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.