basis for conclusions about Thomas’s poetics more generally. Strategies governing his poetic expression are explored in relation to four types of experience which are prominent in his verse: the experience of faith, of the natural world, of another human being, and of art. In the process, the horizons of Thomas’s poetic style are sketched, encompassing a lyrical verse which is also a verse given over to reflection. In this study, his poetry emerges as personal and based on individual experience; however, that experience is at the same time accorded a more universal dimension. By way of conclusion, the present thesis sets Thomas’s writing within the context of literary tradition, highlighting his connections with Romanticism, seventeenth-century poetry, Modernist verse, and other literary movements. This study highlights the fact that Thomas’s literary models are still poorly understood. Examinations of his poetics are important for a fuller understanding of the poet’s achievement in literary history. In offering the first overview of Thomas’s poetic strategies, this thesis lays the groundwork for such future explorations.
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ItemSubjective renewals: tropes of the archaeological body in the verse novels of Anne Carson and Dorothy Porter & Sonqoqui: a verse novel( 2014)This study offers a feminist reading of the ways in which the verse novels of Anne Carson and Dorothy Porter have embraced new possibilities for linguistic experiment. My hypothesis is that literary experimentation within these writers’ contemporary verse novels produces new ways for thinking through, and beyond, sacrificial models of subjectivity. My principal research question contends that tropes of the archaeological body serve as a common heuristic device by which Porter and Carson construct both narrative and poetic vocalisation in their texts. I further argue that this vocalisation is polyphonic. My research suggests that these polyphonic tropes excavate and critique images of sacrifice in specific ways. Moreover, this study explores the interplay of poetic and fictional innovation evidenced in Porter’s and Carson’s respective verse novels. I propose that this interplay serves to produce dynamic representations of Kristevan 'revolt' or renewed subjectivity. These findings suggest that Porter’s and Carson’s verse novels simultaneously resist, or subvert, the sacrificial models of subjectivity on which Irigaray, for example, argues that liberal capitalist economies are built. I argue that the verse novels of Anne Carson and Dorothy Porter critique such economies as they also critique postmodernist representations of subjectivity. These writers’ literary excavations draw on an archaeological imaginary to question repressive notions of sexual difference, thus also critiquing representations of figurative heroism and sacrifice in recent and historical verse novel developments. Influenced by these writers’ polyphonic and poetic narrative techniques, my creative work, Sonqoqui, experiments with the formal possibilities of the verse novel and also deals directly with themes of sacrifice. Inspired by the archaeological discovery of three naturally preserved five-hundred-year-old Inca child mummies in 1999, this creative work draws on an archaeological imaginary to explore the touch of the past on textual subjectivities in flux and motion. Deploying a poetic, and in some cases, typographic, use of weft and warp, this tri-partite creative work produces embodied poetic polyphonies across a textured narrative space. Sonqoqui thus aims to enhance material configurations of ‘revolt’, exploring and representing historical tropes of gendered embodiment via non-sacrificial modes as a way of eschewing monological discourse.
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ItemPrick'd by charm: the pursuit of myth in Frank O'Hara, Ted Berrigan and John Forbes( 2014)This thesis asserts that poetry offers the most persuasive and complex medium for exercising what Stephen Jaeger has termed “enchantment.” While Jaeger covers a range of artistic practices within the Western canon, this thesis focuses on the power of the poem as charm (latin carmen: song) and of the poet (first emblematised in Orpheus) as a figure that productively confuses the relationship between life, art and death. Developing Agamben’s concept of the co-incidence of “life and its poeticisation,” I argue that there is a paradigmatic remastering and troubling of poetic vocation in the twentieth century, whereby the lyric becomes a specular techne through which to negotiate the constitution of self and state at a time when the grand narratives of subject, nation, and community are quickly eroding. Its transmission subsequently informs a sharing or correspondence of affect and, often, a creative response that is mythically informed. Successfully deploying mythos and charm in their writing and life, this thesis considers Frank O’Hara, Ted Berrigan and John Forbes as a significant trefoil in twentieth-century English language poetry. All three had untimely deaths, excited a collective homage, and developed cult followings that reverberate today. The earliest, Frank O’Hara, exercised an erotics of influence that both endears and pricks. His compositional method foregrounds a polyvocality of the lyric subject, courting others to feel they could possess or touch O’Hara the poet. I analyse this corporeal hauntologue through his Collected Poems before turning to how he complicated this in a daemonic doubling with Larry Rivers. I then investigate how it extended to a larger social configuration. Learning from O’Hara’s example but differentiating himself from it, Berrigan fashions an alternative figuration as poet: the uncouth, the erroneous, the cowboy, and prankster. Through reading The Sonnets, I demonstrate how the mythology of “Ted Berrigan” is that of the “cosmophage,” or one who ingests everything, while playfully and sacrificially dispersing distinctions between life and literature. I further analyse how Berrigan’s mythos shapes subsequent poetic practice and sharing of charmed relics. Analysing how Berrigan and O’Hara negotiate self-constitution in terms of a broader constitution of the United States of America, I then investigate how John Forbes takes up the self-mythologising techniques of both from a position of “coming after” but also from being “on the edge” culturally and geographically as an Australian poet. Enervating the figure of the troubadour, Forbes offers an ironic, parodic, but moving alternative in his modelling of poet and citizen.
