School of Culture and Communication - Theses
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ItemRace, Capital and Desire in Roberto Bolaño: Genre in 2666( 2022)Roberto Bolano’s posthumously published 2666 is a novel split into five parts without a clear logic of organisation. I argue that its unity lies in the way each section takes up and then dissolves the conventions of a different genre. Before engaging in a close reading of the work, I seek to establish the importance of generic interpretation in contemporary literary criticism by arguing that genres are not simply categories for sorting texts, but names for complex representational mechanics through which a text relates to its social world. Upon this basis, I show that the movement of the novel reproduces the same trajectory in each of its five parts: each section uses the conventions of the genre but only to negate its usual organisation of meaning and therefore relation to history. Ultimately, I argue, these structures of experience decompose in confrontation with the colonial destruction of life. Since there is no single received literary form that adequately represents the transformations of racial violence, Bolano negates a procession of genres as a way of testifying to the complex matrix of power, death and revolt in the contemporary world. (Apologies for absence of accent on Bolano but the system does not let me type them)
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ItemFantasy and Fertility: Women’s Reproductive Bodies in Medieval Literature( 2022)This thesis explores how the reproductive potential of women’s bodies is portrayed in a selection of medieval literary texts from the Four Branches of the Mabinogi to Malory’s Arthuriad. Through a focus on fantasy in these narratives, I seek to further our understanding of how medieval writers and readers addressed social questions through fantastical story-telling. Literary fantasies, unburdened by the limits of historical realities, are fertile grounds for the expression of otherwise inaccessible desires, hopes, and critiques. This study charts how a series of female characters use the freedoms made possible by fantasy to reclaim the power of their fertility from patriarchal appropriation. I analyse Welsh, French, and English texts from the mid-to-late medieval period to juxtapose several case studies drawn from varied cultural milieux. My chosen narratives demonstrate the diverse ways in which imaginative literature questions the gendered roles of women’s reproductive bodies in medieval societies. The transhistorical and translinguistic scope of this project illustrates how multiple medieval narratives dispute the oppression of women’s bodies, and that this challenge is not exclusive to one writer, culture, or century. In my first chapter I consider Rhiannon, Branwen, Aranrhod, and Blodeuedd of Pedair Cainc Y Mabinogi, or the Four Branches of the Mabinogi, a Welsh tale surviving in two fourteenth-century manuscripts. The second chapter examines the ladies from three twelfth-century lais by Marie de France: “Guigemar,” “Yonec,” and “Milun.” And in the third chapter I approach the later medieval English canon through the Wife of Bath’s “Prologue” and “Tale” by Geoffrey Chaucer, and several women from Thomas Malory’s Arthuriad. The female characters to be discussed refuse to be framed and defined solely by their potential to give birth to a male protagonist around whom the text will then develop. They behave in a variety of ways which actively and unintentionally resist the childbearing function expected of their fertility. Instead, these women seek the freedom to enjoy their own autonomous bodily expression. In my attention to these moments of resistance, I engage with previous scholarship on representations of women in medieval texts and the functions of literary fantasy. This study reads the bodies of fictional medieval women as encompassing both the earthly and the magical, borrowing a productive mundanity from one and the opportunity for wonder from the other.
