Dissertations / Theses on the topic 'Australian History and criticism'
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1
Grossman, Michèle 1957. "Entangled subjects : talk and text in collaborative indigenous Australian life-writing." Monash University, School of Literary, Visual and Performance Studies, 2004. http://arrow.monash.edu.au/hdl/1959.1/5269.
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Paull, James School of English UNSW. "An ambivalent ground: re-placing Australian literature." Awarded by:University of New South Wales. School of English, 2007. http://handle.unsw.edu.au/1959.4/28330.
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Narratives of place have always been crucial to the construction of Australian identity. The obsession with identity in Australia betrays longstanding uncertainty. It is not difficult to interpret in this uncertainty a replaying of the deeper insecurities surrounding the settler community's legal and more broadly cultural claims to the land. Such insecurities are typically understood negatively. In contrast, this thesis accepts the uncertainty of identity as an activating principle, appropriate to any interpretation of the narratives and themes that inform what it means to be Australian. Fundamental to this uncertainty is a provisionality in the post-colonial experience of place that is papered over by misleadingly coherent spatial narratives that stem from the imperial inheritance of Australian mythology. Place is a model for the tension between the coherence of mythic narratives and the actual rhizomic formlessness of daily life. Place is the ???ground??? of that life, but an ambivalent ground. An Ambivalent Ground approaches postcolonial Australia as a densely woven text. In this text, stories that describe the founding of a nation are enveloped by other stories, not so well known, that work to transform those more familiar narratives. ???Re-placing Australian literature??? describes the process of this transformation. It signifies an interpretative practice which seeks to recuperate the open-ended experience of place that remains disguised by the coherent narratives of nationhood. The process of ???re-placing??? Australian literature shifts the understanding of nation towards a landscape that speaks not so much about identity as about the constitutive performances of everyday life. It also converges with the unhomely dimension that is the colonist's ambiguous sense of belonging. We can understand this process with an analogy used in this thesis, that of music ??? the colonising language, and noise ??? the ostensibly inchoate, unformed background disruptive to cultural order yet revealing the spatial realities of place. Traditionally, cultural narratives in Australia have disguised the much more complex way in which place noisily disrupts and diffracts those narratives, and in the process generates the ambivalence of Australian identity. Rather than a text or a narrative, place is a plenitude, a densely intertwined performance space, a performance that constantly renders experience ??? and its cultural function ??? transgressive. The purpose of this thesis is not to displace stereotypical narratives of nationhood with yet another narrative. Rather, it offers the more risky proposition that provisionality and uncertainty are constitutive features of Australian social being. The narrative in the thesis represents an aggregation of such an ambivalent ground, addressing the persistent tension between place and the larger drama of colonialist history and discourse.
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Sun, Christine Yunn-Yu. "The construction of "Chinese" cultural identity : English-language writing by Australian and other authors with Chinese ancestry." Monash University, School of Languages, Cultures and Linguistics, 2004. http://arrow.monash.edu.au/hdl/1959.1/5438.
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Brooklyn, Bridget. "Something old, something new : divorce and divorce law in South Australia, 1859-1918." Title page, contents and summary only, 1988. http://web4.library.adelaide.edu.au/theses/09PH/09phb872.pdf.
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Paris, Lisa. "Visual arts history and visual arts criticism : Applications in middle schooling." Thesis, Edith Cowan University, Research Online, Perth, Western Australia, 1999. https://ro.ecu.edu.au/theses/1240.
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Visual arts history and criticism occupy central positions in visual arts curriculum statements in Western Australia. This status is sustained by the belief that the study of visual arts history and criticism actively contributes to the education of the student as a "whole person". In reality however, rather than attending to the holistic education of students, the application of visual arts history and criticism in Western Australian schools tends to be pragmatic and instrumental - visual arts teachers often use visual art works as "learning aids" because they don't have time, interest or experience in dealing with visual arts works in any other way. While visual arts history and criticism offer the student a valuable life-skill worth acquiring for the contribution they could make to the student's autonomy and personal welfare, this understanding often seems a foreign concept for many classroom teachers. The difference between theorists' and teachers' understandings of the place and purpose of visual arts history and criticism provides an important area of inquiry requiring urgent attention. This research makes a foray into this domain with the purpose of shedding light on the content and methods used by middle school visual arts teachers and their students' perceptions of the content and methods. A qualitative descriptive study was selected for the research taking the form of semi-structured interviews with six teachers. An interview guide was used and transcripts deriving from this methodology were coded by way of reference to the original research questions and classifications which emanated from emergent themes. The teacher interviews were complemented by a questionnaire administered to one class of students from each of the six schools. Participating teachers were selected through a stratified sampling technique. Analysis of data was undertaken from a qualitative stance in the case of interview participants. Narrative-style reporting of interview content was employed to facilitate accurate representation of the teachers' perceptions of visual arts history and criticism at the middle school level. A quantitative analysis of students' questionnaires provided triangulation of methodology, ensuring greater levels of validity than would be afforded by qualitative methods alone. With pressure being applied by the impending implementation of the Curriculum Framework for Kindergarten to Year 12 Education in Western Australian Schools (1998) for the formal inclusion of Arts Responses (aesthetics, art criticism) and Arts in Society (art history), a pressing need exists for clear information about current professional practice. Findings indicated that a misalignment appears to exist between theoretical assumptions embedded in documentation supporting the implementation of the Framework and actual classroom teaching practice. The implications of such misalignment, albeit illustrated on a small scale, are that the initiatives of the Framework may not be sustainable in the longer term, precisely because they are built upon invalid assumptions about what teachers actually do. Whilst the size of the sample and scope of the research limits the generalisability of findings, this first foray may provide impetus for a more comprehensive and evaluative study at a later date.
