School of Culture and Communication - Theses
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ItemBeing in Place: Reimagining Relationships with History, Place and People( 2021)This creative writing project explores questions of belonging and place in settler-colonial Australia, through an historical and writerly lens. It first explores the interrelationship between writing and colonisation, and the construction of settler identity in relation to the control of landscapes, narratives and representations of Aboriginal people. Through an interweaving of critical and autocritical writing, I draw upon personal experiences-in-place from a settler Australian perspective and use Deborah Bird Rose’s philosophy of ‘writing place’ in an attempt to methodologically unsettle colonising narratives and discourses. The thesis documents an emergent, experiential and immersive writing process, which is focused around the following questions: If the act of writing has been crucial to the construction of settler identity, and Aboriginal misrepresentation, can writing—and more specifically the practice of ‘writing place’— respond to place and our presence here through invasion, rather than our anxiety over the absence of belonging? How might we write as settlers in ways that do not distance us further from our identities as colonisers, from our history and from our potential to take responsibility for our legacies of colonisation? These are questions that drive the work, rather than questions that are answered by the work. Part One traces the development of this thesis through an unsettling of questions of settler belonging to a focus on writing place. It locates the thesis in two places: an Aboriginal community in northern Australia and Melbourne in southern Australia. Part Two is a series of meditations on place that document my explorations of ways to read and write place. I draw on both published texts, place as text, and texts encountered in place, in an effort to consider place as an important academic and literary source. Throughout the thesis, I keep a sense of irresolution to the fore, in an effort towards unsettling, rather than settling (or re-settling) the meaning of experience. Through writing place, I look to place as a text that can reveal our own colonising identities to us, to encourage us to move away from an attempt to ‘indigenise’ to belong but instead to come into relationship with ourselves and to understand how colonisation informs our relationships with place, history and Aboriginal people.
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ItemContesting womanhood: the American New Woman in literary and popular culture, 1890-1930( 2015)Who was the American New Woman and why was she important to female literary writers from the period 1890 to 1930? My thesis explores this question by focusing specifically on the relationship between literary writings and the popular culture portrayals of the New Woman appearing in American magazines, many of which were in the form of advertisements and visual illustrations. I critically examine selected works of five American female writers who engaged with this figure in notably different ways, exploring among other things the socio-historical contexts of their literary works in order to understand why the ideology of the New Woman was so appealing and so pervasive, why it spawned so many different responses from female writers and why it changed so dramatically over time. Beginning with major works by Kate Chopin and Charlotte Perkins Gilman, followed by Jessie Fauset and Edith Wharton and finishing with Nella Larsen, the thesis argues that in America the changing nature of the New Woman in popular culture helped lay the framework for female literary writers to imagine and create new forms of American womanhood. It further contends that although she was often stereotyped in popular culture, the New Woman’s identity proved to be more flexible in literary works and that this complexity extended to both “white” and “black” writers. An additional contention is that unlike white women writers, African-American women writers were obliged to suppress their sexuality since to do otherwise was to reinforce the stereotype of animality that had been projected upon them since the era of slavery.
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ItemPresent past, past present: history, memory and identity in six contemporary historiographic novels( 2010)This thesis examines a selection of novels, published from 1990 onward, which engage with past-present relationships, considering the roles history and memory play in connecting us to the past. Examining a range of texts including Amin Maalouf’s Ports of Call (1999), A. S. Byatt’s Possession (1990), Margaret Scott’s Family Album (2000), Joy Kogawa’s Obasan (1994), Sebastian Faulks’ Birdsong (1994) and Bernhard Schlink’s The Reader (1997), I argue that each of my chosen novelists recognizes the socio-political manipulation behind historical narratives and that they affirm the importance of the past to characters in the present, who seek an understanding of their identities in relation to their heritage. Taking issue with Kerwin Lee Klein and Pierre Nora’s idea that history and memory are utterly antithetical and mutually exclusive, I argue that my selected novelists present both history and memory as subjective narratives. In the texts, the conflicts between historical accounts and memories reveal the inevitable discords between socio-political analyses and personal perception. Employing Hayden White’s argument of subjective history and key memory theories by Sigmund Freud, Dori Laub, Annette Kuhn, Louisa Passerini and E. Ann Kaplan to examine the contradictions between history and memory in each novel, I contend that the novelists regard the conflict as a form of positive disagreement. Each novel features characters who are stimulated to delve into the past to trace secrets and to solve mysteries, at the same time entering into a broader critique of the recording of ‘official’ histories. Importantly, while my chosen writers reveal doubts about the reliability of history, they do not attempt to supplant it with memory. Instead, they move towards a process of reconciliation, whereby history and memory complement and inform one another. In this thesis, I contend that by representing a sequence of quests to uncover the past, the novelists do not seek to assert historical certainty. What they foreground in the novels is the importance of building an emotional connection between the past and the present. Bringing readers to participate in their characters’ very private experiences—their struggles, their quests for the past and their reconfiguration of social and personal identities, these writers emphasize and celebrate the gap between history and memory. Each of my chosen novelists explores how history and memory teach us empathy with those who have come before, animating history and heritage so that far from being consigned to the past, they can inform the present.