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ItemKenneth Slessor’s Gothic Harbour( 2022)Kenneth Slessor (1901-1971) often turned to Sydney Harbour as a productive site for his poetry and writing. Reading Slessor’s Harbour in its historical and cultural contexts, this thesis argues that he developed a poetic concerned with loss, memory, sexual desire and the uncanny return of repressed forces from the Harbour’s depths. The thesis begins in 1927, a year which saw two important episodes of drowning in Sydney Harbour: the death of Slessor’s friend Joe Lynch, subject of his later elegy “Five Bells” (1939), and the Greycliffe ferry disaster, to which Slessor responded in the pages of Sydney magazine Smith’s Weekly. In the wake of these twin tragedies, Slessor created a distinctive poetic vision of Sydney Harbour which fused imagery and atmospherics originating in Sydney’s popular press with a Gothic-modernist aesthetic he adopted at least in part from the work of T.S. Eliot (1888-1965). This thesis proceeds to read Slessor’s Harbour poetry as it developed through the 1930s, before leaving Sydney Harbour to read Slessor’s poetic evocations of Kings Cross and the battlefields of the Second World War, arguing that his Harbour poetic infuses poetry that may at first sight seem unrelated to the Harbour. It concludes with remarks about Slessor’s relationship to what Michael Cathcart has called ‘necronationalism’, exploring some of the ramifications and consequences of Slessor’s poetic project of populating an iconic watery Australian space with dead bodies and ghostly apparitions. The thesis draws on theories of the uncanny and the weird, derived from Freud among others, as well as Maria Tumarkin’s notion of the ‘traumascape’, and recent scholarship in literary studies which emphasises the role and agency of the sea, in order to formulate a new reading of Slessor’s relationship to Sydney Harbour and to literary categories such as modernism, the Gothic, and elegy. By recasting Slessor’s Harbour as a traumatising Gothic space, this thesis gestures toward a new perspective on the work of a seminal figure in Australian literary modernism.
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ItemLarrikins, Listeners and Lifeline: inside Australian comedy chatcast The Little Dum Dum Club( 2022)Australian comedy chatcast The Little Dum Dum Club (2010 – present) is a loosely structured weekly podcast hosted by two stand-up comedians and good mates Tommy Dassalo and Karl Chandler. Each episode usually features one to three guests, often also stand-up comedians, who casually chat with Chandler and Dassalo and joke about their lives and the world around them. In this thesis I establish how hosts, guests and listeners of comedy chatcasts co-create their performance conventions by collaboratively and often unwittingly combining a range of social norms, stand-up comedy techniques and conversational skills. Understanding how these conventions are created and shared shows how comedy chatcasts influence host and listener behaviour in podcast-related spaces and in their broader lives. As I demonstrate, comedy chatcasts have influence even when the intention of the hosts and guests is only to be funny. The comedians in The Little Dum Dum Club are always looking for the joke, and the humour is often insult-based and puerile. These are contemporary larrikin performances, involving taking the piss out of one another, themselves and authority in an egalitarian way, a shared self-deprecation that also encompasses a sense of mateship. Rather than uncritically reiterating these dominant conventions of white Australian masculinity, however, the comedic performances in the podcast both represent and critique them. The performance conventions of comedy chatcasts create a “safe space” in which comedians can humorously explore ideas and respond to changing cultural norms in a way that does not radically reshape them but does suggest opportunities for intervention and evolution. The impact of this is clear, for instance, in the meaningful but humorous discussions of suicidality on the podcast and how joking about lived experience reframes flippant suicide jokes to lessen shame and promote help-seeking behaviour among listeners and comedians. Listeners likewise have a set of conventions which enable them to perform their fandom of the comedy chatcast. Building on podcast scholarship about intimacy and parasocial relationships, I show how listeners attempt to replicate the mateship form of friendship performed on the podcast using its jokingly abusive comedy style. For listeners of The Little Dum Dum Club, successfully performing their listenership requires navigating a series of at times conflicting conventions which are often at odds with broader norms of appropriateness and do not necessarily find a willing audience. Podcasts have niche global audiences and conventions need to be interpreted and performed to receptive audiences in order to be successful. The Little Dum Dum Club is unique in its content, but not in its construction. This thesis shows how comedy chatcasts as new media enable analysis of the shifts in and discussions of our cultural norms that happen in non-radical, flexible and playful ways. Through such analysis, we can see how comedy chatcasts can be influential in minor and major ways for those involved.