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McCarthy, Bridie Clare, and bridiecmccarthy@yahoo com au. "At the limits: Postcolonial & Hyperreal Translations of Australian Poetry." Deakin University. School of Communication and Creative Arts, 2006. http://tux.lib.deakin.edu.au./adt-VDU/public/adt-VDU20070329.093702.
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This dissertation employs the methodologies of postcolonial theory and hyperreal theory (following Baudrillard), in order to investigate articulations of identity, nation and representation in contemporary Australian poetry. Informed by a comparative analysis of contemporary Latin American poetry and cultural theory (in translation), as a means of re-examining the Australian context, this dissertation develops a new transnational model of Australian poetics.
The central thesis of this dissertation is that contemporary Australian poetry engages with the postcolonial at its limits. That is, at those sites of postcoloniality that are already mapped by theory, but also at those that occur beyond postcolonial theory. The hyperreal is understood as one such limit, traceable within the poetry but silenced in conventional postcolonial theory. As another limit to the postcolonial, this dissertation reads Latin American poetry and theory, in whose texts postcolonial theory is actively resisted, but where postcolonial and hyperreal poetics nevertheless intersect.
The original critical context constructed by this dissertation enables a new set of readings of Australian identity through its poetry. Within this new interpretative context, the readings of contemporary Australian poetry articulate a psycho-social postcoloniality; offer a template for future transactions between national poetry and global politics; and develop a model of the postcolonial hyperreal.
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Behin, Bahram. "Aspects of the role of language in creating the literary effect : implications for the reading of Australian prose fiction /." Title page, contents and abstract only, 1997. http://web4.library.adelaide.edu.au/theses/09PH/09phb419.pdf.
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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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Rukavina, Alison Jane. "Cultural Darwinism and the literary canon, a comparative study of Susanna Moodie's Roughing it in the Bush and Caroline Leakey's The broad arrow." Thesis, National Library of Canada = Bibliothèque nationale du Canada, 2000. http://www.collectionscanada.ca/obj/s4/f2/dsk2/ftp01/MQ61491.pdf.
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Ryan, Robin Ann 1946. ""A spiritual sound, a lonely sound" : leaf music of Southeastern aboriginal Australians, 1890s-1990s." Monash University, Dept. of Music, 1999. http://arrow.monash.edu.au/hdl/1959.1/8584.
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McArthur, Kathleen Maureen. "The heroic spirit in the literature of the Great War." Thesis, University of Cape Town, 1989. http://hdl.handle.net/11427/23680.
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Sedgwick, Enid. "Kulturelle Beziehungen : German-Australian literary links in Catherine Martin's An Australian girl and Henry Handel Richardson's Maurice Guest." University of Western Australia. European Languages and Studies Discipline Group. German Studies, 2009. http://theses.library.uwa.edu.au/adt-WU2009.0140.
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This thesis demonstrates the close links between Australian literature and German thought and culture in Catherine Martin's An Australian Girl (1890) and Henry Handel Richardson's Maurice Guest (1908), and thereby provides a fuller understanding of the sophisticated literary and intellectual purposes of these two works. In examining the German elements in each novel, and the contexts from which much of that material is drawn, this study seeks to supplement the scholarly explanations provided in the two Academy Editions of these works. While Maurice Guest has received serious scholarly attention, An Australian Girl has been accorded relatively little. Despite generally favourable reviews on publication, both appear to have been undervalued over time. The study begins with a brief historical survey of German migration to Australia and the contribution German migrants made to the intellectual life and culture of the evolving nation. The examination of Catherine Martin's work includes: biographical details, particularly concerning her contact with German culture; an analysis of the form of the novel and a comparison of An Australian Girl with Goethe's Bildungsroman Wilhelm Meister with regard to form, theme and characterisation; an analysis of German philosophical elements in the novel; and Martin's presentation of social conditions in Germany in 1888-90, and their role in the novel as a whole. The examination of Henry Handel Richardson's work encompasses: biographical details; the genesis of Maurice Guest; differences between the reception of the novel in England and Germany; the genre to which the novel belongs and parallels with Künstlerromane; an analysis of Richardson's description of the physical, historical and intellectual milieu of Leipzig, and its role in the novel; and finally her integration of German social customs and the German language into the text. Use has been made of five primary sources which have not been used before in any detail with regard to these aspects of either author: additional material from the Mount Gambier Border Watch; The Hatbox Letters, the family history of the Martin and Clarke families; the German translation of Maurice Guest; German reviews of Maurice Guest; and the correspondence between Richardson and her French translator Paul Solanges. The key argument of this thesis is that the German influence on both form and content, in the case of An Australian Girl, and on style and content, in the case of Maurice Guest, is deep and various, and that these German elements have proved to be an impediment to a full understanding and appreciation of these novels for many Anglo-Saxon readers and reviewers. In the two novels Martin and Richardson provide pointers to Australia's earlier interaction with the wider world and display a level of sophistication which makes these works worthy of greater recognition than they currently enjoy.
