Dissertations / Theses on the topic '420201 New Zealand literature in English'
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1
McDonnell, Brian. "The Translation of New Zealand fiction into film." Thesis, University of Auckland, 1986. http://hdl.handle.net/2292/2010.
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This thesis explores the topic of literature-into-film adaptation by investigating the use of New Zealand fiction by film-makers in this country. It attempts this task primarily by examining eight case-studies of the adaptation process: five features designed for cinema release (Sleeping Dogs, A State of Siege, Sons for the Return Home, The Scarecrow and Other Halves), one feature-length television drama (the God Boy), and two thirty-minute television dramas (The Woman at the Store and Big Brother, Little Sister, from the series Winners and Losers). All eight had their first screenings in the ten-year period 1975-1985. For each of the case-studies, the following aspects are investigated: the original work of fiction, a practical history of the adaptation process (including interviews with people involved), and a study of changes made during the scripting and shooting stages. The films are analysed in detail, with a focus on visual and auditory style, in particular how these handle the themes, characterisation and style of the original works. Comparisons are made of the structures of the novels and the films. For each film, an especially close reading is offered of sample scenes (frequently the opening and closing scenes). The thesis is illustrated with still photographs – in effect, quotations from key moments – and these provide a focus to aspects of the discussion. Where individual adaptation problems existed in particular case-studies (for example, the challenge of the first-person narration of The God Boy), these are examined in detail. The interaction of both novels and films with the society around them is given emphasis, and the films are placed in their cultural and economic context - and in the context of general film history. For each film, the complex reception they gained from different groups (for example, reviewers, ethnic groups, gender groups, the authors of the original works) is discussed. All the aspects outlined above demonstrate the complexity of the responses made by New Zealand film-makers to the pressure and challenges of adaptation. They indicate the different answers they gave to the questions raised by the adaptation process in a new national cinema, and reveal their individual achievements.Whole document restricted, but available by request, use the feedback form to request access.
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Holt, Jill. "Children's Writing in New Zealand Newspapers, 1930s and 1980s." Thesis, University of Auckland, 2000. http://hdl.handle.net/2292/2315.
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This thesis is an investigation of writing by New Zealand children in the Children's Pages of five New Zealand newspapers: the New Zealand Herald, Christchurch Press and Otago Daily Times in the 1930s and 1980s, the Dominion in the 1930s; and the Wellington Evening Post in the 1980s. Its purpose is to show how children reflected their world, interacted with editors, and interpreted the adult world in published writing, and to examine continuities and changes between the 1930s and 1980s. It seeks evidence of gender variations in writing. and explores the circumstances in which the social role of writing was established by young writers. It considers the ways in which children (especially girls) consciously and unconsciously used public writing to create a public place for themselves. It compares major themes chosen by children, their topic and genre preferences in writing, and the gender and age differences evident in these preferences. The thesis is organised into three Parts, with an Introduction discussing the scholarly background to the issues it explores, and its methodology. Part One contains two chapters examining the format and tone of each Children's Page. And the role and influence of their Editors. Part Two (also of two chapters) investigates the origins and motivations of the young contributors, with a special focus on the Otago Daily Times as a community newspaper. Part Three. of four chapters, explores the children's writing itself, in separate chapters on younger and older children, and a chapter on the most popular genre, poetry. The conclusion suggests further areas of research, and points to the implications of the findings of the thesis for social history in New Zealand and for classroom practice. The thesis contains a Bibliography and an Appendix with a selection of writings by Janet Frame and her family to the Otago Daily Times Children's Page in the 1930s.Note: Whole document restricted at the request of the author, but available by individual request, use the feedback form to request access.
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Paul, Mary. "Reading readings: some current critical debates about New Zealand literature and culture." Thesis, University of Auckland, 1995. http://hdl.handle.net/2292/1974.
