School of Culture and Communication - Theses
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ItemVariations of difference(University of Melbourne, 2009)
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ItemThe Forty-seventh r�nin and an existential guide to travel(University of Melbourne, 2008)
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ItemTemporality and Australian narratives of racial science; or, thesis as lynch mob(University of Melbourne, 2008)
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ItemSeparatism to soap opera ; lesbian communities and the community gaze in cinema and television.(University of Melbourne, 2008)
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ItemThe billycan in Australian poetry(University of Melbourne, 2007)
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ItemSonic intersections : subjectivity within punk aesthetics(University of Melbourne, 2007)
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ItemTranssystematic Scale: Media Philosophy Beyond Collapse and Difference( 2023-09)Scale and scaling techniques have become crucial to handling the constitutive limits of systematicity – that is, scale involves a revision of the systematic itself, within, through, and beyond its own limits. While recent media-theoretical work has made great strides in thinking the functions and nature of scale, its precise philosophical status and situation within larger ontological and epistemological debates still requires clarification. Taking scale as a core question for media philosophy, this thesis argues that scale must be read in the register of what I call the ‘transsystematic’: the multifarious attempts to think and work through the constitutive partiality, contingency, and plurality of systematicity itself. The transsystematic indexes various contexts, legible across mathematics, engineering, the sciences, politics, literature, and philosophy, where systematicity runs up against its own limits, but functions through and across those limits nevertheless. Scale becomes a key way such problems are situationally navigated: as such, it functions as a deep and nonarbitrary feature of any conceivable systematicity and their interrelation. To demonstrate how scale emerges as problem and solution in this way, I trace the antinomic functions of scale across contemporary theorisations of climate, capital, and – centrally – computation, observing how scale continually emerges as a crucial means for handling the impasses between collapse and difference, completeness and contingency, determination and the indeterminable that irrupt in these contexts. Scale functions here as both more and less than an ontological or epistemological concept, neither inhering in objects, nor being adequately understood as an arbitrary cognitive artifice. To account for its antinomic functions, I argue that scale is transcendental to systematicity, a necessary condition of any possible individuation and mediation. Understood via this transsystematic revision of the transcendental, scale is the fundamental conceptual term for the structures of localisation and generalisation that mediate between the poles of totalising collapse and irreducible difference. Ultimately, I suggest that thinking scale in this way lets us better address the transsystematic dimensions of contemporary media.
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ItemRace, Capital and Desire in Roberto Bolaño: Genre in 2666( 2022)Roberto Bolano’s posthumously published 2666 is a novel split into five parts without a clear logic of organisation. I argue that its unity lies in the way each section takes up and then dissolves the conventions of a different genre. Before engaging in a close reading of the work, I seek to establish the importance of generic interpretation in contemporary literary criticism by arguing that genres are not simply categories for sorting texts, but names for complex representational mechanics through which a text relates to its social world. Upon this basis, I show that the movement of the novel reproduces the same trajectory in each of its five parts: each section uses the conventions of the genre but only to negate its usual organisation of meaning and therefore relation to history. Ultimately, I argue, these structures of experience decompose in confrontation with the colonial destruction of life. Since there is no single received literary form that adequately represents the transformations of racial violence, Bolano negates a procession of genres as a way of testifying to the complex matrix of power, death and revolt in the contemporary world. (Apologies for absence of accent on Bolano but the system does not let me type them)
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ItemFantasy and Fertility: Women’s Reproductive Bodies in Medieval Literature( 2022)This thesis explores how the reproductive potential of women’s bodies is portrayed in a selection of medieval literary texts from the Four Branches of the Mabinogi to Malory’s Arthuriad. Through a focus on fantasy in these narratives, I seek to further our understanding of how medieval writers and readers addressed social questions through fantastical story-telling. Literary fantasies, unburdened by the limits of historical realities, are fertile grounds for the expression of otherwise inaccessible desires, hopes, and critiques. This study charts how a series of female characters use the freedoms made possible by fantasy to reclaim the power of their fertility from patriarchal appropriation. I analyse Welsh, French, and English texts from the mid-to-late medieval period to juxtapose several case studies drawn from varied cultural milieux. My chosen narratives demonstrate the diverse ways in which imaginative literature questions the gendered roles of women’s reproductive bodies in medieval societies. The transhistorical and translinguistic scope of this project illustrates how multiple medieval narratives dispute the oppression of women’s bodies, and that this challenge is not exclusive to one writer, culture, or century. In my first chapter I consider Rhiannon, Branwen, Aranrhod, and Blodeuedd of Pedair Cainc Y Mabinogi, or the Four Branches of the Mabinogi, a Welsh tale surviving in two fourteenth-century manuscripts. The second chapter examines the ladies from three twelfth-century lais by Marie de France: “Guigemar,” “Yonec,” and “Milun.” And in the third chapter I approach the later medieval English canon through the Wife of Bath’s “Prologue” and “Tale” by Geoffrey Chaucer, and several women from Thomas Malory’s Arthuriad. The female characters to be discussed refuse to be framed and defined solely by their potential to give birth to a male protagonist around whom the text will then develop. They behave in a variety of ways which actively and unintentionally resist the childbearing function expected of their fertility. Instead, these women seek the freedom to enjoy their own autonomous bodily expression. In my attention to these moments of resistance, I engage with previous scholarship on representations of women in medieval texts and the functions of literary fantasy. This study reads the bodies of fictional medieval women as encompassing both the earthly and the magical, borrowing a productive mundanity from one and the opportunity for wonder from the other.
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ItemKenneth Slessor’s Gothic Harbour( 2022)Kenneth Slessor (1901-1971) often turned to Sydney Harbour as a productive site for his poetry and writing. Reading Slessor’s Harbour in its historical and cultural contexts, this thesis argues that he developed a poetic concerned with loss, memory, sexual desire and the uncanny return of repressed forces from the Harbour’s depths. The thesis begins in 1927, a year which saw two important episodes of drowning in Sydney Harbour: the death of Slessor’s friend Joe Lynch, subject of his later elegy “Five Bells” (1939), and the Greycliffe ferry disaster, to which Slessor responded in the pages of Sydney magazine Smith’s Weekly. In the wake of these twin tragedies, Slessor created a distinctive poetic vision of Sydney Harbour which fused imagery and atmospherics originating in Sydney’s popular press with a Gothic-modernist aesthetic he adopted at least in part from the work of T.S. Eliot (1888-1965). This thesis proceeds to read Slessor’s Harbour poetry as it developed through the 1930s, before leaving Sydney Harbour to read Slessor’s poetic evocations of Kings Cross and the battlefields of the Second World War, arguing that his Harbour poetic infuses poetry that may at first sight seem unrelated to the Harbour. It concludes with remarks about Slessor’s relationship to what Michael Cathcart has called ‘necronationalism’, exploring some of the ramifications and consequences of Slessor’s poetic project of populating an iconic watery Australian space with dead bodies and ghostly apparitions. The thesis draws on theories of the uncanny and the weird, derived from Freud among others, as well as Maria Tumarkin’s notion of the ‘traumascape’, and recent scholarship in literary studies which emphasises the role and agency of the sea, in order to formulate a new reading of Slessor’s relationship to Sydney Harbour and to literary categories such as modernism, the Gothic, and elegy. By recasting Slessor’s Harbour as a traumatising Gothic space, this thesis gestures toward a new perspective on the work of a seminal figure in Australian literary modernism.