School of Culture and Communication - Theses
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ItemThe environment in English versions of the Grimms' and Hans Christian Andersen's fairy tale literature, 1823–1899( 2016)This dissertation explores the intersections between literature and environmental history in nineteenth-century English versions of Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm and Hans Christian Andersen’s fairy tale literature. While the success of the Grimms’ and Andersen’s fairy tale literature in England can be attributed to the inclusion of Christian principles, the privileging of individualism, the omission of licentious content and the focalisation of child protagonists, this dissertation argues that the tales were also valued for presenting an environmental ethos. English versions of the Grimms’ and Andersen’s fairy tales relayed anthropocentric ideas about nature which competed with a developing sense of environmentalism during a period of rapid environmental change. While these tales idealised the tremendous possibilities offered by the environment, nature is not prioritised above human interest; rather, these versions effectively highlight humanity’s destructive disposition by disempowering female and animal characters. By focusing on depictions of nature during a century of environmental devastation, this thesis contributes to our understanding of humanity’s relationship with the natural world as relayed in literary texts.
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ItemMaurice Blanchot: three terrors( 2018)This thesis studies the political and critical writings of Maurice Blanchot from 1933 to 1949, a period in which he underwent a number of fundamental intellectual changes that were most famously but not only political. Its overarching trope is that of the terror, which appears in three very different guises, in 1936, 1941, and 1947, playing a central role in Blanchot’s engagement each time. The terror is one of the major metaphorical complexes of twentieth century French letters. It is essentially a nested series of discourses (and medical and juridical metaphors) about how discourse connects to reality or only to itself, which makes it essentially reflexive, as well as immediately political, literary and philosophical. In it the twin heritages of revolution and Romanticism are repeatedly struggled over and re-worked into their modern forms. My thesis elaborates Blanchot’s reckonings with this complex as a means to demonstrating the precise nature of his various changes. The goal is not to explain his political ‘turn’ but to specify the categorical modifications to his thinking that it presupposes. I trace the increasing sophistication of Blanchot’s political and literary thinking, arguing that initially Blanchot’s national revolutionary politics are formally anti-Semitic in that the prerequisite for national restoration is the violent expurgation of what is foreign. It is only with his encounter with thinkers like Jean Paulhan and Brice Parain in the 1940s that he develops an account of how terror and rhetoric, or destruction and articulation, mediate but do not limit one another, and begins to conceive of literature as the sovereign creation-destruction of realities via their interaction. It is his encounter with Hegel that enables him to re-link this conception to history by arguing that it directly corresponds to revolution, a view founded on Hegel’s basic homology between language and history. I argue that Blanchot’s identification of himself with revolution, as well as his negative reading of Hegel (his refusal of ‘achieved’ sense and development generally), sets a kind of absolute positioning named ‘ambiguity’ from which Blanchot will endeavour to think henceforth: it leads directly to his tendency to proceed by the unfolding of paradoxes and to the inescapably plural meaning of his 1950s (anti-)categories such as the neuter. It also precludes the possibility of a fixed division between literature and the political, which I argue is sufficient grounds for ruling out modelling his turn on a transition from one to the other. Such a reading, which is more explicitly materialist than most of those proposed to date, provides a different basis from which to approach Blanchot’s celebrated 1950s critical writings: namely, that they are suffused with the absolute experience of the identity with literature and revolution that Blanchot ‘becomes’ in the late 1940s. It also implies that Blanchot was preoccupied with thinking the link between literature and history throughout his career, and that even the rarefied nature of some of his writings is due to this very issue and his responses to it, rather than to his indifference to such a link.
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ItemThree books: voice, literature, and mind( 2019)THREE BOOKS: Voice, Literature, and Mind (2013–2018) The Absent Therapist / The Inevitable Gift Shop / Murmur The Absent Therapist is a kaleidophone of voices – internal monologues, meditations, expostulations – that stir, argue, wander and pronounce. They may be thought of as sketches of the mind in flight – a vocal fugue that both suggests longer stories (how much more remains to be said) and bears glancing witness to the irretrievable or unknowable (how much has been lost). A companion “memoir by other means”, The Inevitable Gift Shop examines provisionality, detachment and obliquity in literary criticism and the composition of the self. It draws on philosophical and artistic models of brevity (on Auden’s notational essays and Shakespeare’s sonnets, for example) to renew an engagement with sensibility – the “faculty for feeling” – and with problems of voice, mind, belief and consistency as they arise in writing. A third, closely-related section, Murmur, is a discursive novel. It draws on aspects of the later life and work of the logician and computer science pioneer Alan Turing, sentenced to a regime of organotherapy (chemical castration) in 1952 for Gross Indecency with another man. Turing told his Jungian analyst that he’d been dreaming vividly throughout the organotherapy, and the novel presents these dreams as versified hallucinations, framed by letters to the woman (Joan Clarke) he nearly married during the Second World War. Turing and his avatars appears as Alec Pryor. His fiancée becomes June Wilson. In correspondence, Pryor and June use their experience as cryptanalysts to investigate the possibilities of AI: the stumbling blocks are point-of-view, consciousness, and the reality of pain. Murmur constitutes an extension of philosophical material explored in The Inevitable Gift Shop.
