School of Culture and Communication - Theses

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    Burrowing on the beach: satire in the poetry of A.D. Hope, John Forbes, and J.S. Harry
    Eales, Simon ( 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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    "A great blooming, buzzing confusion": language, thought & embodied experience in the writing of Lyn Hejinian
    HAWORTH, DAVID ( 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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    The aesthetic of joy in Old English poetry
    Adair, Anya Margaret ( 2011)
    This thesis examines the aesthetic of joy in Old English poetry. Its assessment of the conception and expression of joy works against the perception of Old English poetry as predominantly dark or lacking in positive feeling; in the broadest terms, it seeks to redress this imbalance of critical attention by devoting itself to a survey of joy. The examination of poetic joy-vocabulary defines some important but often overlooked nuances and connotations in the range of key ‘joy-words’ appearing in Old English poetry. The thesis aims to track certain changes in the meanings of the terms, as they are used in different poetic genres, and as the ideological context of their use changes; from this basis, arguments relating to changes in the Old English aesthetic of joy are made. The thesis presents a tentative taxonomy of poetic joy, proposing six major categories of joyful experience, which may be subdivided into ‘joys of place’ and ‘joys of action’. This survey reinforces the breadth and variety in Old English poetic joy; it also begins to clarify some of the lines along which the aesthetic of joy may be divided. Central among these are the distinctions between earthly and spiritual joys, which are often encoded in poetry as ‘hall-based’ and ‘heaven-based’ joys. The thesis argues that aesthetic differences (of style, lexicon and ideology) are apparent between the predominantly female experience of domestic joys, the predominantly male experience of hall-joys, and the religious and spiritual experience of heavenly joys. Where these conceptions share a guiding aesthetic is in the use of the metaphor of the hall as a physical space filled with joy, which journeyers (in both the literal and the spiritual sense) are able to enter. And finally, the thesis suggests that a major impact of the relocation of joy in poetry from an earthly to a heavenly setting is radically to destabilise the role and power of the Anglo-Saxon poet. Poetry’s own joy – which transforms sorrowful experience to joy for those who take delight in artistic narrative – is replaced by the power of Christ to translate the sinful man to the joy of an eternal heaven. The centrality of the positive values of the ‘joy’ aesthetic is presented throughout the thesis as a counterbalance to that emphasis which privileges negative motifs in the appreciation of Old English poetry. The study will thus add to the understanding both of the guiding artistic principles of Old English poetry, and more broadly, to an understanding of the emotional, cultural and linguistic facets of the Old English world.
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    Automotive apotheosis: an exploration of promotional culture as contemporary mythology
    Kurdyuk, Kateryna ( 2011)
    This thesis proposes that contemporary promotional culture is the mythology of today. This hypothesis was first put forth by Marshall McLuhan in his 1951 book, The Mechanical Bride: Folklore of Industrial Man, where he astutely observed that myth and poetry have been effectively colonized by promotional culture. Although it has been mainly overlooked by the academic community, this book is a cornerstone of the field of popular culture and mass media. In it, McLuhan was one of the first scholars to detect that folklore of industrial society is determined, not by education or religion, but by the mass media (McLuhan 1951). Over the decades, many scholars from various academic fields have observed the same trends, concluding that the myth-making faculty is thriving in contemporary society, and situating the strongest mythopoeic forces in worlds of entertainment and promotional culture. Nevertheless, these notions have not been sufficiently explored. Hence, in order to uncover the prevalent myth and poetry operating in contemporary society we must turn to promotional culture, and particularly to advertising, which McLuhan believes is as equivalent to collective society as dreams are to the individual (McLuhan 1951, p. 97). Myth is defined in this work as a universal narrative that reflects humanity’s collective unconscious projections and contains primordial forms, or archetypes. This thesis argues that advertising is mythopoeic and utilizes primordial archetypes. The focus of this thesis is automotive adverting, which draws on the mythology of the car as a godlike entity in contemporary popular culture. McLuhan’s observations detailing the colonization of myth and poetry in contemporary society inform a critical methodology which this thesis builds upon and modernizes. The resulting version of mythical criticism is a valid method of enquiry. It reveals underlying meaning in contemporary promotional texts that could not otherwise be observed by using methods such as semiotics alone.