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Reddy, Colleen. "Ecological consciousness in modern Australian poetry." Thesis, Queensland University of Technology, 1998.
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One of the most significant issues confronting humanity as the twentieth century draws to a close is that concerning environmental degradation. This study posits the dual notion that at the centre of any movement to protect the earth from further degradation there must be a change in the predominant anthropocentric worldview, and that there is a role for poets to help bring about such change by
writing ecologically-conscious poetry. The study explains what is meant by ecological consciousness as distinct from a
conservation or environmental ethic. There follows a brief discussion of Deep Ecology (the philosophical perspective which, along with others, critiques human domination of nature) and a survey of relevant literature. The growth of an Australian poetic and the concomitant development of an Australian relationship with the land are also surveyed. Then, through a process of close reading, comparative analysis and discourse, the work of a number of poets (both
indigenous and non-indigenous) is considered for its ecological awareness. The study highlights some pivotal ideas for the development of a new worldview:
these are the development of a non-anthropocentric perspective of nature similar to that embraced by adherents of Deep Ecology; acceptance of the notion that nature
is ambivalent (that the cycle of life is also a cycle of death and decay); and the possible use of indigenous people's deeply ecological relationship with the land as
a basic model on which to build a new worldview. The study contends that only poetry which is grounded in ecocentrism, rather than anthropocentrism, can claim to be ecologically-conscious. It concludes by reaffirming the need for poets to
encourage a change in the prevailing anthropocentric worldview by adopting a deeply-ecological focus on nature in some of their poetry.
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Manning, Joanne Melissa. "Subversive voices a study of text and performance in the interpretation and realisation of experimental poetry /." Phd thesis, Australia : Macquarie University, 2005. http://hdl.handle.net/1959.14/47260.
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"March 2002".Thesis (PhD)--Macquarie University, Division of Humanities, Department of English, 2005.
Bibliography: p. 324-344.
Introduction: framing the texts -- Subversive voices -- Formulating a theoretical position -- Performance: a complete process -- On second thoughts: rewriting contemporary culture -- Performing On second thoghts -- Dialogic voices: Amanda Stewart and # -- Performing # -- Voices of desire: Ania Walwicz and Soft -- Performing Soft -- Marginal voices: Hazel Smith and Poet without language -- Performing Poet without language -- Conclusions: interpreting subversive voices.
This study considers the text and performance of four Australian experimental poets, Chris Mann, Amanda Stewart, Ania Walwicz and Hazel Smith. My aim is to demonstrate how the genre of experimental poetry uses language and performance in such a way as to rewrite existing dominant discourses. The challenge as an analyst is to find ways into such reflexive texts that use intertextual resources of critical theory as their subject matter. The perspective employed here engages with the theories posited by the texts and allows for a theoretical position removed from the structure and theories informing them. -- The study is organised in two parts. First, I consider the subversiveness of the genre drawing on Raymond Williams' notion of the emergent, followed by a discussion of important predecessors in the field of experimentation. I then outline the particular method of enquiry and theoretical framework used here to analyse the meaning potential of such works. Systemic Functional Grammar and Multimodal Discourse theory are discussed and their particular application in this study. The second part of the thesis applies these theories to the experimental works. -- I begin explaining my theoretical position by considering the weakness of the commonly used theories of Kristeva's 'semiotic' to analyse such works. I found Systemic Functional Grammar, as developed by Michael Halliday and then Terry Threadgold, to be a useful tool for elucidating the meaning potential behind the fractured grammars in the texts. It also provided a way of conceptualising enunciative positions and the way intertextual resources might be rewritten. From within this linguistic framework I was able to discern subversive messages from the intertwined theories ranging across the texts from Marxism, structuralism, psychoanalysis, feminism and multiculturalism. -- The performance posed another challenge as the improvised spoken texts, uniquely performed by these artists, create a subversive listening position for the audience, which engages with both the words and sounds for their sonic and semantic qualities. I consider many ways of addressing the role and behaviour of the performer and listener as well as the performance as a creative process, emerging from the two. I engage the model put forward by Kress and Van Leeuwen for analysis of multimodal texts which provides a functional approach to meaning potential in the performance and its varying layers. Within this model, I found prosody most useful for its ability to notate intonation, key, disjuncture and stress, exposing the dialogic voices and the relationship between semantics and sound in the performances. This form of communication is equivalent to the indexical entailment of sound and music which forms the basis for communication between performers, and between performer and audience. The dialogic situation is enhanced by both prosody and indexical entailment providing possible meanings. I use some traditional musicological analysis but my aim is to move away from such formalistic descriptions to consider culturally inscribed sounds and their interpretation using a functional model. -- Throughout, the complexity of experimental performance is evident but the theoretical frame used here might be applied to other works of this nature as a means of further understanding the semiotic web in subversive texts.