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ItemFauna Fiction: 'Interspecies Communication in Contemporary Literature' and 'The Animals in That Country'( 2017)Instances of interspecies communication and miscommunication occur in almost every interaction humans have with other animals. Nonetheless, discussions of nonhuman animals as communicative subjects are often relegated to interspecies language experiments and children’s fiction. This thesis makes an original contribution by exploring representations of interspecies communication in contemporary adult fiction, which I call ‘fauna fiction’. In the critical component I analyse in some detail what is occurring in novelistic accounts of human-nonhuman animal encounters. I focus on six contemporary fauna fictions: The Conversations of Cow (1985) by Suniti Namjoshi, The Evolution of Bruno Littlemore (2011) by Benjamin Hale, Wish (1995) by Peter Goldsworthy, A Beautiful Truth (2013) by Colin McAdam, Bear (1976) by Marian Engel and Dog Boy (2009) by Eva Hornung. In these texts, the meeting point of attempted contact between species is framed theoretically by three key concepts: the ‘speaking meat’ (as conceptualised by ecofeminist philosopher Val Plumwood), the ‘species boundary’, and ‘language primacy’. I argue that what I call ‘agency-centred models’ of literary animal studies – in which nonhuman animals are considered as responding beings – provide a relevant theoretical base from which to study interspecies communication in fauna fiction. In order to draw out these ideas, I ask: how we might read these novels as disruptive speculations upon a perceived species divide between human and nonhuman animals? I argue that fauna fiction contains subversive sexual and violent subtexts of nonhuman animal resistance. Through this lens, the nonhuman animal protagonist is no longer an allegory or stand-in for human meaning in fiction, but a destabilising, transgressive and resistant figure. The creative component consists of a novel extract, The Animals in That Country. The novel is an apocalyptic literary fiction that provides new insights by exploring communicative human-nonhuman animal relationships. The story follows Jean, a fifty-one-year-old Australian zoo guide, into a world where humans can understand other animals. Through shared communication the human characters in this novel are able to put words to their complex relationships with other animals. They are also confronted with their own animality, a reality for which the language barrier usually provides a convenient shield. Conversations between species forge new connections. The novel also engages with issues of intersubjectivity, power and violence, resulting in dystopian outcomes. As the narrative develops, a dingo character called Sue becomes increasingly important to Jean, and eventually takes charge of Jean’s life. Through this process, dingo speech is prioritised. In The Animals in That Country, the overwhelming responsibility that comes with sudden shared communication with other creatures is sometimes offset by the thrill of insight into previously incomprehensible minds.
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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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Item‘Something we can only desire’: writing the past in recent Australian literature & an extract from the novel 'To name those lost'( 2014)In the last decade, the novel in Australia has come under increasing scrutiny from historians, academics, and the wider public as novelists offer a vision of our past that often sits uneasily beside more formal historiographic investigations. There is a general expectation that fiction should be truthful with the past. Fiction, however, often undermines the empiricist view of referentiality that history promotes, instead exploiting the paradoxical break from the referent that the imagined topography of fiction allows. This leads to what Ellison has called ‘referential anxiety’, or an uncomfortable awarness of the loss of reciprocity with the world. Given this range of responses and the paradox of which they are indicative, to claim that the novel is a form of historiography misunderstands the nature of truth in fiction. This dissertation focuses on three Australian novels that exemplify the problematics of reference, Kim Scott’s That Deadman Dance, Richard Flanagan’s Gould’s Book of Fish, and J.M. Coetzee’s Diary of a Bad Year. The dissertation is paired with an extract from the novel To Name Those Lost, the story of an itinerant labourer and Black War veteran named Thomas Toosey. His journey takes him along the Launceston-Deloraine railway line during the early years of its operation as he searches for his son, William. Arriving in Launceston, Toosey finds the town in chaos. Riots break out in protest at a tax levied on citizens to pay for the rescue of shareholders in the bankrupt Launceston and Western Railway Company. Toosey is desperate to find his son who is somewhere in town amid the looting and general destruction, but at every turn he is confronted by the Irish transportee Fitheal Flynn and his companion, the hooded man, to whom Toosey owes a debt that he must repay.
