School of Culture and Communication - Theses

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    The Age of Icons: Digitising the Self in Profile Images
    Antonellos, Madeleine Kayla ( 2018)
    In the “Age of Icons”, a digital echo of the self emerges in an online ecology where representations of the self and others are signified in virtual, globally networked profiles. In digital spaces, real and online friends, followers and connections collide. Social media platforms have evolved into dynamic and malleable communicative spaces, that guide an individual’s construction of a ‘profile’ on their network. The ‘profile image’, provides options for a user to express a visualisation of themselves, alongside multimodal presentations of personal content. This technologically-mediated icon of self, can portray a user’s actual or desired physical appearance, an identity that translates from the “real world” into online expressions of cultural, social and emotional values. Through developing an online presence, in singular, or interconnecting, social accounts or platforms, this thesis asks the question: how do we construct representations of ourselves online, using our social media profile pictures? Building on recent literature surrounding online image production, dissemination, and identity formation on social media, I have collected and coded extensive, qualitative data – gathered through semi-structured interviews – with a small study group of 21-35-year-old social media users. This thesis presents a thematic analysis of the process of creating an online identity and explores the adaptation of this online marker of identity to technological features of social media accounts. Finally, it examines impacts of profile pictures in the daily lives of social media users, where online and offline realities can intersect. The chosen case study is ‘profile images’: the literal, or figurative, public face a user wears when interacting in online, social media platforms. The thesis considers the interplay between varied forms of self-expression, and conceptions of identity in a user, as they live offline and online through their use of social media profiles.
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    Writing places: whiteness and the design of the built environment
    Chiodo, Louise Jane ( 2018)
    The design of the built environment affects people. In Australia, designed spaces reflect specific ideas about nationhood that do not represent the reality of a diverse population. Instead, a white national identity pervades with unresolved issues of land often at the heart of such identity narratives. Whiteness, understood as a specific power structure, operates through landscapes and architecture in explicit and implicit ways. Indigenous cultural identities are also present within and against all of these expressions of whiteness. Such tensions arise in the first instance due to manifestations of whiteness in designed spaces being situated in Indigenous lands and Country while colonial histories and their associated violence, both symbolic and literal, remain largely unacknowledged. This thesis uses a mixed methodology to investigate a range of spaces, including demarcated national spaces, memorial sites, and places of exhibition, through the lens of critical race and whiteness studies to reveal how these identity tensions occur. Though the Australian context is the main focus of the study, an initial look to how similar issues are playing out in the US highlights the existence of transnational whiteness and the nature of the newly-formed relationship between the two nations at the time of Australia’s Federation. It is argued that the complicated relationship between these cultural identities affects the way landscapes and architecture are experienced, whether this is realised on a conscious level or not. Further, by using critical and reflexive modes of engagement, designers can gain deeper insights into place, see and feel their position in relation to these identity tensions, and understand how power is operating through them. This examination of the way cultural identities such as whiteness and Indigeneity are expressed through the design of national, memorial and exhibition spaces, allows a way into thinking about how the same tensions and power dynamics may also be taking place in more everyday spaces.
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    When romance is dead: vampires in romance narratives for girls
    Tealby, Alison ( 2018)
    In this thesis, I examine how the archetype of the vampire in Western literature continues to evolve within contemporary Young Adult vampire romance narratives. Building on Auerbach’s contention that vampires mutate according to the social demands of their time, I argue that the late twentieth and early twenty-first century proliferation of romantic vampire figures in Young Adult narratives for girls is a response to cultural anxieties concerning rapidly changing societal expectations of femininity following second-wave feminist movements in the twentieth century. I study three contemporary vampire romance narratives, Whedon’s Buffy the Vampire Slayer (1997-2003), Meyer’s Twilight (2005-2008) and Mead’s Bloodlines (2011-2015). Through my analysis of these texts, I demonstrate different ways in which the romantic vampire archetype has responded to Western anxieties concerning contemporary femininity, and I argue that the romantic vampire continues to evolve, drawing on conventions that have been set up in preceding vampire romance narratives to address changing social environments. The creative component of this thesis is an opening extract of a Young Adult vampire romance narrative titled The Blood Pact. In this extract, I explore ways in which the romantic vampire archetype can continue to transform in response to contemporary cultural concerns.
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    Global positioning: international auctions and the development of the Western market for Chinese Contemporary art, 1998-2012
    Archer, Anita Sarah ( 2018)
    This thesis examines the role of international auction houses in developing a Western market for Chinese Contemporary art from 1998 to 2012. It highlights six art auction events as pivotal for the transmission of cultural and economic value from local contexts to global acceptance. This thesis underscores the agency of collectors, networked art mediators and auctions to influence market expansion in the West, thereby revealing auctions as creators and consecrators of symbolic and economic value of Chinese Contemporary art.
