School of Culture and Communication - Theses
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ItemOswald Brierly and the art of patronage: a colonial journey( 2016)This thesis seeks to evaluate the nature and significance of artistic patronage in colonial Australia by an examination of the patronage received by Oswald Walters Brierly [later Sir Oswald] (1817-1894) associated with his time in Australia and the extent to which this patronage informed his art. The thesis explores Brierly’s role as a professionally trained artist in the emerging artistic environment of the Australian colonies in the 1840s and seeks to show how his colonial experiences influenced the subject matter of his later art; particularly the impact of his direct engagement with the whaling industry at Twofold Bay in New South Wales between 1843 and 1848, under the patronage of his first Australian mentor, the flamboyant entrepreneur, Benjamin Boyd (1801– 1851). It also examines his role as a shipboard artist on voyages of discovery aboard H.M.S Rattlesnake and to a lesser extent H.M.S. Maeander. It will be shown that following Brierly’s second visit to Australia with H.R.H. Prince Alfred, the Duke of Edinburgh (1844-1900), on the first Royal visit to Australia in 1867-1868, the artist attracted new Australian patronage: patrons who sought to enhance their own prestige and status by acquiring works by an artist who enjoyed strong royal connections. It proposes that the examination of Brierly’s work associated with Australia sheds new light on the changing nature of artistic patronage in Australia between the largely convict dependent society of the 1840s and the confident and prosperous world of the Boom Period following the discovery of gold, especially in Victoria. The thesis will demonstrate that Brierly’s art reflects these changed circumstances and the expanding aspirations of his Australian patrons.
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ItemHurdy-gurdy: new articulations( 2016)The purpose of this thesis is to expand existing literature concerning the hurdy-gurdy as a contemporary musical instrument. Notably, it addresses the lack of hurdy-gurdy literature in the context of contemporary composition and performance. Research into this subject has been triggered by the author’s experience as a hurdy-gurdy performer and composer and the importance of investigating and documenting the hurdy-gurdy as an instrument capable of performing well outside the idioms of traditional music. This thesis consists of a collection of new works for hurdy-gurdy and investigation of existing literature including reference to the author’s personal experience as a hurdy-gurdy composer and performer. It will catalogue and systematically document a selection of hurdy-gurdy techniques and extended performance techniques, and demonstrate these within the practical context of new music compositions created by the author. This creative work and technique investigation and documentation is a valuable resource for those seeking deeper practical and academic understanding of the hurdy-gurdy within the context of contemporary music making.
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ItemLooking back: contemporary feminist art in Australia and New Zealand( 2016)This thesis sets out to examine the ways in which feminism manifests itself in contemporary art, focusing in particular on Australia and New Zealand. Interviews were conducted with practicing contemporary artists Kelly Doley, FANTASING (Bek Coogan, Claire Harris, Sarah-Jane Parton, Gemma Syme), Deborah Kelly, Jill Orr and Hannah Raisin. During these interviews, a number of key themes emerged which form the integral structure of the thesis. A combination of information drawn from interviews, close reading of art works, and key theoretical texts is used to position contemporary feminist art in relation to its recent history. I will argue that the continuation of feminist practices and devices in contemporary practice points to a circular pattern of repetition in feminist art, which resists a linear teleology of art historical progress. The relationship between feminism and contemporary art lies in the way that current practices revisit crucial issues which continue to cycle through the lived experience of femininity, such as the relationship to the body, to labour and capital, to the environment, and to structures of power. By acknowledging that these issues are not tied to a specific historical period, I argue that feminist art does not constitute a short moment of prolific production in the last few decades of the twentieth century, but is a sustained movement which continually adapts and shifts in order to remain abreast of contemporary issues.
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ItemCircuits, computers, cassettes, correspondence: the Clifton Hill Community Music Centre 1976 - 1984( 2016)This thesis examines the production and presentation of experimental music, art, performance and installation by a group of musicians, visual artists, writers, performers and film makers who were involved in the activities taking place at the Clifton Hill Community Music Centre, Melbourne from 1976 until 1984. This thesis will investigate the musical influence of the generation of practitioners who founded the Clifton Hill and taught at the La Trobe University Music Department. It will examine their influence upon the younger generation, with focus on the close relationships both generations had with the broader music and visual art scenes of Melbourne and Australia. This thesis traces a transitional moment in artistic production between the older and younger generations, which was an illustration of the broader shift in Australian artistic culture from modernism to postmodernism. I will document the artistic work of a younger generation at the Music Centre as a symptom of a new postmodern mode of engagement in order to determine what place the Clifton Hill occupies within a history of emergent postmodern theories in Australian art.
