School of Culture and Communication - Theses
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ItemFemale desire and agency in selected short stories by Lorrie Moore & Thrill: short stories( 2016)This dissertation employs Simone de Beauvoir’s and Jessica Benjamin’s theories of female subjectivity to perform a gynocritical feminist exploration of women’s desire and agency as depicted in selected short stories by Lorrie Moore. Examining Moore’s short stories ‘You’re Ugly, Too’ (Like Life 67–91), ‘Willing’ (Birds of America 5–25), ‘Two Boys’ (Like Life 3–19) and ‘Amahl and the Night Visitors: A Guide to the Tenor of Love’ (Self-Help 97–116), the thesis aims to discuss the ways in which Moore’s stories call into question both the objectification of women under patriarchy, and the impact that this objectification has on female subjectivity, desire and agency. It is my hypothesis that, key to Moore’s critique of the objectification of women, is the portrayal in her short fiction of straight women whose complex romantic and sexual encounters with men compromise their sense of themselves as subjects capable of desire and agency. My research attempts to show that Moore’s stories comment on the often-compromised desire and agency of women under patriarchy, and can be considered creative solutions to the question of how short fiction might function to broach the complexities of female subjectivity. The creative component of the dissertation, Thrill, comprises seventeen short stories that explore female desire and agency. Thrill responds to Moore’s work, and to the thinking of Beauvoir and Benjamin, by depicting young heterosexual women grappling with issues of desire, agency, and subjectivity. These stories hinge on the idea that female subjectivity is controlled and negated by a patriarchal sexual politics which is at its most potent in the interpersonal sexual arena.
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ItemHow can we lose when we're so sincere?: A study of sincerity in autobiographical comics( 2016)In the last twenty to thirty years there has been an increased emphasis on sincerity, in both critical writing and art practices across a variety of media. This thesis looks at how this emphasis on sincerity can be seen manifesting in autobiographical comics. Critical writing on autobiographical comics has tended to focus on authenticity or irony, and this thesis seeks to find out how sincerity is related to or differs from authenticity and irony in tone and register. It looks at how sincerity in autobiographic truth telling manifests in openness and intimacy, in a kinder, gentler tone (than irony or authenticity) and in providing comfort through both language and gesture; through not only the cartoonist’s words but through the cartoonist’s hand, and handwriting, on the comics page. The creative component of this thesis, Raw Feels, is a practical inquiry into how sincerity is written and drawn into autobiographical comics, and our lives in general. Being sincere can include being ironic and serious at the same time; Raw Feels attempts to inhabit this space and to take conventions of comics (such as the thought balloon) as seriously as possible in order to work through new ways of thinking about thinking and our bodies.
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ItemBeneath the Long White Cloud: settler Chinese women's storytelling in Aotearoa New Zealand( 2016)This thesis analyses settler Chinese women’s storytelling in Aotearoa New Zealand in order to articulate a conception of autonomous subjectivity within the context of hegemonic Colonialist Orientalist narratives. Utilising a bricolage methodology that combines the researcher’s creative writing with critical analyses of spoken and written stories, including interviews with authors, it focuses on Chinese women’s lived experiences and the narrative strategies they deploy. The prolonged absence of the feminine voice is barely acknowledged in extant studies of the settler Chinese community in New Zealand. Chinese women’s stories did not emerge in the public domain until the 1990s. While increased recognition of this writing appears to point to the country’s progress, Colonialist Orientalist narratives have continued to characterise Chinese women as either exotic and Oriental or assimilated and invisible, subordinating them in accord with a an enduring prototype: ‘Chinese woman’. I contend that the insidiousness of this prototype is reflected in its integration into settler Chinese women’s subjectivities, and in the stories they tell: both ‘inside’ the Chinese community, and ‘outside’ in the Pākehā mainstream. As such, it appears that there exists no space within which these women can express an autonomous subjectivity and thereby assert a ‘separate’ identity. This thesis is concerned with identifying such a space. Framed by key premises drawn from Judith Butler’s critical analysis of subjection, and with reference to Rey Chow’s analysis of Chinese woman’s subjectivity, Linda Alcoff’s positional feminism, Erving Goffman’s dramaturgical schema and Mary Ann Doane’s theory of femininity as ‘masquerade’, this research analyses the stories that settler Chinese women have told in diverse contexts including personal interviews and in their published writing. In these analyses, in which I conceive of storytelling as performance, I identify a range of narrative strategies through which autonomous subjectivities may be articulated and validated, and which have the potential to ground claims for previously unrecognised subject positions. The more explicitly imaginative creative writing in this thesis is also interrogative, and as such, has more than adjunctive value to the (more overtly) critical discussion. Chapter Five demonstrates a range of counterhegemonic narrative strategies in its juxtaposition of multiple genres including fictionalised autobiography, poetry, images and excerpts from mainstream New Zealand newspapers. Creative writing is also utilised to articulate an intimate conversation among Chinese women in Chapter Two, and in the autoethnographic narrative threads integrated into the critical discussion in most of the other chapters. The incorporation of this creative writing into the body of the thesis is intended to demonstrate that the language of traditional academic discourse alone is inadequate for the task of illuminating settler Chinese women’s subjectivity. It also reveals how the autonomy and agency of this Chinese woman writer – in the capacity of researcher – may be grounded in the transformation of the very language that has produced her as ‘Chinese woman’.