Mode of access: World Wide Web.
344 p., music
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Penazzi, Leonardo. "The fellow (novel) ; and Australian historical fiction, debating the perceived past (dissertation)." University of Western Australia. School of Social and Cultural Studies, 2008. http://theses.library.uwa.edu.au/adt-WU2008.0070.
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Novel The Fellow What is knowledge? Who should own it? Why is it used? Who can use it? Is knowledge power, or is it an illusion? These are some of the questions addressed in The Fellow. At the time of Australian federation, the year 1901, while a nation is being drawn into unity, one of its primary educational institutions is being drawn into disunity when an outsider challenges the secure world of The University of Melbourne. Arriving in Melbourne after spending much of his life travelling around Australia, an old Jack-of-all-trades bushman finds his way into the inner sanctum of The University of Melbourne. Not only a man of considerable and varied skill, he is also a man who is widely read and self-educated. However, he applies his knowledge in practical ways, based on what he has experienced in the
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Stafford, Andrew. "Pig city : from The Saints to Savage Garden." Thesis, Queensland University of Technology, 2004.
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She comes from Ireland, she's very beautiful
I come from Brisbane, and I'm quite plain Pig City
- The Go-Betweens, Lee Remick
If popular music really is a universal language, it's curious how easily a song - even a commercially obscure one - can come to symbolise a city's identity. The stories of
London, Liverpool, Manchester, Dunedin, Detroit, Memphis, Nashville, New York, New Orleans, San Francisco and Seattle are inextricably entwined with the music made there. Robert Forster, however, could never have imagined that his self-deprecating paean to an actress would become so fabled in his home town.
This is understandable. Queensland's often stifling subtropical capital doesn't exactly spring to mind when discussing the world's great musical cities. Partly this comes down to Australian pop and rock's poor-relation status next to the United States and
the United Kingdom. Inside Australia, too, Brisbane for decades wore a provincial reputation as a big country town, at least in the southern capitals of Sydney and Melbourne.
Of course, one of the most successful bands in recording history began life in Brisbane in the late 1950s. But the Bee Gees didn't so much outgrow the city as outgrow Australia. Struggling for recognition, the Brothers Gibb began an exodus of musicians out of the country when they left for their native UK at the beginning of 1967, the year before a peanut fanner, Joh Bjelke-Petersen, took control of
Queensland's ruling Country Party (later the National Party).
The literature on Australian pop is only beginning to accumulate, so again it is understandable that Brisbane, so far, has rated little more than a footnote. The bigger problem is that the footnote has remained the same, recycled in various contexts by various authors: that music in Brisbane especially the punk scene of the late '70s -
was overwhelmingly a reaction to the repression of the Bjelke-Petersen era.
This is partly true. Bjelke-Petersen's rule of Queensland between 1968 and 1987 was nothing if not iron-fisted. Public displays of dissent were often brutally suppressed;
the rule of law was routinely bent to the will of those charged with its enforcement; minorities were treated as simply another obstacle on the path to development. To top
it all off, the electoral system was hopelessly rigged in favour of the incumbents. 'Here,' writes Rod McLeod, 'in a city practically under police curfew, you fucked and
fought, got stoned, got married, or got out of town.'
But it makes little sense to give a politician too much credit for the creation of a music scene. Major cultural movements result from an intersection of local, national and
international factors. The Saints were not so much a reaction to living in a police state as they were a response to the music of not just the Stooges and the MC5, but the Easybeats and the Missing Links. And it's doubtful the national success of a string of Brisbane acts in the '90s - from Powderfinger to George - could have happened
without the nationalisation of the Triple J network.
Of course, it would be naïve to suggest that growing up in a climate of fear and loathing did not heavily distort the prism through which these artists saw the world. As Saints guitarist Ed Kuepper says, 'I think the band was able to develop a more obnoxious demeanor, thanks to our surroundings, than had everyone been really nice.' In the words of Australian music historian Ian Mcfarlane, 'That Australia's most conservative city should give rise to such a seditious subcultural coterie is a sociological phenomenon yet to be fully explored.
This book is my attempt to document the substantial yet largely unsung contribution that Brisbane has made both to Australian popular culture and to international popular
music. In doing so, I aimed to chart the shifts in musical, political and cultural consciousness that have helped shape the city's history and identity. In its broadest
sense, Pig City is the story of how Brisbane grew up.