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ItemStoried cities: Bret Easton Ellis and the urban literary tradition( 2016)This thesis is an attempt to re-classify the work of Bret Easton Ellis. It seeks to determine, through close textual analysis and with particular attention to the epigraphs and allusions he employs, whether “blank fiction” and Postmodernism adequately describe the ideological tradition of writing to which Ellis belongs. Noting the central role that the urban spaces of New York and Los Angeles occupy in Ellis’s oeuvre, it asks to what extent can the disturbed minds of his protagonists be seen as resulting from the alienating city environments in which they dwell, and can we ally Ellis’s project to the classical eighteenth and nineteenth-century urban literary texts he references? In reading against a prose style that invites its readers to skim, Ellis’s citations signal that he does not intend his novels to be merely a commentary upon adolescent apathy, 1980s capitalist greed, or 1990s celebrity obsession – the dominant critical interpretations of his key novels – but, in a vision far more closely aligned to classic urban novelists, as comments on the destructive and alienating nature of the city as a force acting upon the psyche of the individual. This thesis examines Ellis’s portrayals of the contemporary American city in order to reveal potential meaning behind what has been described as the unnecessarily graphic and sadistic levels of violence that characterise these works, and argues that Ellis occupies an uneasy position within the Postmodern era.
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Item'There is a concept behind it': symbolic narrative and material realities in Randolph Stow's To the Islands( 2016)This thesis critically examines the novel To the Islands, published in 1958 by Australian writer Randolph Stow. Taking issue with the predominantly aestheticist readings of the novel that have dominated the field, I offer a close-reading which re-contextualises To the Islands in relation to Stow’s time at Forrest River Mission in 1957. Employing a methodology that refigures Stow’s anthropological and culturally appropriative modes in pursuit of his symbolic narrative, I argue that this is a novel intensely implicated in place. In doing so, I expose the authorial ambiguities and textual repressions in the novel that are directly linked to the material realities of Forrest River, both as Balanggarra country and as Mission site, to reveal the uneasy cultural and racial politics of this work. Out of this reading, To the Islands emerges as a far more problematic novel than most critics to date would have us believe. As a timely consideration of an author currently experiencing revived interest, this thesis makes a significant contribution to the field. It also has important implications for how we read texts which appropriate Aboriginal contexts.
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ItemA hybrid approach to grangerizing: analysing Henry Shaw’s extra-illustrated Shakespeare volumes by combining quantitative and qualitative methodologies( 2016)Housed within the Special Collections Department of the Auckland Public Library, Henry Shaw’s Edinburgh Folio edition of Shakespeare’s works is an obscure but important example of the grangerizing movement – a form of custom book modification mostly practised by wealthy intellectuals in private domestic settings from the eighteenth to the twentieth centuries. Also known as ‘extra-illustration’, grangerizing can be defined as the insertion of external material – such as illustrations, essays, or physical ephemera – between the pages of a pre-existing text. A relatively sparse area of study, the small cache of critics who have written on grangerizing tend to pursue it from their particular background, be it history, art history, print culture, or sociology, with little regard for establishing a unified foundation of criticism or a standardised method of analysis. Because of this, most studied grangers exist within relative vacuums from each other (a stark contrast to their historically very social purpose), with many fundamental grangerizing researching questions such as illustration selection decisions, the extent to which the finished granger can inform the personality and habits of its grangerizer, and more fundamental interrelationships between image and text all remaining decidedly open. These are the questions that I primarily pursue in this thesis, drawing from the rich resource of Henry Shaw and the Edinburgh Folio. The methodologies in this thesis comprise a hybrid of quantitative and qualitative research techniques, which adapt several key elements from other grangerizing critics. These techniques are deployed on a sample of fourteen volumes from the forty-part Edinburgh Folio. To obtain a primary dataset for this research phase, I photographed, categorised, and uploaded a total of 1,535 illustrations across the fourteen sample volumes – a laborious process that took a combined nine months to complete. Once all the illustration properties were recorded and categorised, I conducted a quantitative evaluation using a range of models and visualisations. This revealed a series of broad insights into Henry Shaw and his grangerizing techniques. A qualitative analysis then followed, which isolated and examined several key illustrations, illustration sequences, and text pages at a more granular level, unearthing even more aspects of Shaw’s personality and behaviour. When both the quantitative and qualitative analyses were complete, I combined the analysis with insights from an archive of surviving letters between Henry Shaw and the Chief Librarian of the Auckland Public Library, John Barr. In tandem with the Edinburgh Folio, these letters help to ‘complete the picture’ of Shaw and his underlying character, portraying him as a wealthy but altogether lonely individual who sought lasting public recognition through philanthropic and civic means. Ultimately, this thesis utilises research methods that are some of the first of their kind employed within grangerizing criticism. I hope that they can serve as a model for future analyses of grangerized texts. I will also make all the datasets freely available to the Special Collections Department of the Auckland Public Library for any future research into Henry Shaw.