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This thesis examines contemporary interpretations of a selection of important texts written by New Zealand women between 1910 and 1940, and also a film and film script written more recently (which are considered as re-readings of a novel by Mander). The thesis argues that, though reading or meaning-making is always an activity of construction there will, at any given moment, always be reasons for preferring one way of reading over another-a reading most appropriate to a situation or circumstances. This study is motivated by a desire to understand how literary criticism has changed in recent years, particularly under the influence of feminism, and how a reader today can make a choice among competing methods of interpretation. Comparisons are drawn between various possible readings of the texts in order to classify methods of reading, particularly nationalist and feminist reading strategies. The over-all tendency of the argument is to propose a more self-critical and self-conscious approach to reading, and to develop a materialist and historical approach which I see as particularly important to the New Zealand context in the 1990s.Thesis is now published as a book. Paul M. (1999) Her Side of the Story: readings of Mander, Mansfield and Hyde. Dunedin: Otago University Press. http://www.otago.ac.nz/press/ for more information.
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Laurs, Deborah Elizabeth. ""Ungrown-up grown-ups" : the representation of adolescence in twentieth-century New Zealand young adult fiction : a dissertation presented in fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in English Literature at Massey University, Palmerston North, New Zealand." Massey University, 2004. http://hdl.handle.net/10179/1255.
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Behaviouralists consider adolescence a time for developing autonomy, which accords with Michel Foucault‘s power/knowledge dynamic that recognises individuals‘ assertion of independence as a crucial element within society. Surprisingly, however, twentieth-century New Zealand Young Adult (YA) fiction tends to disempower adolescents, by portraying an adultist version of them as immature and unprepared for adult responsibilities. By depicting events through characters‘ eyes, a focalising device that encourages reader identification with the narratorial point-of-view, authors such as Esther Glen, Isabel Maud Peacocke, Joyce West, Phillis Garrard, Tessa Duder, Lisa Vasil, Margaret Mahy, William Taylor, Kate de Goldi, Paula Boock, David Hill, Jane Westaway, and Bernard Beckett stress the importance of conforming to adult authority. Rites of passage are rarely attained; protagonists respect their elders, and juvenile delinquents either repent or are punished for their misguided behaviours. ―Normal‖ expectations are established by the portrayal of single parents who behave ―like teenagers‖: an unnatural role reversal that demands a return to traditional hegemonic roles. Adolescents must forgive adults‘ failings within a discourse that rarely forgives theirs. Depictions of child abuse, while deploring the deed, tend to emphasise victims‘ forbearance rather than admitting perpetrators‘ culpability. As Foucault points out, adolescent sexuality both fascinates and alarms adult society. Within the texts, sex is strictly an adult prerogative, reserved for reproduction within marriage, with adolescent intimacy sanctioned only between couples who conform to the middle-class ideal of monogamy. On the other hand, teenagers who indulge in casual sex are invariably given cause to regret. Such presentations operate vicariously to protect readers from harm, but also create an idealised, steadfast sense of adultness in the process.
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Lawn, Jennifer. "Trauma and recovery in Janet Frame's fiction." Thesis, National Library of Canada = Bibliothèque nationale du Canada, 1997. http://www.collectionscanada.ca/obj/s4/f2/dsk3/ftp04/nq25087.pdf.
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Redmond, Robert Stanley. "Female authors and their male detectives: the ideological contest in female-authored crime fiction : a thesis presented in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts in English at Massey University, Palmerston North, New Zealand." Massey University, 2008. http://hdl.handle.net/10179/1057.
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In the nineteen-eighties a host of female detectives appeared in crime fiction authored by women. Ostensibly these detectives challenged hegemonic norms, but the consensus of opinion was that their appropriation of male values and adherence to conventional generic closures colluded with a gender system of male privilege. Academic interest in the work of female authors featuring male detectives was limited. Yet it can be argued that these texts could have the potential to disrupt the hegemonic order through the introduction, whether deliberately, or inadvertently, of a female counterpoint to the hegemony. The hypothesis I am advancing claims that the reconfiguration of male detectives in works authored by women avoids the visible contradictions of gender and genre that are characteristic of works featuring female detectives. However, through their use of disruptive performatives, these works allow scope for challenging normal gender practices—without damage to the genre. This hypothesis is tested by applying the performative theories of Judith Butler to a close reading of selected crime novels. Influenced by the theories of Austin, Lacan and Althusser, Butler’s concept of performativity claims that hegemonic notions of gender are a fiction. This discussion also uses Wayne Booth’s concept of the implied author as a means of distinguishing the performative agency of the text from that of the characters. Agatha Christie, P.D. James, and Donna Leon, each with their male detective heroes, come from different generations. A Butlerian reading illustrates their potential for disrupting gender norms. Of the three, however, only Donna Leon avoids the return to hegemonic control that is a feature of the genre. Christie’s women who have agency are inevitably eliminated, while conformist women are rewarded. James’s lead female character is never fully at ease in her professional role. When thrust into a leadership she proves herself to be competent, but not ready or desirous of the senior position. Instead her role is to mediate the transition of her junior, a male, to that position. Donna Leon is different. The moral and emotional content of her narratives suggests an implied author committed to ideological change. Her characters simultaneously renounce and collude with illusions of patriarchal authority, and could lay claim to be models for Butler’s notion of performative resistance.
