School of Culture and Communication - Theses
Permanent URI for this collection
Search Results
1 - 1 of 1
-
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.