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Anderson, Emma Kate School of English UNSW. "Representations of female sexuality in chick-lit texts and reading Anais Nin on the train." Awarded by:University of New South Wales. School of English, 2006. http://handle.unsw.edu.au/1959.4/27319.
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My critical essay uses Foucault???s theory of discursive formation to chart the emergence of the figure of the single modern woman as she is created by the various discourses surrounding her. It argues that representations of the single modern woman continue a tradition of perceiving the female body as a source of social anxiety. The project explores ???chick-lit??? as a site within the discursive formation from which the single modern woman emerges as a paradoxical figure; the paradoxes fundamentally linked to her sexuality. This essay, then, essentially seeks to investigate representations of female sexuality within chick-lit, exposing for scrutiny the paradoxes inherent in and around the figure of the single modern woman. My fictional piece is a work of erotica. It is divided into four sections: The Reader, The Writer, The Muse and The Critic. Essentially it explores the relationships between female sexuality and literature; between female sexuality and feminist, post-feminist and patriarchal values and between literature and issues of truth, perspective and representation. The two works complement each other to illuminate the paradox of female sexuality: one from a theoretical perspective and the other from a fictional perspective. The critical work focuses on female sexuality and its relationship to, and development within, the current social context. Chick-lit, as a new and immensely popular genre of fiction which holistically explores the lives of single modern women was useful for examining the relationship between the sexual persona of the single modern woman and society. The fiction is concerned with a narrower focus: specifically the sexual life of the single modern woman. Through the creative process, it became apparent that working within the genre of ???erotica??? would be not only more useful than working within chick-lit, but more powerful in exploring the themes I was interested in. The creative work draws on numerous points of interest raised in the critical work from, for example, the grander notions of the relationship between object and discourse ??? in this case female sexuality and literature ??? and the female body as a source of social fascination and anxiety to finer observations such as what it means to have sex ???like a man.??? In essence, the creative work seeks to examine the many faces of the single modern woman as a sexual being and to illuminate, on an intimate level, the many conflicts between and surrounding those faces and to suggest that while paradox remains in female sexual ideology, the single modern woman will remain suspended in a kind of sexual paralysis.
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Watkins, Catherine, and mikewood@deakin edu au. "Celebrating difference." Deakin University. School of Communication and Creative Arts, 2004. http://tux.lib.deakin.edu.au./adt-VDU/public/adt-VDU20050915.120943.
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This thesis examines short fiction and some poetry by writers from four different Australian cultural communities, the Indigenous community, and the Jewish, Chinese and Middle-Eastern communities. I have chosen to study the most recent short fiction available from a selection of writing which originates from each culture. In the chapters on Chinese-Australian and Middle-Eastern Australian fiction I have examined some poetry if it contributes to the subject matter under discussion. In this study I show how the short story form is used as a platform for these writers to express views on their own cultures and on their identity within Australian society. Through a close examination of texts this study reveals the strategies by which many of these narratives provide an imaginative literary challenge to Anglo-Celtic cultural dominance, a challenge which contributes to the political nature of this writing and the shifting nature of the short story genre. This study shows that by celebrating difference these narratives can act as a site of resistance and show a capacity to reflect and instigate cultural change. This thesis examines the process by which these narratives create a dialogue between cultures and address the problems inherent in diverse cultural communities living together.
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Weeda-Zuidersma, Jeannette. "Keeping mum : representations of motherhood in contemporary Australian literature - a fictocritical exploration." University of Western Australia. School of Social and Cultural Studies, 2007. http://theses.library.uwa.edu.au/adt-WU2007.0054.
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[Truncated abstract] This thesis argues that the non-representation and under-representation of mothering in contemporary Australian literature reflects a much wider cultural practice of silencing the mother-as-subject position and female experiences as a whole. The thesis encourages women writers to pay more attention to the subjective experiences of mothering, so that women’s writing, in particular writing on those aspects of women’s lives that are silenced, of which motherhood is one, can begin to refigure motherhood discourses. This thesis examines mother-as-subject from three perspectives: mothering as a corporeal experience, mothering as a psychological experience, and the articulations and silences of mothering-as-subject. It engages with feminist, postmodern and fictocritical theories in its discussion of motherhood as a discourse through these perspectives. In particular, the thesis employs the theoretical works of postmodern feminists Hélène Cixous, Luce Irigaray and Julia Kristeva in this discussion . . . A fictional narrative also runs through the critical discussion on motherhood. This narrative, Catherine’s Story, gives a personal and immediate voice to the mother-as-subject perspective. In keeping with the nature of fictocriticism, strict textual boundaries between criticism and fiction are blurred. The two modes of writing interact and in the process inform and critique each other.
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Robb, Simon. "Fictocritical sentences." 2001, 2001. http://web4.library.adelaide.edu.au/theses/09PH/09phr631.pdf.