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Ellis, Jeanne. "Past (pre)occupations, present (dis)locations : the nineteenth century restoried in texts from/about South Africa, Canada, Australia and Aotearoa New Zealand." Thesis, Stellenbosch : Stellenbosch University, 2014. http://hdl.handle.net/10019.1/96012.
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Thesis (PhD)--Stellenbosch University, 2014.ENGLISH ABSTRACT: This thesis focuses on the 'restorying‘ of British settler colonialism in a range of texts that negotiate the intricacies of post-settler afterlives in the postcolonial contexts of South Africa, Canada, Australia and Aotearoa New Zealand. In this, I do not undertake a sustained, programmatic comparative reading in order to deliver a set of answers based on insights achieved into the current state of post-settler colonial identities. Rather, I approach the study as an open-ended exploration by reading a combination of texts of various kinds – novels, poetry, drama, films and installation art – from and about these different geographical and historical contexts, structured as a sequence of four chapters, each with a distinct theoretical ensemble specific to the (pre)occupations of the settler colonial past and the linked senses of (dis)location in the present that emerge from the primary texts combined in each case. Since this project is informed by my location as a South African researcher, the cluster of primary texts in every chapter always includes one or more South African texts as pivotal to the juxtapositional dynamics such a reading attempts. By placing this study of the textual afterlives of settler colonialism undertaken from a South African perspective within the ambit of neo-Victorian studies, it is my intention to contribute to the growing body of critical and theoretical work emerging from this interdisciplinary field and to introduce to it a set of primary texts that will extend the parameters of its productive intersections with colonial and postcolonial studies.
AFRIKAANSE OPSOMMING: Hierdie tesis bestudeer die 'restorying' van Britse setlaar-kolonialisme in ‘n groep tekste wat die verwikkeldheid van post-setlaar 'afterlives' in the post-koloniale kontekste van Suid Afrika, Kanada, Australië en Aotearoa Nieu-Seeland vervat. Hiermee onderneem ek nie ‘n volgehoue, programmatiese vergelykende interpretasie met die oog daarop om die huidige stand van post-setlaar koloniale identiteite tot ‘n stel antwoorde te reduseer nie. Ek benader die studie eerder as ‘n verkenning van moontlikhede gegenereer deur die lees van ‘n kombinasie van verskillende tekste – romans, gedigte, drama, films en installasie kuns – wat hulle oorsprong in hierdie verkillende geografiese en historiese kontekste het, asook daaroor handel. Gevolglik bestaan die studie uit vier hoofstukke wat elkeen die (pre)okkupasies van die setlaar-koloniale verlede en die gepaardgaande gevoel van (dis)lokasie in die hede, soos tevoorskyn gebring deur die kombinasie van primere tekste, aan die hand van ‘n toepaslike teoretiese ensemble bespreek. Aangesien die projek uit my posisie as Suid Afrikaanse navorser spruit, en ‘n jukstaposisionele dinamiek grondliggend aan my leesbenadering is, betrek ek telkens een of meer Suid Afrikaanse tekste by die groep primere tekste wat die basis van elke hoofstuk vorm. Deur hierdie studie van die tekstuele 'afterlives' van setlaar-kolonialisme, wat vanuit ‘n Suid Afrikaanse perspektief onderneem word, binne die raamwerk van neo-Viktoriaanse studies te plaas, beoog ek om by te dra tot die korpus van kritiese en teoretiese werk van hierdie interdisiplinere veld. Deur die toevoeging van die betrokke groep primere tekste word die area waar hierdie veld met koloniale en post-koloniale studies oorvleuel verbreed.