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    Maurice Blanchot: three terrors
    Hiatt, Marty ( 2018)
    This thesis studies the political and critical writings of Maurice Blanchot from 1933 to 1949, a period in which he underwent a number of fundamental intellectual changes that were most famously but not only political. Its overarching trope is that of the terror, which appears in three very different guises, in 1936, 1941, and 1947, playing a central role in Blanchot’s engagement each time. The terror is one of the major metaphorical complexes of twentieth century French letters. It is essentially a nested series of discourses (and medical and juridical metaphors) about how discourse connects to reality or only to itself, which makes it essentially reflexive, as well as immediately political, literary and philosophical. In it the twin heritages of revolution and Romanticism are repeatedly struggled over and re-worked into their modern forms. My thesis elaborates Blanchot’s reckonings with this complex as a means to demonstrating the precise nature of his various changes. The goal is not to explain his political ‘turn’ but to specify the categorical modifications to his thinking that it presupposes. I trace the increasing sophistication of Blanchot’s political and literary thinking, arguing that initially Blanchot’s national revolutionary politics are formally anti-Semitic in that the prerequisite for national restoration is the violent expurgation of what is foreign. It is only with his encounter with thinkers like Jean Paulhan and Brice Parain in the 1940s that he develops an account of how terror and rhetoric, or destruction and articulation, mediate but do not limit one another, and begins to conceive of literature as the sovereign creation-destruction of realities via their interaction. It is his encounter with Hegel that enables him to re-link this conception to history by arguing that it directly corresponds to revolution, a view founded on Hegel’s basic homology between language and history. I argue that Blanchot’s identification of himself with revolution, as well as his negative reading of Hegel (his refusal of ‘achieved’ sense and development generally), sets a kind of absolute positioning named ‘ambiguity’ from which Blanchot will endeavour to think henceforth: it leads directly to his tendency to proceed by the unfolding of paradoxes and to the inescapably plural meaning of his 1950s (anti-)categories such as the neuter. It also precludes the possibility of a fixed division between literature and the political, which I argue is sufficient grounds for ruling out modelling his turn on a transition from one to the other. Such a reading, which is more explicitly materialist than most of those proposed to date, provides a different basis from which to approach Blanchot’s celebrated 1950s critical writings: namely, that they are suffused with the absolute experience of the identity with literature and revolution that Blanchot ‘becomes’ in the late 1940s. It also implies that Blanchot was preoccupied with thinking the link between literature and history throughout his career, and that even the rarefied nature of some of his writings is due to this very issue and his responses to it, rather than to his indifference to such a link.
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    Collaborative drawing on Captain Cook's Endeavour voyage, 1768-1771: an intellectual history of artistic practice
    Parsons, Harriet Elizabeth ( 2018)
    This thesis investigates what can be learned from the drawn gesture on paper by locating it in the historical context in which it was made. This ‘contextualist’ approach to drawing analysis is derived from the methodologies used for text analysis in intellectual history. Intellectual historians recapture the meaning a text conveyed to its original readers by reconstructing the ‘language game’ of the author. The game has two dimensions in this approach: the concepts and practices that define the cultural norms of the author’s society and intellectual community, and might be described as the ‘rules of the game’, and the creative ‘moves’ made by individuals within these parameters as participants in a discourse with the author that constitute the game’s ‘play’. This thesis proposes to expand the field of intellectual history by incorporating the dimension of gesture into the moves of the language game to allow drawing and writing to be studied together. This gestural dimension of the linguistic move constitutes artistic practice in the terms of this thesis. The ramifications of its incorporation into the play of discourse are illustrated in a case study of the first part of Captain Cook’s Endeavour voyage of Pacific exploration from 1768 to 1771, the voyage to Tahiti to observe the transit of Venus. Part One, ‘Intellectual Parameters,’ constructs a model of Georgian civil society that provides the foundation for the linguistic context in which the expedition’s manuscripts of texts and drawings will be read in the chapters of the thesis. Part Two, ‘Drawing Practices,’ applies this model to develop a detailed picture of the expedition’s working community by reconstructing the artists’ drawing sessions in the Atlantic. Part Three, ‘Discourse,’ interprets the drawings of Tupaia, the man who joined Cook’s voyage to travel to England, and his discourse through the bridging languages of navigation and cartography with several members of the expedition, to produce a new reading of the Endeavour’s purpose of discovery in the South Pacific and Cook’s claims to possession.
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    Moving mountains: interwar collecting of French modernist art and the economics of translocation
    Challis, David Martin ( 2018)
    A distinguishing feature of the Parisian art market during the interwar period was the influx of art collectors from outside continental Europe, who, in many cases, benefited from a currency advantage against the weakened French franc. These collectors expedited a large-scale translocation of French modernist artwork, the causes and consequences of which have been the subject of a range of recent publications and exhibitions. However, the significance of the underlying economic context surrounding this translocation remains less studied and poorly understood. This thesis draws on unpublished archival correspondence, gallery records and quantitative economic data to construct case studies of prominent interwar art collectors in France, Britain, America, Japan, Australia and Brazil. These case studies are thematically linked by two arguments: first, that the collapse in the value of the French franc, among other economic disruptions, played a significant role in the timing, scale and international dispersion of French modernist art; second, that foregrounding the underlying economic context provides a fresh insight into the importance of the newly assembled international collections, which are shown to have significantly influenced the reception of French modernist art in their respective locations. In substantiating these arguments, the thesis seeks to provide an alternative perspective within which the activities of interwar art collectors and the causes and consequences of the translocation of French modernist art can be further understood.