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ItemSomewhere, between 'in' and 'out': locating Jia and internet in Baling-jiulinghou Chinese gay subjectivities( 2016)Informed by face-to-face interviews with over twenty young gay men during a 2013 field trip to five cities across Mainland China, this research thesis critically examines the everyday articulations of their sexual subjectivities both in the space of family and in cyberspace. By contemplating the state of existence experienced by these young men—specifically, their management of parent-child relationships and their utilization of Internet and geo-locative social media in negotiating their sexual identities—this thesis seeks to provide a framework to theorize broader socio-cultural specificities lived by this generation of urban Chinese gay men. A central argument of this dissertation is that contemporary Chinese gay subjectivities are not only defined by constant negotiations between ‘closetedness’ and ‘outness’, they are also paradoxically constituted vis-à-vis rapid, ongoing, socio-cultural shifts experienced by the Chinese baling- jiulinghou generation. Focusing on family and filiality, as well as the rise of geo-locative media, this thesis explores how these shifting circumstances are generating conflicting sets of expectations for young Chinese gay men, and constructing them as queer subjects of contradictions and incoherencies.
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ItemConstrained writing and critical reflection( 2016)The Oulipo is a group that is best known for its practice of constrained writing: a form of composition based on the use of additional, arbitrary restrictions in the writing process. This practice has been widely studied in the group and in secondary literature, but I argue here that an important dimension of constrained writing has not yet been fully developed. Its generative potential informs not only the composition of the text, but can create a process of critical reflection on the text as well. To develop a concept of criticism grounded in the generative principle of a text, I draw on the work of Walter Benjamin, whose early articulation of a reflective criticism informs his late work as well. I argue that Benjamin’s The Arcades Project groups together his conceptions of the philosophical idea, collection, and reflection, and may be used as a model for the critical work described in this thesis. Through these principles, I develop a kind of criticism that requires the reader to first engage with the methods behind the work, and to then reflect on this method to infer the organising idea or absolute. The critical work that I develop will thus address the process of constrained writing from the position of the writer, rather than the written text itself. This theoretical perspective orients my reading of three Oulipian texts in the thesis’s final chapter: Georges Perec’s La disparition, a lipogrammatic novel in “e;” Jacques Jouet’s Metro-poems, based on the stops and starts of train rides; and Hervé Le Tellier’s The Sextine Chapel, which uses mathematical and poetic rules in its construction.
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ItemPhilosophy of edition: cultural transmission and the publication history of hölderlin( 2016)This thesis charts certain key interpretative moments in the publication history of Friedrich Hölderlin’s collected writings. Isolating a series of important publications of Hölderlin in the twentieth century allows for the reconstruction of the philosophical meaning and influence of these texts via their edition history. The twentieth century saw a number of landmark developments in both the scholarly and popular understanding of Hölderlin, decisively mediated by the editorial choices of the various twentieth century publications of the poet’s work. Three editorial interventions are taken up. Franz Rosenzweig’s 1917 publication of the fragment now known as “The Oldest System-Program of German Idealism” was an early move in the unearthing of Hölderlin’s unique position in relation to the literary and philosophical milieu of early German Romanticism. While on the one hand sparking endless debate as to the true authorship of the fragment, Rosenzweig’s influential interpretation of the text, and its implications for later understandings of the projects of German Idealism and Romanticism, are the concern of Chapter One as it interrogates Rosenzweig’s editorial intervention, his specific interpretation of the fragment, and the philosophical context in which it emerged, in light of more recent philosophical considerations of Romanticism and of Hölderlin in particular. Norbert von Hellingrath’s publication, begun in 1910, of the first philologically supported historical-critical edition of Hölderlin’s collected writings represents what appears now to be a “rediscovery” of Hölderlin in the twentieth century. Chapter Two tracks Hellingrath’s influence on two important philosophical readings of Hölderlin, those of Walter Benjamin and Martin Heidegger. Hellingrath, in his 1910 dissertation on Hölderlin’s Pindar translations, attributed to the poet what he called a “rough” or “austere style” of poetic composition as that which separated him from his contemporaries. According to Hellingrath, Hölderlin’s late style was “rough” due to the rough articulation of the various elements of the poem – a formulation itself derived from Hölderlin’s own poetological writings and his use distinctive use of the term “caesura.” This analysis would be extended by Walter Benjamin in his early writings on Hölderlin, and will go on to form the basis of an understanding of the historical temporality of modernity as an interruption of historical continuity. This will be taken as the site of Benjamin’s theoretical divergence from Martin Heidegger, both of whom were readers of Hellingrath’s Hölderlin edition and important philosophical interpreters of Hölderlin. Dietrich E. Sattler’s publication, begun in 1975 and completed as recently as 2008, of the Frankfurt historical-critical Hölderlin edition, took place alongside the development of what have since become known as post-structuralist theories of textuality. Chapter Three identifies Sattler’s editorial technique and its underlying textual theory, advancing the claim that Sattler’s implicit theory of textuality can be understood as a ‘reactualisation’, under transformed conditions, of early Romantic literary theory. From this perspective, the critical aspect of Hölderlin’s poetry – its Romantic status as literature producing itself as it produces its own theory – can be identified as that which has been systematically occulted or suppressed in certain previous editions of the poet’s writings. A brief coda concludes the thesis with a demonstration of the way in which the Frankfurt edition enabled certain elements of Hölderlin’s poems to flash into legibility by foregrounding the process or movement of the texts, that is, the self-presentation of the capacity of these texts to act in the present.