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Includes bibliographical references (leaves 166-168). CD-ROMs comprise: Appendix A. Family values: fictocritical sentences -- appendix C. Reforming the boy: fictocritical sentences Primarily enacts a fictocritical mapping of local cultural events essentially concerned with crime and trauma in Adelaide. The fictocritical treatment of these events simulates their unresolved or traumatised condition. A secondary concern is the relationship between electronic writing (hypertext) and fictocriticism.
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Melano, Anne. "On divergence in fantasy." Master's thesis, Australia : Macquarie University, 2006. http://hdl.handle.net/1959.14/17998.
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The original thesis contains the novel "Stranger, I" as an integral part of the thesis. However this novel has been omitted in this digital copy.Thesis (MA (Hons))--Macquarie University, Division of Humanities, Department of English, 2006.
Bibliography: p. 93-97.
On divergence in fantasy -- Introduction -- Preliminary -- The thousand and one definitional nights -- Characteristic works: inclusions and exclusions -- Critical objections to fantasy -- Conclusion.
On Divergence in Fantasy explores the ways in which fantasy criticism continually redefines its boundaries, without arriving at agreement. The paper draws on Foucault to suggest that these disputes and dispersions are characteristic of the operation of fantasy critisim as a discursive formation.
Mode of access: World Wide Web.
97 p
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Barnett, Vanessa. "Tasha: A practice-based problematisation of Australian comedy cinema’s representation of gender, family and nationhood." Thesis, Edith Cowan University, Research Online, Perth, Western Australia, 2014. https://ro.ecu.edu.au/theses/1411.
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Between 2007 and 2012, 140 fictional feature films were financed with the assistance of Australian film funding bodies. Of these 140 films, only 31 featured female protagonists and of these 31 films, only 8 were comedies (see Appendix B). These figures show statistically, Tasha, the creative film component of this research project, is not a typical Australian comedy film; it is the story of Tasha, an unemployed girl from Girrawheen in her early twenties, who has lost her sense of identity. As Australian films such as Little Fish¸ Candy, Jedda and Muriel’s Wedding would suggest, this is certainly not an uncommon premise in Australian national cinema. However, this is not all there is to know about Tasha; she is preoccupied, not by a love interest or by a drug addiction, but by ninjutsu, and vigilantism. This is where Tasha finds its unique approach to Australian cinema’s historic treatment of the woman-centred narrative. That said, beneath Tasha’s unconventional surface arguably lies a truly Australian comedy film.
The exegesis component of this project re-interprets Bazin’s question, “Qu'est-ce que le cinéma?” (What is cinema?), with a theoretical framework inspired by Australian film theorist Tom O’Regan’s influential text, Australian National Cinema. The exegesis begins by looking at Australian national cinema as a whole, then narrowing the focus to Australian comedy cinema. O’Regan (1996) describes Australian cinema as a national cinema; a cinema that embodies Australian culture, society and history. The focus is on Australian comedy film texts, and their social, political and cultural contexts. Tasha, the creative film project, is what O’Regan would term a “problematisation” of Australian comedy cinema.
The key argument of this project is that Australian national comedy films are uniquely Australian, cinematic explorations of individual identity, socio-cultural identity, landscape and family. Australia laughs about what it knows best, these four narrative and aesthetic preoccupations being central to Australian socio-cultural values and attitudes, to understanding the concept of Australianness. Australian comedy cinema is a problematic genre unto itself. The theoretical component of this project is a profile of Australian comedy cinema’s homogenised representation of Australianness. Tasha is then presented as an alternative. This investigation aims to both improve, and demonstrate an understanding of Australian comedy cinema as a problematisation of gender, culture, landscape, family and identity.
Tasha responds to the research question, “What is Australian comedy cinema?” by revealing that even an Australian action comedy with exciting stunts and fight scenes, is still a story of an individual’s sense of identity, family, and place. Such stories are arguably the hallmark of Australian comedy cinema; this carries a uniquely Australian sense of quirkiness. It remains the domain of the underdog: the battlers, larrikins, and of course the ockers. It still carries the same messages; never forget who you are, who your friends and family are, or where you came from. Despite its unconventional narrative, subject matter, soundtrack and aesthetics, Tasha proves to be no exception; it is still easily identified as a truly Australian comedy film.
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Lyssa, Alison. "Performing Australia's black and white history: acts of danger in four Australian plays of the early 21 century." 2006. http://hdl.handle.net/1959.14/714.
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Submitted in fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Masters in English in the Division of Humanities, Dept. of English, 2006.Thesis (MA)--Macquarie University (Division of Humanities, Department of English), 2006.
Bibliography: p. 199-210.
Introduction -- Defiance and servility in Andrew Bovell's Holy day -- Writing a reconciled nation: Katherine Thomson's Wonderlands -- Transformation of trauma: Tammy Anderson's I don't wanna play house -- The rage inside the pain: Richard J. Frankland's Conversations with the dead -- Conclusion: towards an understanding of witness to the trauma of invasion.