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Stoop, Graham Charles. "The management of knowledge : text, context, and the New Zealand English curriculums, 1969-1996." Thesis, University of Canterbury. Education, 1998. http://hdl.handle.net/10092/1045.
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This is a study of the New Zealand English curriculums, 1969-1996. The study is organised around three phases of reform: the initial changes made to the teaching of English in the first three years of secondary school; the later reform of the senior-school English syllabus; the more recent development of an integrated national curriculum statement for the teaching of English. These reforms are charted in a narrative fashion, although the thesis does not purport to be a full history of English teaching in the period under review. Instead, the various developments and changes to English teaching in New Zealand secondary schools, during a thirty year period, are contextualised under the interpretative paradigm: the management of knowledge. It is argued herein that knowledge, and, in this case, the subject English, has been managed - consciously and unconsciously - in the interests of dominant socio-cultural and socio-economic groups. I aver that even alleged progressive developments in the pedagogy of classroom life have been routinised in the curriculum statements. Consequently, there has been an official sanctioning of established or conservative perspectives on the way English language and literature should be taught, thus often denying the emancipatory themes of respect for the human subject and human agency. My contention is advanced and supported through a careful examination of the curriculum text discourses, and, in several instances, through an examination of the transmission process from the draft statement to the published statement. I am therefore able to argue that the English curriculums must be understood as part of wider social and political processes: the curriculums are produced, managed and reproduced. The influences of the social environment and, in particular, the ideological struggle between State and society, are to be found in the English teaching discourse. This notion is captured in the subtitle of the study: text and context. The thesis concludes with a brief, personal reflection on how an English curriculum might be theorised so that it does not impose on students a definition of reality that declares the values and symbols of the social elites. I assert that an understanding of discourse, or the discourses of knowledge, can provide a way forward for the theorising of the subject English.
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Dionne, Lee Elton. "Situating the cetacean: Science and storytelling in Witi Ihimaera's The whale rider." CSUSB ScholarWorks, 2006. https://scholarworks.lib.csusb.edu/etd-project/2883.
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Seran, Justine Calypso. "Intersubjective acts and relational selves in contemporary Australian Aboriginal and Aotearoa/New Zealand Maori women's writing." Thesis, University of Edinburgh, 2016. http://hdl.handle.net/1842/21999.
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This thesis explores the dynamics of intersubjectivity and relationality in a corpus of contemporary literature by twelve Indigenous women writers in order to trace modes of subject-formation and communication along four main axes: violence, care, language, and memory. Each chapter establishes a comparative discussion across the Tasman Sea between Indigenous texts and world theory, the local and the global, self and community. The texts range from 1984 to 2011 to cover a period of growth in publishing and international recognition of Indigenous writing. Chapter 1 examines instances of colonial oppression in the primary corpus and links them with manifestations of violence on institutional, familial, epistemic, and literary levels in Aboriginal authors Melissa Lucashenko and Tara June Winch’s debut novels Steam Pigs (1997) and Swallow the Air (2006). They address the cycle of violence and the archetypal motif of return to bring to light the life of urban Aboriginal women whose ancestral land has been lost and whose home is the western, modern Australian city. Maori short story writer Alice Tawhai’s collections Festival of Miracles (2005), Luminous (2007), and Dark Jelly (2011), on the other hand, deny the characters and reader closure, and establish an atmosphere characterised by a lack of hope and the absence of any political or personal will to effect change. Chapter 2 explores caring relationships between characters displaying symptoms that may be ascribed to various forms of intellectual and mental disability, and the relatives who look after them. I situate the texts within a postcolonial disability framework and address the figure of the informal carer in relation to her “caree.” Patricia Grace’s short story “Eben,” from her collection Small Holes in the Silence (2006), tells the life of a man with physical and intellectual disability from birth (the eponymous Eben) and his relationship with his adoptive mother Pani. The main character of Lisa Cherrington’s novel The People-Faces (2004) is a young Maori woman called Nikki whose brother Joshua is in and out of psychiatric facilities. Finally, the central characters of Vivienne Cleven’s