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ItemAnthropologist of space: the poetry and poetics of Laurie Duggan( 2014)This thesis, which comprises a critical dissertation and creative manuscript, explores the representation of contemporary space in the work of Australian poet Laurie Duggan. Through comparative readings of Duggan’s poetry and that of other poets with whom he shares thematic preoccupations and aesthetic concerns, the thesis provides a range of critical approaches for illuminating the representational strategies in Duggan’s work. The thesis argues, with reference to theoretical perspectives including those of Michel de Certeau, Henri Lefebvre and Fredric Jameson, that Duggan’s poetry constructs a deceptively complex spatial dynamic, a poetic strategy grounded in specific localities, while recognising that the local, as space, is open to social and cultural associations that extend beyond the static nature of place. Situating Duggan’s work within a modernist tradition of process-based aesthetics, the thesis argues that Duggan’s poetry involves a process of spatial mapping, a strategy that constructs experiential, yet necessarily provisional, maps of contemporary space that move fluidly from the local to the global. The creative component of the thesis takes the form of a poetry manuscript, the poems responding to—though not attempting to explicate—the aesthetic concerns explored in relation to Duggan’s poetry and poetics. Although the poetry presented here displays shared influences and representational strategies with Duggan and the other poets considered in this study, the manuscript is not imitative, or derivative but instead deliberately charts its own conception of contemporary space. In this respect, the two components of the thesis complement one another, offering on the one hand a critical investigation of Duggan’s approach to the representation of space, while at the same time creatively exploring the possibilities of what might constitute a spatial poetics.
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ItemPoets, belief and calamitous times( 2006-06)My research in this thesis covers the religious discourse of six contemporary poets who write belief from a position of calamity. Yehuda Amichai writes from the constant wars fought since the founding of the state of Israel; Anne Sexton from psychiatric illness; Seamus Heaney from the sectarian violence of Ireland; Paul Celan and Nelly Sachs from the twentieth century’s greatest calamity, the Holocaust; and Yves Bonnefoy, from the language theories of post-modernism, which are calamitous for a poet. (For complete abstract open document)
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Item"Galilean turbulence" : disruption and the bible in the poetry of W.B.Yeats( 2003-06)Disturbance has been recognised as a presence in Yeats’s poetry for some time, although its discussion has not been extensive. The purpose of this thesis is to explore a particular type of disturbance in Yeat’s poetry that has not yet been investigated: disruption, and its relation to the Bible. I argue that disruption, in its meanings of interruption, disorder, fracturing, and division, is a distinct presence in a number of Yeat’s poems, and that it manifests in three key categories: disruption relating to Yeatsian poiesis, Yeat’s interest in and use of instances of disruption in the Bible, and disruption of the Bible itself. I begin by considering “The Second Coming” as a notable instance of disruption and its religious and biblical resonances. I argue that this work, in reference to an instance of disruption in the Bible, undergoes textual disruption close to its centre. I develop an account of the poem as divided into opposing texts, identities, and prophetic currents, all in close relation to the Bible. I then turn to a range of contextual matters raised by the discussion of “The Second Coming”. Starting with a consideration of religion and the Bible in Yeat’s artistic vision, I argue that these two factors are important to Yeat’s envisioning of art and that disruption is deeply involved with both. Following this I investigate the relation between disruption and the Bible itself, demonstrating that disruption is a strong presence in the biblical narrative. I then consider Yeat’s reception of the Bible, focusing on Yeat’s perception of the Authorised Version and on Blake as a precursor. I argue that the Authorised Version was significant for Yeats, and that Blake was influential in demonstrating the poetic possibilities of biblically-related disruption for Yeats. After discussing these contextual matters I embark upon a wider survey of biblically-related disruption in Yeat’s poetry. First, I consider a group of poems from one of Yeat’s earlier poetic books, The Wind Among the Reeds. I argue that these works, through the figure of the biblical wind, explore the conjunction of disruption and the Bible in each of the three categories of disruption outlined above. I then turn to a second set of poems that I group together due to a shared theme of inspiration. I argue that these works also engage with disruption and the Bible, particularly in relation to the category of disruption relating to the act of poiesis. The last group of poems that I consider are concerned with central events in the life of Christ. I argue that these works demonstrate a dynamic exploration of disruption and the Bible in relation to these events, focusing particularly on the nature of Christ as God and Saviour. I then proceed to a consideration of disruption in Yeats apart from its expression in the poetry. Seeking to gain a deeper insight into disruption as an element of Yeatsian poiesis, I consider some relevant theoretical perspectives before suggesting that disruption in Yeats can be constructively interpreted in terms of potentiality.