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Item“Unbearable Brightness”: a Study of Enchantment in Alice Oswald and Robert Macfarlane( 2021)This thesis explores notions of (re-)enchantment in British “new nature writing”, as represented by writer Robert Macfarlane and poet Alice Oswald. It argues that their work describes a world of lively and potentially dangerous entanglements that disrupt the binary divisions (between subject/object, nature/culture, human/nonhuman) that framed old forms of “enchantment” and modern “disenchantment”. For both writers, re-enchantment registers our entanglement with our damaged world and, by occupying the terrain between enchantment and disenchantment, offers the groundwork for a future politics.
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ItemReading the Vegetarian Vampire( 2020)The vampire of folklore, like its offspring in cinematic and literary productions and popular culture, is an undead creature of the night who drinks, by preference, human blood to survive. Not only is the vampire’s lust for human blood the source of their evil, it also informs the threat they pose: they want to feed on women, men and children. It is surprising therefore to find, in the first decade of the twenty-first century, the emergence in Stephenie Meyer’s Twilight (2005) of the so-called ‘vegetarian’ vampire, who abstains from consuming human blood. The so-called ‘vegetarian’ vampire chooses to slake its thirst with animal or synthetic blood and/or to access human blood in ways that do not harm the human from which it is drawn. With this major revision of the vampire’s long-standing hunger as its primary focus, this thesis traces the rise of the vegetarian vampire in popular culture, while also exploring the changing significance of this creature’s diet, as seen in recent works of vampire television and literature: The Twilight Saga (2005-8), The Vampire Diaries (2009-17) and True Blood (2008-14), and the novels on which the second and third works are based: L.J Smith’s The Vampire Diaries (1991-3) and Charlaine Harris’ The Southern Vampire Mysteries (2001-13). It also considers Anne Rice’s Interview with the Vampire (1976) and Joss Whedon’s television series Buffy the Vampire Slayer (1998-2003). I argue that, since the early years of the twenty-first century, the vegetarian or human-blood abstinent vampire has developed primarily in response to notions of environmental conservation, sustainability and greater ethical responsibility and care for other species—notions that reflects concerns raised by the Anthropocene, the geological age now upon us, which calls for creative ways of reimaging our interactions with nonhuman and inhuman species. In vampire fiction, these notions are most clearly evident in the vampire’s changing diet, which is to say on whom or what and how the vampire feeds. Adopting a theoretical position that is informed in large part by the modern practice, politics and ideologies of vegetarianism, I trace some of the ways in which contemporary vampire fiction explores the relationship between species and, in so doing, echoes the concerns and anxieties promoted by the Anthropocene. This thesis thus provides an original contribution to knowledge in three key areas. First, it provides an in-depth genre study of the history and development of the animal-blood diet in vampire fiction (still critically underacknowledged), which to the best of my knowledge has not previously been attempted in one over-arching study of this length, while also outlining how important the broader role of diet is to the genre. Second, it offers a new critical perspective by reading the vampire’s changing diet through a vegetarian lens. And third, by charting contemporary portrayals of vampiric consumption as a response to the Anthropocene, the thesis elucidates some of the ways that vampires in contemporary literature and television reflect growing concerns regarding how humans should live in our geological age.
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ItemTaiwan in Their Hands: cultural soft power and translocal identity making in the New York Taiwan Academy( 2019)In 2011, Kuomintang (KMT) President Ma Ying-jeou created the Taiwan Academies as a cultural exchange initiative to enhance Taiwan’s soft power and introduce Taiwan’s culture to the world, while also competing against China for space in the realm of competing notions of Chineseness internationally. Three Taiwan Academy resource centres were established that year in New York, Los Angeles, and Houston. This thesis presents a historical case study analysis of the Taiwan Academy resource centre in New York between 2012-2014, in order to examine the context of production of soft power discourse and the empirical consequences within a specific program, among a target audience. To this end, it examines soft power from the perspective of translocality, in order to uncover the often-overlooked socio-cultural, relational, and spatial aspects of cultural strategies aimed at generating soft power. This study responds to two central research questions. First: what kind(s) of cultural messages were being produced and exported to New York by Ma's administration in Taipei? Second: how were these messages translated, interpreted and received in practice, in their implementation at the New York Taiwan Academy? To address these, this research first re-conceptualises a de-Westernised, localised framework for interpreting cultural soft power discourse under Ma’s KMT administration. It then considers Taipei’s strategy of generating cultural soft power through Taiwan Academy from two perspectives: from “above”, in Taipei, and “below”, in New York. From “above”, it evaluates Taiwan Academy as a political strategy, in relation to relevant domestic, cross-Strait, and international contexts. From “below”, this study conducts a grounded analysis of two Taiwan Academy cultural programs and the translocal processes and practices that re-/defined the role of Taiwan Academy in New York. The conclusion integrates these two perspectives in order to address the dynamics and limits of Ma’s use of cultural soft power within the Taiwan Academy. In doing so, this thesis aims to explicate the contingent, relational, and inherently translocal nature of soft power practice.