novel Her Sister’s Eye (2002) display a wide range of congenital and acquired cognitive impairments, allowing the author to explore how the compounded trauma of racism and sexism participates in (and is influenced by) mental disability. Chapter 3 examines the materiality and corporeality of language to reveal its role in the formation of (inter)subjectivity. I argue that the use of language in Aboriginal and Maori women’s writing is anchored in the racialised, sexualised bodies of Indigenous women, as well as the locale of their ancestral land. The relationship between language, body, and country in Keri Hulme’s the bone people (1984) and Alexis Wright’s Carpentaria (2006) are analysed in relation to orality, gesture, and mapping in order to reveal their role in the formation of Indigenous selfhood. Chapter 4 explores how the reflexive practice of life-writing (including fictional auto/biography) participates in the decolonisation of the Indigenous self and community, as well as the process of individual survival and cultural survivance, through the selective remembering and forgetting of traumatic histories. Sally Morgan’s Aboriginal life-writing narrative My Place (1987), Terri Janke’s Torres Strait Islander novel Butterfly Song (2005), as well as Paula Morris and Kelly Ana Morey’s Maori texts Rangatira (2011) and Bloom (2003) address these issues in various forms. Through the interactions between memory and memoirs, I bring to light the literary processes of decolonisation of the writing/written self in the settler countries of Australia and Aotearoa/New Zealand. This study intends to raise the profile of the authors mentioned above and to encourage the public and scholarly community to pay attention and respect to Indigenous women’s writing. One of the ambitions of this thesis is also to expose the limits and correct the shortcomings of western, postcolonial, and gender theory in relation to Indigenous women writers and the Fourth World.
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Thurman, Megan. ""The End at the Beginning" : Spiral Logic in Keri Hulme's The Bone People." Scholarship @ Claremont, 2017. http://scholarship.claremont.edu/scripps_theses/896.
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Hanson, Paul Michael. "Beyond settler consciousness : new geographies of nation in two novels by Margaret Laurence and Fiona Kidman : a thesis submitted to the Victoria University of Wellington in fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts in English /." ResearchArchive@Victoria e-Thesis, 2008. http://hdl.handle.net/10063/916.
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Dean, Andrew. "Foes, ghosts, and faces in the water : self-reflexivity in postwar fiction." Thesis, University of Oxford, 2017. http://ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid:4c2e3b07-2454-457a-bf9f-a3f0734c89ba.
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This thesis examines the nature and value of metafictional practices in the careers of postwar novelists. Discussions of metafiction have been central to accounts of postwar literature. Where debates in the 1980s and 1990s about metafiction tended to make claims about its distinctive political and theoretical power, recent work in the study of institutions has folded metafiction into the routine operation of the literary field, and attacked previous claims to distinctive value. In this thesis I both historicize self-reflexive literary practices in the literary field, an element largely absent from the earlier scholarship, and present historically determinate claims about the value of these practices, an element I suggest is missing from the more recent work. To do so, I turn to the study of autobiography, specifically Philippe Lejeune's concept of 'autobiographical space.' In the first chapter, I explore how J. M. Coetzee develops academic literary criticism in his fiction. In the second chapter, I examine how Janet Frame responds to both the demands of a national literature and biographical inquiry into her life. In the third chapter, I address how Philip Roth handles the relationship between the politics of identity and the postwar novel. Self-reflexive practices, I show throughout, are ways of writing that were encouraged by particular formations in the literary field and were handled by writers through more or less explicit treatments of autobiographical space. I argue, though, that while these practices can be remarkably inventive, they carry no guarantees for political, theoretical, or aesthetic value.
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Caskey, Sarah A. "Open secrets, ambiguity and irresolution in the Australian, New Zealand, and Canadian short story." Thesis, National Library of Canada = Bibliothèque nationale du Canada, 2000. http://www.collectionscanada.ca/obj/s4/f2/dsk2/ftp02/NQ58399.pdf.
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Fankhauser, Rochelle A. "Dear Father." Diss., CLICK HERE for online access, 1998. http://patriot.lib.byu.edu/u?/MTAF,34215.
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Le, Marquand Jane Nicole. "'I'm not a woman writer, but--' : gender matters in New Zealand women's short fiction 1975-1995 : a thesis presented in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in English at Massey University, Palmerston North, New Zealand." 2006. http://hdl.handle.net/10179/1462.
