School of Culture and Communication - Theses
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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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ItemInnovation and change in Aotearoa New Zealand’s documentary production ecology 2010-2013( 2014)This thesis presents a detailed analysis of New Zealand’s documentary production ecology during the period 2010 – 2013, focusing on innovation, change and the function(s) of documentary as a creative and cultural industry. ‘Ecology’ as a term in media and cultural studies scholarship is increasingly employed as a means of extending the scope of critical political economy beyond a critique of power dynamics in contemporary capitalist society to acknowledge the complex and multifaceted nature of relations between producers and audiences and the ways that media are produced, circulated and used. The use of the term ‘ecology’ in this context acknowledges the ways that our systems of communication, like those in nature, are not stable or fixed, but are interconnected, evolving and dynamic. Drawing on interviews, observation, practice-led research and analysis of theatrical and television documentary output, the framework of ecology is used to examine the specific conditions of documentary production in New Zealand as a complex media system in relation to global shifts in media production, distribution and use, and aims to identify factors that support or inhibit innovation in the context of New Zealand’s documentary production ecology.
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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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ItemJames McCaughey and the Mill Community Theatre Company 1978 -1984: the history of a brief theatrical experiment with a long tail( 2014)In Australia the 1970s could be characterised as a decade of civic generosity and cultural expansiveness. In terms of theatre and performance that expansiveness was reflected in the emergence of the community theatre movement and a determination to re-imagine the audience/performer relationship as one of inclusion and shared agency. My research places the specific and local work of the Mill Community Theatre Project within the wider context of national and international movements in the 1970s and early 1980s that identified art as generative of social change; of art and artists as agents for cultural transformation. While the company’s life was relatively short, its legacy, along with that of the Deakin performing arts course, which founding artistic director James McCaughey created simultaneously, has been substantial. McCaughey’s particular vision, derived from influences as diverse as Athenian tragedy and the aesthetics and techniques of contemporary postmodern dance, was for an integrated program of work in which formal innovation and artistic excellence could sit alongside an approach to community engagement that was process-based and inclusive. The Company’s location in a former Woollen Mill in the regional city of Geelong was provided by Deakin University, itself a radical new institution in 1976. This abandoned industrial space offered both subject matter and a context in which to explore the idea of “community” in relation to the uses of theatre and to question and test the form’s continued relevance in the late twentieth century with its plethora of competing media. While other community theatre companies in the country pursued essentially British models of popular theatre – circus, cabaret – or the agitprop political theatre models of an earlier era, the Mill under McCaughey set out to discover how the aesthetics of late modernism could be re-fashioned to serve particular social purposes but more particularly, as Copeau would urge, “to renovate the theatre and its audiences rather than to reinvent them.” (Copeau, 1913)
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Item(Re)tracing the line: familial representations in contemporary multicultural texts and immigrant fiction( 2014)This thesis is a genealogical exploration into a second-generation immigrant writer’s identity through critical and creative writing. It (re)traces the author’s own familial immigrant experience via select contemporary literature and multicultural works, analysing key theoretical ideas and critical scholarly texts by intellectuals, including Roland Barthes, Marianne Hirsch, Madelaine Hron and Gaston Bachelard. The thesis also explores and produces creative works on the themes of death and memory, place and trauma, journey and home. Chapter One, discusses death photography as the site of trauma and the “wound” (Barthes, Camera Lucida 26), and the resulting narratives produced as a response to the “punctum” (27) through the analysis of specific photographic works and texts by Chinese-Australian artist William Yang, French theorist Roland Barthes, and Australian photography curator, historian and writer, Helen Ennis. The chapter also introduces the writer’s own idea of “the personal punctum” building on the Barthesian notion of the power existing within death photographs and the “triggering” of memories through “photo elicitation” (Harper 2002) for their potential in the creation of fictional narrative. Chapter Two, through textual analysis of two contemporary Asian-Australian writers, Alice Pung’s memoir Her Father’s Daughter (2011) and Nam Le’s fictional short story “Love and Honour and Pity and Pride and Compassion and Sacrifice” (2009), trauma and second-generation immigrant writing about place, explicitly the landscape and familial homeland as “traumascape” (Tumarkin 12), are examined . The section focusses on the inter-generational effects of trauma and “postmemories of place” (own term), and the conflict arising with the appropriation of survivors’ testimonies. Chapter Three, investigates the trauma and pain as a result of the “journey” (Hron 15) in the immigrant narrative genre. It explores the ideas of “topography” and “topoanalysis” with the mapping of the first-generation immigrant’s journey back to the homeland. The emigrant’s/immigrant’s journey and the realities of the old homeland and the new imagined home are discussed through Shaun Tan’s graphic novel The Arrival (2006), and Péter Forgács’ documentary Hunky Blues (2009), about the Hungarian mass migration to America. Framing the dissertation are selected creative works. The non-fiction interleaves are bridging devices, linking critical theory with creative practice, enabling meditation on the aforementioned critical themes provoked by my father’s death. The fiction includes chapters from Our Fathers, a contemporary-historical novel of a boy escaping post revolution Hungary, and his death in Brisbane fifty years on. The fiction ties both past and present through themes of family history, trauma, inter-generational transfer of memories and postmemories, place, and the idea of home.