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ItemSeeking Arrangement: Essays on Work( 2019)This thesis is about work and collectivity under post-Fordism. It examines social and artistic forms that loosely organise reproductive labour outside of formal institutions. Polyamorous relationships are conducted on a spectrum from spontaneous to Google-calendared to commune to cult. A secret men’s club is comprised of working-class unionists who ban politics from discussion at their meetings. The nightclub is celebrated as a utopian melting pot, but exacerbates as much as alleviates workaday alienation. I explore these sites across five essays; in the sixth and final essay, I turn to the form of the essay itself, arguing that contemporary hybrid nonfiction derives from and expresses its precarised conditions of production in syntax and structure. If post-Fordism is most readily associated with the collapse of work into leisure, as well as the destruction of workplace- and class-solidarity, the polyamorous relationship, the nightclub, the men’s club, and the essay not only take this collapse for granted, but grow from it and reproduce it. They exist in an ambivalent zone of resistance and complicity that runs parallel to, and separate from, organised solidarity. In doing so, they usefully refract contemporary debates around leisure, automation, reproductive labour, and aesthetic production. The creative component of this thesis is comprised of the six essays outlined above. The critical section contains an introduction, a literature review, and exegetical statement contextualising my use of the essay form and my research on post-Fordism.
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ItemOtherness and Ambiguity: Coding Difference in British Gothic and Sensation Novels( 2020)This thesis reads British gothic and sensation novels through their historical contexts, examining Matthew Lewis's The Monk (1796), Charlotte Dacre's Zofloya, or The Moor (1806), and Wilkie Collins's The Woman in White (1860) through the themes of cultural and social transgression, examining how transgressive experiences of religion, gender, sexuality, race, and class are registered in these novels through coded rather than explicit modes of representation. My analysis illuminates these novels' indirect engagement with contemporary discourses – about Catholicism, Orientalism, femininity, sodomy, tribadism, and domestic violence – through the utilisation of similar modes of language and theme. With this combination of literary and historical analysis, I examine how these texts reflect change across time and genre. In particular, I focus on gothic uses of excess and violence in The Monk and Zofloya, and how this facilitates the inclusion of other, more coded, transgressions and marginalised cultural Others in the texts. I then apply the same framework to a central text of the sensation genre, The Woman in White. By analysing this novel alongside its gothic forebears, I examine the different approaches taken by these genres and their authors to the same cultural issues, as well as how they are strikingly similar, in order to unpack the changes caused by shifts in setting and plot from the distant and outlandish, to the familiar, domestic, and contemporary. The thesis utilises a non-binarist approach to analysis that allows for contradiction and inconclusiveness, resisting a critical history which relies on false or restrictive methods of classification and opposition. I emphasise the complexities of the novels, particularly within the full context of cultural debates, rather than attempting to define them as radical or conservative on particular social issues. By allowing the texts to stand within their contradictions, the thesis seeks to illuminate how we can gain a greater understanding of both text and history, and how these dynamic and powerful texts resist categorisation.
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ItemCollecting Australian art history: Dr. S.A. Ewing and the Ewing Collection( 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.