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Item'Fleischgeist': subversive tropes of the flesh of 'Woman' and 'Animal' in selected novels by Angela Carter, Marie Darrieussecq and Deborah Levy( 2016)This dissertation offers an ecofeminist exploration of subversive tropes of the flesh in selected novels by Angela Carter, Marie Darrieussecq and Deborah Levy. The aim of this investigation is to discover how patriarchal and carnivorous ideologies can be disrupted through novelistic narrative, which incorporates particular tropes of ‘Woman’ and ‘Animal’. My hypothesis is that subversive tropes of the flesh portrayed in selected novels by Carter, Darrieussecq and Levy trouble the deadly authority of Western culture’s carnophallogocentric logic. That is, the logic underpinning material-semiotic practices that reduce women and nonhuman animals to objects of consumption. My research shows that subversive tropes of the flesh inform a specific narrative strategy found in all three novels examined: a subversive, double-voiced mimicry. It is my contention that Carter, Darrieussecq and Levy apply this form of parodic mimicry to trouble old narratives in new political ways. This study uses theoretical frameworks developed by Luce Irigaray, Mikhaïl Bakhtin, Julia Kristeva, Mary Russo, Susan Rubin Suleiman, Jacques Derrida, Linda Hutcheon and Matthew Calarco to explore how Carter, Darrieussecq and Levy portray sexist and speciest violence while foregrounding an ethical feminist allegiance to an embodied, relational and contingent aesthetic. Moreover, I consider the way this aesthetic collapses species boundaries by depicting meat as a substance of exposed embodiment and suffering shared by humans and other animals. I conclude this study by suggesting that the narrative experimentations developed by Carter, Darrieussecq and Levy jam the discursive functioning of the carnophallogocentric machine and offer new narrative models for writing beyond the ‘Fleischgeist’. Sleeper, a novella, engages the subversive tropes and narrative techniques examined in my literary-cultural analysis. Sleeper uses the language of carnophallogocentric oppression to stir up practices and politics of gender inequality in an Australian suburban setting. The narrator, Anna, plunges into a world where reality, dreams and hallucinations intermingle to form a landscape of actual and imagined human-animal death. Anna’s fictionalised world takes aim at the so-called authority of carnophallogocentrism.
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ItemWe have voices, too: literacy, alternative modernities, and Indonesian domestic workers in Hong Kong( 2015)Migrant domestic workers are arguably one of the most exploited and subordinated groups of women in the international division of labour under global capitalism. However, they are active in negotiating the prevailing power structures in the transnational labour market. My thesis examines the significance of literacy practices to the cultural and subjective experience of Indonesian Domestic Workers (IDWs) in Hong Kong. Using three sites of culture as case studies—the Forum Lingkar Pena Hong Kong (Pen Circle Forum, FLP-HK) writing community, IDWs’ blogging community, and the practice of suitcase libraries—I argue that IDWs actively exercise agency by engaging in literacy practices, which embody various forms of self-modernisation. Through extensive ethnography and textual analysis of IDWs’ writings, the study reveals that IDWs in the FLP-HK writing community define their own meaning of Islamic modernity by writing to maintain and develop self-reflexive and spiritual interiority. Meanwhile, IDW bloggers are engaged in digital literacy practices that consciously challenge the stereotypes of stupid and uneducated maids and create new images of smart and technologically literate women. Furthermore, their engagement in ICTs—a key element of modernity—for social and political activism enables their elaboration of and participation in an alternative public sphere. Finally, IDWs’ suitcase library practices aimed at fostering reading practices carry the literacy mission as another element of modernity. More importantly, suitcase libraries serve as literacy hubs in which the various forms of IDWs’ literacy practices converge, and thus facilitate IDWs’ participation in an alternative public sphere, in which IDWs create forums of literacy-related public discussions. The above three sites of culture and the elements of modernity they negotiate are the manifestations of IDWs’ definitions of their own meanings of modernity.