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From the late 1970s, New Zealand women short story writers increasingly worked their way into the literary mainstream. In the wake of the early, feminist-motivated years of the decade their gender, which had previously been the root of their marginalized position, began to work for them. However, rather than embracing womanhood, this growth in gender recognition led to many writers rejecting overt identification of their sex. To be a labeled a woman writer was considered patronising, a mark of inferiority. These women wanted to be known as writers only, some even expressing a hope for literature to reach a point of androgyny. Their work, however, did not convey an androgynous perspective. Just as the fact of their gender could not be avoided, so the influence their sex had on their creativity cannot be denied. Gender does matter and New Zealand women's short fiction published in the 1975-1995 period illustrates its significance. From the early trend for adopting fiction as a site for social commentary and political treatise against patriarchy's one-dimensional image of woman, these stories show a gradually increasing awareness of fictional possibilities, allowing for celebration of the multiplicity of female experience and capturing a process of redefinition rather than rejection of 'women's work'. Though in the later 1990s it may no longer have been politically 'necessary' to promote women's work on the grounds of gender, on a personal level the 'difference of view' of the woman writer remained both visible and vital. An increasing sense of woman-to-woman communication based on shared experience emerges: women are writing as women, about women, for women.
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Shaw, Kirsten Elizabeth. "Neoliberalism and social patterns : constructions of home and community in contemporary New Zealand fiction : a thesis presented in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Masters of Arts in English at Massey University, Albany, New Zealand." 2007. http://hdl.handle.net/10179/736.
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Constructions of home, family and community as ways of belonging have been ongoing discourses in New Zealand. This thesis examines constructions of home and family in works of fiction by four contemporary New Zealand authors: Alice Tawhai, Charlotte Grimshaw, Witi Ihimaera and Damien Wilkins. It asks how the main sociological characteristics of the period are presented and performed through fiction. Through these characters and their situations these authors expose the social fantasy of contemporary New Zealand society: that of individual reflexive opportunity. The twentieth century has seen a changing social fabric with loosening of bonds and the increase of individualism. The New Zealand way of life is changing, with increasing interconnectedness of the world through globalisation. Neo-liberal ideology, itself a response to globalising effects, has exacerbated social fragmentation and income disparity. Neoliberalism, a retreat of the state from both financial control and support of individuals, presumes a logic of market-forces and rational choice based on the maximisation of opportunity. This has implications for the individual’s sense of self and ways of belonging as the New Zealand subject is increasingly premised on personal responsibility. This thesis looks at the economic and sociological analyses of neoliberalism and asks if they are confirmed in the fiction.
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Sanders, Leonard Patrick. "Postmodern orientalism : William Gibson, cyberpunk and Japan : a thesis presented in fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in English at Massey University, Albany, New Zealand." 2008. http://hdl.handle.net/10179/816.
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Taking the works of William Gibson as its point of focus, this thesis considers cyberpunk’s expansion from an emphatically literary moment in the mid 1980s into a broader multimedia cultural phenomenon. It examines the representation of racial differences, and the formulation of global economic spaces and flows which structure the reception and production of cultural practices. These developments are construed in relation to ongoing debates around Japan’s identity and otherness in terms of both deviations from and congruities with the West (notably America). To account for these developments, this thesis adopts a theoretical framework informed by both postmodernism as the “cultural dominant” of late capitalism (Jameson), and orientalism, those discursive structures which produce the reified polarities of East versus West (Said). Cyberpunk thus exhibits the characteristics of an orientalised postmodernism, as it imagines a world in which multinational corporations characterised as Japanese zaibatsu control global economies, and the excess of accumulated garbage is figured in the trope of gomi. It is also postmodernised orientalism, in its nostalgic reconstruction of scenes from the residue of imperialism, its deployment of figures of “cross-ethnic representation” (Chow) like the Eurasian, and its expressions of a purely fantasmatic experience of the Orient, as in the evocation of cyberspace. In distinction from modern or Saidean orientalism, postmodern orientalism not only allows but is characterized by reciprocal causality. This describes uneven, paradoxical, interconnected and mutually implicated cultural transactions at the threshold of East-West relations. The thesis explores this by first examining cyberpunk’s unremarked relationship with countercultural formations (rock music), practices (drugs) and manifestations of Oriental otherness in popular culture. The emphasis in the remainder of the thesis shifts towards how cyberpunk maps new technologies onto physical and imaginative “bodies” and geographies: the figuration of the cyborg, prosthetic interventions, and the evolution of cyberspace in tandem with multimedia innovations such as videogames. Cyberpunk then can best be understood as a conjunction of seemingly disparate experiences: on the one hand the postmodern dislocations and vertiginous moments of estrangement offset by instances of intense connectivity in relation to the virtual, the relocation to the “distanceless home” of cyberspace. As such it is an ever-expanding phenomenon which has been productively fused with other youth-culture media, and one with specifically Japanese features (anime, visual kei, and virtual idols).
