School of Culture and Communication - Theses
Permanent URI for this collection
Search Results
1 - 2 of 2
-
ItemExtreme males: autistic masculinity in three bestsellers( 2015)Inspired by Simon Baron-Cohen’s theory that autism can be understood as an extreme version of typical male behaviour, this thesis will examine whether this view is reflected in the representation of autistic males in best-selling fiction (“Extreme Male Brain” 248). It will investigate autism representations in the context of hegemonic masculinity, by comparing the behaviour of Christopher Boone from The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, Jacob Hunt from House Rules, and Don Tillman from The Rosie Project to Linda Lindsey’s masculinity norms. These include anti-femininity, emotional reticence, success, intelligence, toughness, aggressiveness and an obsessive heterosexuality (Lindsey 241-7). While Christopher's surprising violence, extreme intelligence, insensitivity and stubbornness are masculine traits, his asexuality disqualifies him from being an extreme male. Jacob’s masculinity is shown in his aggressiveness, intellect and physique, but is undermined by his ambiguous sexuality and patchy career history. Don’s physical appearance, heterosexuality, stoic attitude and intellect are all masculine qualities, unlike his need for social guidance and apparent virginity at the novel’s beginning. All three characters are white and compensate for a lack of emotional awareness with hyper-rationality. Their paradoxical masculinity may account for their novels’ success. This thesis finds that these three fictional autistics are not extreme males by the standards of hegemonic masculinity.
-
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.