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ItemThe politics of empowerment: young adult literature, heterotopia and the possibility of social change( 2015)Critical component Young Adult (YA) literature features adolescent protagonists challenging dominant power structures in order to experience transformation and development – the postmodern entwicklungsroman. This thesis will deploy Foucault’s theory of heterotopia to locate spaces that are empowering not only for the adolescents within a fictional text, but also for teen readers. An analysis of Janet Tashjian’s Vote for Larry, David Levithan’s Wide Awake and Cory Doctorow’s Little Brother reveals a seemingly unavoidable ideological didacticism that closes down possibilities for seeing the world differently. Although Meg Cabot’s chick-lit series The Princess Diaries and All American Girl are more successful in achieving a politically transgressive approach, they also ultimately succumb to ideological dogma, failing to open up a dialectical space between author and reader. Although similarly didactic, JK Rowling’s Harry Potter novels contain an incompatible jumble of ideology that prevents the reader from being forced into a closed utopian locus. This contradictory space allows readers to narrate their own ideologies through fan fiction, within the fictional world but outside of the original text. In the case of the Harry Potter Alliance, the fan-space opens up into an alternative pathway to activism – creating transformative and empowering possibilities for young readers. This marriage of fiction, fandom and activism is further explored in an analysis of John Green’s Paper Towns, and the Nerdfighters community. Unlike Rowling, Green is an active participant in this online community, consciously destabilising the author/reader binary and encouraging a cultural hybridity that opens up new possibilities for social organising and activism. The YA heterotopia creates not only new pathways to resistance, transformation and social change, but also offers radical new possibilities for fiction in the space revealed between author, text and reader. Creative component Green Valentine is a YA novel that blends romance, humour, environmentalism, community and social change. The emotional development of protagonist Astrid reflects the procession of arguments in the critical work. Astrid is passionate about politics and environmentalism, but is trapped by her own didactic ideology. After experiencing the transformational power of heterotopian space – a guerilla garden – she learns to see her drab suburb of Valentine differently, empowering her to resist the cultural hegemony of her world and become a catalyst for social change. It is in the alternative space of the garden that Astrid begins to see the world differently – her growth and transformation mirroring the organic metamorphosis of ugly, concrete Valentine into an oasis of subversive greenery. Astrid’s Victory Garden enables her to imagine new ways of thinking and being, beyond the fixed dystopia of present-Valentine, or the stark utopian vision of Mayor Tanaka’s future-Valentine. Astrid gains an understanding of the multitude – realising the futility of trying to impose her own ideological dogma upon others, and instead embracing the rhizomatic power of individual subjectivities united in alternative spaces. By allowing the unpredictability of the wilderness into the static rigidity of Valentine, a heterotopian space opens up that transforms not only Astrid, but the entire Valentine community, empowering them to resist, subvert and bring about social change.
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ItemWriting for singing: conceptualising lyric address in contemporary songwriting( 2015)This project investigates conceptual approaches to writing popular song lyrics. Through examination of a selection of popular song lyrics from Bette Davis Eyes (Carnes 1981) to Snowflake (Bush 2011), I explore two main textual dimensions: the lyric voice and its act of address; and types of writing such as argumentative discourse, descriptive discourse, and narrative discourse, that are used to structure song lyrics. In doing so, this thesis identifies key tensions in the construction of song lyrics between song as a literal address with fictional features and song as a performance text that is designed to facilitate affective listening experiences for its audience. The creative component of this thesis is a folio of song recordings with lyrics that explore the lyric address, including narrative discourse, argument-driven structures, and unfolding lyric description. These texts attempt to negotiate the writing of a fictive address and creating lyrics that facilitate evocative experiences for listeners.
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ItemWomen writing traumatic times( 2014)This thesis is a critical and creative investigation into the literary representation of post-traumatic emergence and proceeds from an examination of recent developments in trauma theory in the context of feminist literary criticism and Australian fiction. The critical enquiry uses a psychoanalytic feminist framework to focus on four novels: Barbara Baynton’s, Human Toll (1907), Sue Woolfe’s, Painted Woman (1990), Morgan Yasbincek’s, liv (2000), and Alexis Wright’s, Carpentaria (2006). I examine the particular generic, narrative and conceptual strategies each writer uses in their work to describe and inscribe creative emergence from the effects of historical, intergenerational and cultural trauma, and the subsequent impact on modalities of subjectivity. Principal themes that are evident from this research are the deployment of generic merging to subvert expectations of power relations and engender the development of new paradigmatic writing forms, and the presence/lack of agency from within the traumatic space. In the varying employment of écriture féminine in these novels, which are examples of Bildungsroman, Künstlerinroman, and parodic epic, respectively, the writers generate radical language through which to testify to trauma and suggest that from abjective experience, empowerment and transformation are not only possible, but also essential. These writers attempt to reframe embodied experience through experimentation with assumptions around signifying practices, as they interrogate their position for its relation to power and feminine subjectivity. The creative project that accompanies this literary-critical dissertation is a novella entitled The Saltbush Thing, which performs many of the literary practices visited in the dissertation in a related thematic narrative exploration. The story centres on the changing relationship between three generations of women of a dysfunctional Australian family, who each enact a creative emergence from trauma that has multiple layers and causes.