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Johnston-Ellis, Sarah Jane. "David Mitchell's Cloud Atlas : "revolutionary or gimmicky?" : a thesis presented in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts in English at Massey University, Manawatu, New Zealand." 2010. http://hdl.handle.net/10179/1685.
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This thesis will examine David Mitchell’s use of postmodern narrative structures and strategies in Cloud Atlas and how these relate to his overtly political concerns regarding relations of power between individuals and between factions. This will involve a discussion of debates surrounding the political efficacy of postmodern narrative forms. I will consider Mitchell’s prolific use of intertextual and intratextual allusion and his mimicry of a wide range of narrative modes and genres. These techniques, along with the complex structural iterations in the novel and the ‘recurrence’ of characters between its parts, appear to reinforce a thematic concern with the interconnectedness — indeed, the repetition — of human activity, through time and a fatalistic conception of being that draws on two central Nietzschean notions, eternal recurrence and the will to power. The vision of humanity and human relations of power that is expressed within Cloud Atlas is open to extended analysis in Foucauldian terms. Against this apparently nihilistic backdrop, Mitchell appears to promote a notion of (albeit limited) individual agency and the capacity for creative narration and reinterpretation of the past as a means to devise new ‘truths’ and explore new ‘meanings’ for the present and the future. I will explore the ways in which Mitchell’s metafictional self-reflexivity (and that of his protagonists), offers a vision of hope and political agency that counters the apparent (Nietzschean) fatalism of the novel.
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Hall, Mark Webster. ""Repetition to the life" : liminality, subjectivity, and speech acts in Shakespearean late romance : a thesis presented in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts in English at Massey University, Palmerston North, New Zealand." 2008. http://hdl.handle.net/10179/754.
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One key debate in the critical reception of Shakespearean late romance concerns how best to approach the functionality of the dramatised worlds that constitute it. What I call ‘containment’ readings of late romance argue that the alternative realities explored in the plays – realities of miraculous revivals, pastoral escapes and divine interventions, – serve to affirm the inevitable return of extant power structures. Utopian readings dispute this, making the case that the political and existential destructurations exposed in these plays point toward a new orientation for the dramatic subjects they produce. With the aim of contributing to the debate between containment and utopian readings, I explore in this thesis how late romance produces its subjects. I interrogate the plays’ structures with the help of the anthropological model of the limen, which is shown to be a useful category through which to educe the meaningfulness of certain ritual sequences. The limen’s three phases – separation; limen; aggregation – are employed to make sense of the transitions that subjects undergo in the four plays studied: Pericles, Cymbeline, The Winter’s Tale, and The Tempest. To study the liminality of these plays is, I argue, to study how dramatic subjects are produced therein, guided by the fact that their language shares properties with ritual discourse. When studying this discourse the focus falls on that class of language which impinges most lastingly on subjects: performatives. How performatives function in late romance will show us how real the changes induced in liminal subjects are. I examine the four plays in turn and find that their performative language produces subjects in a limen-consistent fashion. Aristocratic subjects are first of all estranged from those discursive practices that nourish their identity; their subjectivities are then glued back together in the ritualised, emblematising language of the limen. The conclusion I draw from my interrogation of the liminal patterns uncovered is that the functionality of late romance is broadly consistent with containment readings; I claim to have extended such readings, however, in showing that Shakespeare’s dramatisation of the state’s return to power usefully exposes its logic and symbolic grammar.
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White, Mandala. "From the sublime to the rebellious : representations of nature in the urban novels of a contemporary New Zealand author : a thesis submitted in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Masters of Arts in English in the University of Canterbury /." 2007. http://library.canterbury.ac.nz/etd/adt-NZCU20070525.152454.
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