In an Australia shaped by neo-conservative government and by searing contention, national and global, over what the past is, how it should be allowed to affect the present and who are authentic bearers of witness, this thesis compares testimony to Australia's black/white relations in two plays by white writers, Andrew Bovell's 'Holy day' (2001) and Katherne Thomson's 'Wonderlands' (2003), and two black writers, Tammy Anderson's 'I don't wanna play house' (2001) and Richard J. Frankland's 'Conversations witht the dead' (2002).
Mode of access: World Wide Web.
210 p. ill. 30 cm
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Barker, Heather Isabel. "A critical history of writing on Australian contemporary art, 1960-1988." 2005. http://repository.unimelb.edu.au/10187/7134.
Full textAbstract:
This thesis examines art critical writing on contemporary Australian art published between 1960 and 1988 through the lens of its engagement with its location, looking at how it directly or indirectly engaged with the issues arising from Australia's so-called peripheral position in relation to the would-be hegemonic centre. I propose that Australian art criticism is marked by writers' acceptances of the apparent explanatory necessity of constructing appropriate nationalist discourses, evident in different and succeeding types of nationalist agendas, each with links to external, non-artistic agendas of nation and politics. I will argue that the nationalist parameters and trajectory of Australian art writing were set by Australian art historian, Bernard Smith, and his book Australian Painting, 1788-1960 (1962) and that the history of Australian art writing from the 1960s onwards was marked by a succession of nationalist rather than artistic agendas formed, in turn, by changing experiences of the Cold War. Through this, I will begin to provide a critical framework that has not effectively existed so far, due to the binary terror of regionalism versus internationalism.Chapter One focuses on Bernard Smith and the late 1950s and early 1960s Australian intellectual context in which Australian Painting 1788-1960 was published. I will argue that, although it can be claimed that Australia was a postcolonial society, the most powerful political and social influence during the 1950s and 1960s was the Cold War and that this can be identified in Australian art criticism and Australian art. Chapter Two discusses art theorist, Donald Brook. Brook is of particular interest because he kept his art writing separate from his theories of social and political issues, focussing on contemporary art and artists. I argue that Brook's failure to engage with questions of nation and Australian identity directly ensured that he remained a respected but marginal figure in the history of Australian art writing. Chapter Three returns to the centre/periphery issue and examines the art writing of Patrick McCaughey and Terry Smith. Each of these writers dealt with the issue of the marginality of Australian art but neither writer questioned the validity of the centre/periphery model.
Chapter Four examines six Australian art magazines that came into existence in the 1970s, a decade of high hopes and deep disillusionment. The chapter maps two shifts of emphasis in Australian art writing. First, the change from the previous preoccupation with provincialism to pluralist social issues such as feminism, and second, the resulting gravitation of individual writers into ideological alliances and/or administrative collectives that founded, ran and supported magazines that printed material that focused on (usually Australian) art in relation to specific social, cultural or political issues. Chapter Five concentrates on the Australian art magazine, Art & Text, and Paul Taylor, its founder and editor. Taylor and his magazine were at the centre of a new Australian attempt to solve the provincialism problem and thus break free of the centre/periphery model.
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Shoemaker, Adam. "Black words, white page : the nature and history of Aboriginal literature, 1929-1984." Phd thesis, 1985. http://hdl.handle.net/1885/139397.
Full text
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Lawrenson, Anna Louise. "Flesh + blood : appropriation and the critique of Australian colonial history in recent art practice." Phd thesis, 2007. http://hdl.handle.net/1885/110373.
Full textAbstract:
In the final two decades of the twentieth century Australian society was preoccupied with its
own history. So ubiquitous was this interest, that bookshops were crammed with popular
histories and historical fictions, TV networks aired historical re-enactments and devoted
whole series to its exploration and re-creation. In part, this increased awareness of history
was stimulated by the 200-year anniversary of white settlement simultaneously celebrated by
many non-Indigenous Australians and condemned by Indigenous protestors. Throughout the
1990s the debate over historical fact and its place within society- or the 'history wars' - took
centre stage moving beyond academic circles and into political and public discourse. At the
heart of this debate was what Bain Attwood called the 'new history', which incorporated the
hitherto absent perspectives of Indigenous Australians. This new version of history examined
discrepancies between dominant settler accounts of historical events and those provided by
Indigenous people, often in the form of oral testimony. A more vocal Indigenous population
also forced these new perspectives on Australian history into being, as increased calls for
land rights recognition and social justice became prominent.
The debate was so prominent that it permeated many areas of Australian society, the visual
arts provides one such example. This thesis is concerned with how the popularisation of
history was contended in the visual arts. I argue that Australian artists have used
appropriation as an effective means of engaging in a discourse on colonialism; of
communicating with the past, and of ensuring that that past remained a highly visible
concern of the present Through its reliance on existing images, appropriation enables artists
to condense the space between the quoted image and their new work. It therefore demands
that the quoted image be seen as a concern of the present. This strategy was implemented by
a significant number of Indigenous and non-Indigenous Australian practitioners during the
last two decades of the twentieth century. Moreover, it provides an important point of
intersection between the artistic practice of Indigenous and non-Indigenous artists. Rather
than seeking to document the history of appropriation in Australia, this thesis is concerned
with highlighting how appropriation has become the basis of a critical commentary on
historical narratives of colonialism.