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    Fielding Peter Carey: economy, archive, celebrity
    Allahyari, Keyvan ( 2018)
    This thesis accounts for a method of reading Carey’s fiction as works of national literature in the minor register (colonial, peripheral, small) which refract a sense of the possibility of circulation in transnational literary markets. The publication of Carey’s debut work, The Fat Man in History, by the University of Queensland Press in 1974 coincided with the termination of The Traditional Markets Agreement, which resulted in assisting American publishers to roam more freely in the Australian literary market. Drawing on Pierre Bourdieu’s concepts of the literary field, capital, and habitus, my thesis starts by examining the publication of The Fat Man as a microevent to better understand the macroevent of Carey’s position-taking in the transnational marketplace. The mid-1970s shifted Carey’s position in the field and established a trajectory through which he accumulated significant cultural and economic capital in the following decades. This method interrogates Carey’s rising visibility in relation to the construction of a new status for the postcolonial authors and the possibilities of the global publishing industry since the 1960s throughout to the present moment, including the politics of literary prizes and literary festivals, the rise of literary agents, the commodification of literary archives, and the merging of conglomerate publishing houses. Carey’s fiction exhibits the anxieties of an Australian author ensnared in neoliberal systems of literary production and distribution, a free market economy biased against national territories (such as Australia) on the periphery of a world republic of letters. Drawing on the sociological paradigm of Pierre Bourdieu, this thesis asks how, and to what extent, can we think of Carey’s fiction and his writerly persona as cultural objects circulating within the global literary marketplace? How does his fiction refract the global forces that produce and distribute his books and celebrity? And what is the relationship between Carey’s stories and the literary marketplace, between the making of his books and the reading of them? Thus, my study offers a lateral examination of two interrelated aspects of Carey’s fiction. On the one hand, it captures a continuum of Australian and transnational practices of literary distinction and advancement that governed the critical and financial success of Carey’s fiction; on the other, it produces insights into the structural homologies between the literary spaces that Carey inhabits and those of his Australian characters confined to minor systems of cultural production and consumption.
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    Collecting Australian art history: Dr. S.A. Ewing and the Ewing Collection
    Rosier, Cathleen Gabriella Marie ( 2018)
    This thesis is a study of collector Dr. Samuel Arthur Ewing (1864–1941) and his collection of Australian art at the University of Melbourne. Although Ewing was considered one of the leading collectors of his day, little is known of Ewing’s collecting activities or the conceptual design directing his acquisitions. This thesis provides a reassessment of the University’s Ewing Collection by identifying and analysing Ewing’s original thematic design for his collection. This thesis therefore returns the conceptual understanding of Ewing’s Collection to its creator. I begin by contextualising Ewing’s collecting activities amongst the art collectors of his era. To address the current paucity of research on Ewing’s peers, I identify collecting trends of the day by analysing a historic, but little known, newspaper series. Through this analysis, I reposition Ewing as an eminent collector of his era. I then utilise material cultural studies and narratology to chronologically delineate Ewing’s collecting career and postulate that Ewing collected a visual exploration of Australian art history. I then conceive art history as a broader cultural activity undertaken, in this study, through art collecting, and analyse the structural framework of Ewing’s Collection. Returning to material cultural studies, I interpret the structural framework through Ewing’s scientific background and contemporary literary histories of Australian art. By reconceiving the Ewing Collection as an exploration of Australian art history, this thesis highlights alternative cultural engagements with art histories being undertaken prior to and outside of the professional discipline in Australia.
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    The politics of the night: feminine writing and mother-daughter relations in Djuna Barnes, Angela Carter, and Shahrnush Parsipur
    Shiran, Parisa ( 2018)
    This thesis uses Luce Irigaray’s philosophy of sexual difference and Maurice Blanchot’s orphic philosophy of literature to examine representations of night in the fiction of three women novelists, Djuna Barnes, Angela Carter and Shahrnush Parsipur. Performing a feminist psychoanalytical reading of Blanchot, I reveal the various ways in which his poststructuralist literary theory rests upon and reflects the phallocentric constitution of the symbolic whereby linguistic signification (the production of the literary work) depends upon the loss of the mother (Eurydice), and the nocturnal exteriority of maternal-female sexual difference. If literature is the impossible movement towards the darkness of maternal origin (the other night), then it is twice as impossible for the female author to move towards the prelinguistic night of maternal origin because of the incest taboo and the phallocentric relegation of maternal-female sexuality to the unconscious. Through a combination of feminist psychoanalysis and literary criticism, the thesis proposes that a feminine literary category marked by maternal-female sexuality is a near-impossibility. However, I go beyond a feminist appropriation of Blanchot’s concept of the other night in order to explain the political relevance of the author’s sex in writing. The thesis also has a comparative dimension because the night is a key concept in Persian literature and in Sufism. In so far as Parsipur’s imagery of the pre-Oedipal night takes on a mystical shape very different from that of Barnes and Carter, the thesis reveals the cultural formation of the unconscious across different socio-cultural geographies in world literature.