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Item"A great blooming, buzzing confusion": language, thought & embodied experience in the writing of Lyn Hejinian( 2013)Lyn Hejinian is considered one of the more significant members of the Language poets, a group of late twentieth century American poets who take language as a formative aspect of human existence. Literary critics have largely studied Hejinian’s poetry and essays in that context, using theories based in linguistics and post-structuralism to assert that Hejinian’s writing celebrates the powers of language to shape the world. Hejinian often advocates what she refers to as an ‘open’ text, in which the author uses various techniques to invite the reader to participate in the construction of meaning. However, studies of Hejinian’s work have tended not to question why she believes this embrace of openness is necessary. What is it about language, and its role in the human experience of the world, that allegedly compels this openness? This study attempts to answer this question by examining how Hejinian characterises the human condition: how we speak, how we think, and how both language and thought influence and are influenced by our embodied experience of the world. Such a question calls for a theoretical framework that incorporates concepts from disciplines such as linguistics, post-structuralism, cognitive science and phenomenology. This question also calls for a close reading of both Hejinian’s essays and her poetry, with particular focus on the essay ‘The Rejection of Closure’, which establishes her open poetics, and the prose poem memoir My Life, which is often considered to be Hejinian’s chief example of an open text. A careful analysis of these texts reveals that Hejinian’s writing does not merely celebrate the powers of language, but does so in spite of the failure of language to enclose in words the vast and uncertain nature of lived experience. Hejinian characterises the human condition as poised between an embodied presence in a vast, uncertain world and partial, provisional enclosures of that world through language. Her poetics is predicated on the belief that language can never reach perfect closure and completion because the lived world is neither closed nor complete. Hejinian is perhaps too emphatic in her complete rejection of closure, which is sometimes necessary, but her writing suggests that language can provide partial closures as well as express a sense of wonder, curiosity, playfulness and freedom about the world. This reading contributes an important qualification to previous readings of Hejinian, which have tended to aggrandise the role of language in shaping the world. The deployment of ideas from cognitive science also puts the human use of language in an evolutionary and biological context, which is hinted at in Hejinian’s writing but has previously been unexplored by her critics. For the first time, this study puts Hejinian’s work in relation to the recent turn in the humanities towards questions of biology and nature; in that sense this project will contribute to further research in the same area.
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ItemFrom "Homelands" to "Wastelands": landscapes of memory in poetry, place and photography( 2012)This thesis explores the gaps within the familial narrative, including those found in the photographic archive. The ideological framework of the family, and the ways in which we create and imagine domestic landscapes, is examined through a “reading” of family photographs, a key feature of this thesis. Family photographs frame and trigger individual and familial memory and instigate forgetting. Additionally, landscapes of memory and identity are strongly linked to, and inform a dis/connection to place. Our “sense of place” is also informed by trajectories of migration both forced and desired. The meaning of “home” and the ways in which we imagine “home” is, in turn, informed by the construction of myths, shared through generations. Utilising notions of memory, place and landscape in my photo-poetic work “A Time in Place” as a point of departure, the thesis also examines how cultural memory is mediated through place and photography. The thesis traverses various terrains and cultural geographies, investigating how cultural identity is both informed and challenged by myths of the nation, “home” and “homelands”, childhood and the family. Within my own family, narratives of migration and settlement both anchor familial bonds while simultaneously disputing and supporting nationalist narratives. The confluence of migrations from Jamaica, Wales and England to Australia offers a new perspective on colonisation, nationalism, belonging, and “home” in an examination of myths of the family, place, and cultural identity in Australia and my family’s countries of “origin”. An analysis of both place and the photographic image, as repositories of memory, create what Michel Foucault terms counter-memories and reveal histories “hidden” or erased in visual and written discourses of the nation-state and the dominant narrative of the family, which is often patriarchal or monolithic. The thesis also adopts an interdisciplinary approach within visual and cultural studies with a strong emphasis on feminist theories and those located within the fields of memory studies and postcolonial and diaspora studies. The thesis is divided into two sections: the photo-poetic work “A Time in Place” and the critical component entitled “From “Homelands” to “Wastelands””. “A Time in Place” responds to places (both in the natural and built environment) of familial and personal significance in my family’s patterns of migrations. Three parts constitute the critical component of the thesis “From “Homelands” to “Wastelands””. The first of these explores place and memory (including forgetting) in family photographs taken in Jamaica, England and Wales. The second examines the work of three contemporary photographers: Ingrid Pollard, Simryn Gill, and Sandy Edwards, and the ways in which they negotiate identity, place, space, diaspora and the family. The third investigates “sense of place” and the notion of home through a psychogeographic exploration of my “hometown”, Newcastle, Australia.
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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.