School of Culture and Communication - Theses
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ItemThe Age of Icons: Digitising the Self in Profile Images( 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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ItemSpectres of Modernism: authorship, reception and intention in Witter Bynner and Arthur Davison Ficke’s spectra hoax( 2017)This thesis draws from a range of primary materials relating to the Spectric School, a hoax poetry movement concocted in 1916 by poets Witter Bynner and Arthur Davison Ficke, to reconcile the movement’s relationship to the backdrop of modernist print culture. Specifically, it argues that Bynner and Ficke exploited a breakdown of discourses surrounding modernist conceptions of authorship, identity, and intention in their construction of the hoax movement. Additionally, this thesis considers the hoax alongside contemporary appraisals of the movement, and argues that the hoaxers’ subversion of what it meant to be an author exposes a growing disjunction during the modernist period between a culture of reviewing and modernist conceptions of authorship. Finally, this thesis considers Bynner and Ficke’s use of a hoax movement as a medium to further their poetic aims and avers that the hoaxers’ retrospective recasting of their motives alongside the development of the hoax complicate current critical valuations of the movement. Through considering Bynner and Ficke’s recasting of poetic intention, I challenge readings of the hoax that interpret it as having had a clear didactic purpose in parodying modernist poetry, and instead argue that the Spectra Hoax serves as an interface of meanings that complicates attempts to inscribe clear notions of authenticity, authorship and intentionality onto it.
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ItemAustralian media representations of sea-level rise in the Pacific: an assessment of coverage around COP21( 2016)This study examines Australian mainstream media coverage of those in the Pacific most at risk of suffering due to climate change-related issues. It develops a multidimensional framework to assess the performance of news texts published by four key online outlets around the time of the UN Climate Change Conference in Paris. The study finds, through measuring performance against journalistic ideals, that there are many areas where the potential to improve coverage exists. This includes: better representation of Pacific Islanders, conveying the global and regional significance of the issue, the use of visioned cosmopolitan discourse, mentioning the potential for adaptation, critiquing climate policy and engaging in debate, including a vast range of diverse voices, and using environmental narrative to inspire action.
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ItemThe other side of realism: David Foster Wallace & the hysteric's discourse( 2014-05-08)“Hysterical Realism” was coined by James Wood in 2000 to pejoratively name the intermillennial “inhuman” maximalist turn in American and British fiction. I recuperate the term as a critical category, redefining it at the intersection of Lacanian psychoanalysis and Lukácsian realism. David Foster Wallace’s fiction is a thoroughgoing aesthetic deployment of the hysteric’s discourse: it inhabits and intervenes in discourses presumed to be legitimate, staging an immanent critique of the mechanisms of the emerging Deleuzian “society of control”. Wallace’s hysterical realism is the “other side” of realism; neither “narration” nor “description”, it is both a polyphonic, mimetic torrent of language that must be read with careful discrimination, and the internal, “symptomatic” undermining of the Lacanian master’s and university discourses. It is a realism capable of legitimately resisting the 21st century intensification of capitalism’s capture of the symbolic order.
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ItemMirror as symbol in the art of Gordon Bennett( 2015)The purpose of this dissertation is to locate and explore the use of the symbol of the mirror in the work of Gordon Bennett, and to define the period of its most prevalent use. Outcomes of this thesis include greater understanding of postcolonial critique in Bennett’s work and an addition to much needed scholarship on his 1993 work Mirror Line, made while he was Artist in Residence at the University of Melbourne. I seek to identify three forms that the mirror takes in Bennett’s work: the represented mirror, the mirror as inversion, and the physical mirror. I analyse the ways in which each form manifests meaning within art historical, psychoanalytic and postcolonial frameworks. I find that the mirror has multiple meanings and interchangeably may represent truth, narcissism and the colonial self/other binary and that ultimately the mirror is a key symbol in Bennett’s postcolonial critique of Australian historical narrative in the years 1987-1996.