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ItemFrom Baudelaire to Sebald via the Australian diaspora: migrancy, exile and reflective literary memories( 2012)While many studies in memory scholarship engage with memory as a discrete entity, this thesis engages with the field of memory’s literary representation. The thesis highlights literature’s active reflection upon memory, as well as its echo of the concerns with memory experienced more broadly in the late-twentieth century. Positioning itself at the intersection of twentieth-century literature and memory studies, this thesis argues that literary texts have made nuanced contributions to understandings of memory’s myriad roles and recent rise, in ways that are commonly unrecognised in memory studies scholarship. Informed by theories of temporality and place as well as by those of memory, the thesis embarks on an engaged, associative reading of different texts from three contexts of twentieth-century experience — the post-Second World War, the post- colonial and the post-migration. This reading reveals literature’s engagement with memory’s presence as well as its absence and, crucially, literature’s conjoining and complication of these qualities of memory. Looking to philosophies of memory and temporality in my first chapter, I examine the work of Maurice Merleau-Ponty as well as the work of Walter Benjamin, analysing how poetic form interrelates with representations of memory and time. This discussion provides a grounding and point of comparison for my second chapter, which engages with the work of Walter Benjamin from a somewhat different perspective, examining his semi-autobiographical prose on memory and modern place. By demonstrating the work of Benjamin’s writing in relocating the memory of place to a literary space, my discussion reveals memory’s interrelationship to prose as well as to poetry. These two chapters, entailing engagement with theories of temporality as well as with memory, reveal memory’s dynamic relationship with modern place and time, and with the temporal processes of writing itself—interrelations which bring to the fore memory’s complexities and absences. This discussion is the foundation for my study of memory in the late-twentieth century, where I engage with the presence as well as the promise of memory in writing, in the context of memory’s current fascination and recent rise. Moving to the work of W.G. Sebald, I argue that After Nature, his lesser-studied poem, realises the promise of memory in the post-war present, whilst also articulating the difficulties and losses of memory. This tension and duality, present to a lesser extent in Sebald’s prose, is productive of questioning insight into memory as well as writing. Moving to a further consideration of memory’s challenges and potentialities, I examine memory in the work of the post-colonial writer, J.M. Coetzee. Looking beyond the more thoroughly explored theme of history, this chapter examines memory in Coetzee’s memoirs and fiction, discussing the voice and presentation of childhood in Boyhood, and the fraught representation of the memories of others in the novel Foe. Examining memory in one further, literary context of the twentieth century, I explore the poetry and prose of the migrant Australian writer, Antigone Kefala, demonstrating how a reflective representation of post-migration memory entails a questioning of any one place as a point of home, and an ongoing experience of memory in the diaspora. In a final reflection on memory’s recent representations, I turn to a discussion of memory in contemporary art film. Noting the migration of memory themes and concerns across disciplines, I then consider how the structures of memory in film reorient and enrich approaches to memory in literature. Recent films, like recent writing, ask for a reflective engagement with memory that is conscious of representation as a means of record and of remembering, as well as a means of reorienting conceptions of memory, so that memory’s losses and absences as well as its presences are encountered.
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ItemBeyond the femme fatale: the mythical Pandora as cathartic, transformational force in selected Lulu, Lola and Pandora texts( 2009)The Pandora myth lies at the very heart of our cultural self-definition. The phrase 'Pandora's box' is commonly used to denote any form of multiple/uncontrolled disaster, continually reinscribing, at least at the unconscious level, the idea of femininity—and of female sexuality in particular—as alluring and desirable, but also dangerous, irrational, uncontrolled and chaotic, the source of all the world's ills. Of the myriad of textual and artistic manifestations of Pandora since her inception, those that portray her as femme fatale have received the most attention; that Pandora also offers Hope has largely been neglected. This project explores an idea of Pandora which is much more complex and multi-faceted than her traditional casting as early femme fatale. Taking as general background Julia Kristeva's notion of intertextuality and Judith Butler's concept of identity and gender as performatively constructed, multiple and even 'contradictory', this intertextual study interrogates a cluster of interconnected works that incorporate major aspects of the Pandora myth. The investigation demonstrates that Pandora's 'chaos', resisting all attempts to box and frame it, can be read as a cathartic, transformative force which is not always destructive, but may also be productive, generative and even redemptive. The works examined are drawn mainly from the cinema and span the twentieth century. All of these texts feature either a Lulu or related Lola character, or Pandora herself, as female protagonist. Because of the wealth of attention already devoted to the figure of the femme fatale, my primary focus is the texts of the Lulu/Lola/Pandora selection that portray Pandora as Redeemer. A detailed study of these texts in terms of the Pandora myth explores aspects of Pandora that exceed the boundaries of her traditional framing as harbinger of disaster. This broader perspective on Pandora not only enhances the overall conception of the myth and of the Redeemer works, but also adds resonance to the femme fatale texts themselves.