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Item(Re)tracing the line: familial representations in contemporary multicultural texts and immigrant fiction( 2014)This thesis is a genealogical exploration into a second-generation immigrant writer’s identity through critical and creative writing. It (re)traces the author’s own familial immigrant experience via select contemporary literature and multicultural works, analysing key theoretical ideas and critical scholarly texts by intellectuals, including Roland Barthes, Marianne Hirsch, Madelaine Hron and Gaston Bachelard. The thesis also explores and produces creative works on the themes of death and memory, place and trauma, journey and home. Chapter One, discusses death photography as the site of trauma and the “wound” (Barthes, Camera Lucida 26), and the resulting narratives produced as a response to the “punctum” (27) through the analysis of specific photographic works and texts by Chinese-Australian artist William Yang, French theorist Roland Barthes, and Australian photography curator, historian and writer, Helen Ennis. The chapter also introduces the writer’s own idea of “the personal punctum” building on the Barthesian notion of the power existing within death photographs and the “triggering” of memories through “photo elicitation” (Harper 2002) for their potential in the creation of fictional narrative. Chapter Two, through textual analysis of two contemporary Asian-Australian writers, Alice Pung’s memoir Her Father’s Daughter (2011) and Nam Le’s fictional short story “Love and Honour and Pity and Pride and Compassion and Sacrifice” (2009), trauma and second-generation immigrant writing about place, explicitly the landscape and familial homeland as “traumascape” (Tumarkin 12), are examined . The section focusses on the inter-generational effects of trauma and “postmemories of place” (own term), and the conflict arising with the appropriation of survivors’ testimonies. Chapter Three, investigates the trauma and pain as a result of the “journey” (Hron 15) in the immigrant narrative genre. It explores the ideas of “topography” and “topoanalysis” with the mapping of the first-generation immigrant’s journey back to the homeland. The emigrant’s/immigrant’s journey and the realities of the old homeland and the new imagined home are discussed through Shaun Tan’s graphic novel The Arrival (2006), and Péter Forgács’ documentary Hunky Blues (2009), about the Hungarian mass migration to America. Framing the dissertation are selected creative works. The non-fiction interleaves are bridging devices, linking critical theory with creative practice, enabling meditation on the aforementioned critical themes provoked by my father’s death. The fiction includes chapters from Our Fathers, a contemporary-historical novel of a boy escaping post revolution Hungary, and his death in Brisbane fifty years on. The fiction ties both past and present through themes of family history, trauma, inter-generational transfer of memories and postmemories, place, and the idea of home.
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ItemRe-landscaping the historical novel : imagining the colonial archives as postcolonial heteroglossic fiction( 2009)This thesis comprises a critical dissertation (Part A) and an extract from my novel, Eugene's Falls (Part B). Eugene's Falls was published by Arcadia (Australian Scholarly Press) in 2007. Eugene's Falls is a Bildungsroman retracing the Australian journeys of colonial landscapist Eugene von Guerard. It deploys narrative techniques of historiographic metafiction, polyphony and parody to deconstruct the heroic colonial quest tale. The critical dissertation situates the novel against recent theories of intercultural subjectivity, postcolonialism, and the advent of the so-called `history wars'. This thesis argues that Bakhtin's theories of novelistic polyphony, theories of focalisation building on Gerard Genette's work, and postmodern narrative techniques have a renewed importance for postcolonial historical novels created in a context of the `history' and `culture wars'. These frameworks and techniques not only enable the writer to render ethical portrayals of Indigenous-speaking subjects; most importantly, they enable postcolonial novelists to expose the archive imaginatively. At the heart of the (Australian) section of the novel is the issue of imaginatively interrogating all forms of archival evidence—rethinking `what counts, what doesn't, where it is housed, who possesses it, and who lays claim to it as a political resource' (Burton 139). As Antoinette Burton suggests, `this is not theory, but the very power of historical explanation itself (139).