School of Culture and Communication - Theses
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ItemAn/aestheticizing carnage: the politics of 'meat' as an image( 2016)This thesis examines the representation and cultural construction of ‘meat’ as an image, exploring histories of sacrificial spectacle (real to virtual) and tracing a shift from meat’s representation as a subject in art, to its presentation as art. Aesthetical, political and psychoanalytic theory is brought to bear on meat-images from Goya to Gaga, in order to explore the anaesthetizing effects of aestheticizing carnage; the hybridization of meat’s sexual and violent connotations; the reduction of bodies to meat as a measure of political power; and the separation of ethical from aesthetical value in meat’s material and symbolic use. Practical work created in conjunction with this thesis but not included as part of the dissertation, is presented in the Prologue in the form of digitally printed collage. This study proposes that a contemporary ‘carno-scopophilia’ (or ‘love of looking at meat’) engenders a growing desensitization toward ‘the pain of others’ (Sontag: 2003) that calls for an ethical re-consideration of aesthetical constructs.
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ItemSymbols and power in Theatre of the Oppressed( 1999-09)Augusto Boal developed Theatre of the Oppressed as a way of using the symbolic language of the dramatic arts in the examination of power relations in both the personal and social contexts. Boal understood that symbolic realities directly influence empirical reality and that drama, as an art form that employs the narrative and the event, serves as a powerful interface between symbols and actuality. In the dramatic process, the creation and the environment from which it emerges are inevitably transformed in the process of enactment. These transformations manifest in the context of power relations - in the context of the receptors ability to make decisions and to engage in actions, and the communicators ability to influence the receptors opinions and behaviour. This thesis will examine two different practices in which symbolic realities have been utilised in the context of human relations of power. Primarily, this thesis examines the theory and practice of Theatre of the Oppressed as it has developed.
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ItemThomas De Quincey and the serpentine line( 2010)This thesis provides the first examination of the roles played by the serpentine line in De Quincey’s work, where it shapes representations of textuality, autobiography, aesthetics, epistemology and hermeneutics, and characterises a digressive sublime that forms both texts and individuals. When De Quincey began writing, Hogarth’s serpentine line was widely disseminated and threaded into the weave of European culture. This is perhaps why De Quincey’s explicit references to Hogarth are sparse and the relationship between the two artists has been neglected by critics. Nonetheless, the serpentine line as image and structure convincingly characterises important strands of De Quincey’s work. It offers him, as it had Hogarth’s Renaissance forebears, a concordia discors. In his hands, the undulating line becomes a flexible image of harmony in discord or discord in harmony, and a visual ground for the dynamic, dialectical antitheses so important to Romanticism. In a further iteration, De Quincey’s serpentine lines model an oscillation that incorporates without collapsing many of the dichotomies of the post-Kantian world. It thus performs on an aesthetic level the very kind of two-in-oneness demanded by post-Kantian and Romantic dilemmas. To establish the serpentine line’s particular relevance to De Quincey, as well as his deviations from his predecessors, I chart the historical trajectories of the serpentine line from the Renaissance figura serpentinata into the nineteenth century, with particular emphasis on Hogarth’s paradigmatic definition and exploration of the line in his Analysis of Beauty (1753). This genealogy reveals the serpentine line’s repertoire of associations and possibilities, the contrary roles it could be cast in and lines it could be made to deliver—radical, conservative, fluid, static, progressive, aimless, translational, nationalist, chaotic and orderly. The central text through which I read De Quincey’s reworkings of this tradition is the late autobiographical work Suspiria de Profundis (1845). Hogarthian principles of variety, intricacy, lively movement and pursuit are evident in Suspiria’s pervasive images of wavy lines; but De Quincey’s serpentine lines are also shaped by his distinctive concerns in literature, theology, science, and philosophy, particularly the philosophy of Kant. De Quincey’s engagement with Kant is elucidated by an examination of ‘On the German Literature and Kant in particular,’ another autobiographical text shaped by serpentine lines—this time primarily structurally, in the undulating course of the digressive textual sublime. Analysis of this essay throws light on the Kantian cast of De Quincey’s epistemology, particularly in Suspiria’s ‘Palimpsest,’ which imagines the mind as a text. Conversely, the last scene in Suspiria illuminates the Kantian cast of De Quincey’s aesthetic hermeneutics. Suffused by serpentine lines, Suspiria’s final pages dally with a German Romantic transformation of the serpentine line into an ironic arabesque, but finally reject this involuted, utopian figure of total chaos or total sense for a progressive English serpentine line, infinitely oscillating between chaos and order, forgetting and remembering, death and resurrection, nonsense and sense, relevance and irrelevance, heteronomy and autonomy, identity and difference.
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ItemMeeting the aesthetic's impossible demands: the authorial idealism of George Gissing and Oscar Wilde( 2009)This thesis examines Oscar Wilde, George Gissing and the challenges of aesthetic authorship in the literary marketplace of the 1890s. Using Pater’s formulation of the aesthetic as a basis for my understanding, I argue that the commodity-driven changes that transformed the literary marketplace at the end of the nineteenth century created insurmountable obstacles for authors working within the aesthetic ideal. I examine the conflict between the demands of the aesthetic and those of the literary market through two specific notions of ‘utility’. In the first instance, following Regenia Gagnier’s The Insatiability of Human Wants, I explore the seemingly opposed notions of economic utility and aesthetic authorship and how they appear to merge, with examples from the fictional prose of Wilde and Gissing. I then explore the public’s use of the aesthetic, which, I argue, is discernible in the celebrity-status of these authors; in particular, I focus on the growing need for authors to perform for their public—a need which signals a shift in the public’s consumption of art away from the literary work and towards the author himself. As both forms of utility are essential aspects of literary production, yet also pose unaesthetic demands on the author, I examine how Wilde and Gissing respond to these challenges through their literary prose. Taking The Picture of Dorian Gray [1891] and New Grub Street [1891] in addition to Gissing’s The Whirlpool [1897] and Born In Exile [1892] and Wilde’s “The Remarkable Rocket” [1888] and “The Soul of Man Under Socialism” [1891], alongside both authors’ letters and contributions to journals and magazines of the day, I reveal how their aesthetic idealism shapes their writing in an oppositional manner. Despite the overt differences between Wilde and Gissing, I also find striking similarities in their positioning as aesthetic authors in the late-Victorian literary field. By doing so, my thesis comprehensively examines how both authors mediate their aesthetic ideals in the literary marketplace of the 1890s.