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Chion, Loretta Ravera. "The female dilemma : subversion and art in some novels by Australian women writers." Master's thesis, 1986. http://hdl.handle.net/1885/139376.
Full text
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Capili, Jose Wendell P. "Migrations and mediations : the emergence of Southeast Asian diaspora writers in Australia, 1972-2006." Phd thesis, 2007. http://hdl.handle.net/1885/150957.
Full text
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Jewell, Melinda R., University of Western Sydney, College of Arts, and School of Communication Arts. "The representation of dance in Australian novels : the darkness beyond the stage-lit dream." 2008. http://handle.uws.edu.au:8081/1959.7/39463.
Full textAbstract:
Many Australian novelists since the late 1890s have written about dance in varied and interesting ways. Characters in many Australian novels are portrayed dancing on stage, dancing within the context of their everyday lives, watching corroborees, reminiscing about social dance events in distant homelands or gyrating under flashing lights at discos and raves. In other instances the word “dance” (or an associated term) is used metaphorically to convey actual or imagined movement such as the wind dancing in trees, or thoughts dancing in characters’ minds. Although representations of dance in Australian novels portray qualities such as vitality, beauty and transcendence, this thesis argues that they also elucidate a shadowland of pain and suffering and sometimes an uncertainty about Australian culture and identity. Indigenous dancers are scrutinised critically by non-Indigenous spectators. Despite the bright lights and glamour of their world, professional dancers are shown to struggle against the persistence of the cultural cringe. Unflattering notions of class and gender taint the excitement and romance of social dance occasions, migrant characters associate dance with painful memories of abandoned homelands and dancers performing professionally or privately risk being labelled mad, feminine or homosexual (or all three). The metaphorical use of the word dance does not always portray vital movement but often conveys heaviness, awkwardness and even imminent collapse. Descriptions of dance are minimalist to the point where the dance almost disappears from the reader’s view. As well as making dance in Australian novels visible, the investigation conducted in this thesis sharpens awareness of its negative or “shadow” side and challenges the widespread critical glorification of the presence of dance in literature more generally.Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)
30
Robertson, Judith Smyth. "Australian lexicography 1880-1910." Phd thesis, 2005. http://hdl.handle.net/1885/151727.
Full text
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Taylor, Johnson Heather. "And the Word was Song: a novel." 2006. http://hdl.handle.net/2440/47791.
Full textAbstract:
v. 1 [Novel]: And the Word was Song [Embargoed] -- v. 2 [Exegesis]: The return to mother: exegesis accompanying the novel: And the Word was SongThe novel manuscript And the Word was Song is a work in five parts, structurally (and very loosely) mirroring the first five books of The Old Testament. It is the story of Lily May, a young woman who travels around the world trying to find meaning in her life after her prostitute, heroin-addicted mother has died. Throughout her journeys, Lily May comes into contact with people who have issues with sex and / or addiction, always forcing her to remember her mother, a loving yet entirely flawed woman. Some of her fellow travellers are neglected children; some are street-smart gypsies; some are lovers; all are unknowingly Lily May’s mother substitutes. Through an impending birth, a return to her childhood home and an unexpected discovery of a half-sister, Lily May is able to end her journey and accept her mother for who she was: an imperfect woman who gave birth to her, then loved and cared for her the best that she could. The story is about spirituality, sexuality, love, addiction, acquiescence — and Elvis. Ultimately it is about mothers. The exegetical essay is a reflection on the journey from daughter to mother. I discuss the structuring of my novel manuscript and explore ways in which memory is accessed in the recreation of the maternal bond. Through an imaginary conversation with my mother about the legitimacy of psychoanalysis in re-evaluating mothers and maternity, I look at three concepts of mother substitution, considering ways in which the subconscious reconstructs the mother in the relationships women have. I deliberate on homecomings, both literary and personal, and consider the ethics of using my mother’s stories to further my own story.
Thesis (PhD) -- School of Humanities, 2006
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Heley, Matthew. ""Men made out of words": reading men writing masculinities in Australian literature." Thesis, 1996. http://hdl.handle.net/2440/110812.
Full textAbstract:
This study of some Australian literary texts covers Rod Jones ("Julia Paradise"), David Brooks ("The book of Sei"), Robert Drewe ("A cry in the jungle bar"), George Johnston ("My brother Jack") and Patrick White ("The Twyborn affair")Thesis (M.A.) -- University of Adelaide, Dept. of English Language and Literature, 1996
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Harrow, Janet Gail. "Flight." 2006. http://hdl.handle.net/2440/56815.
Full textAbstract:
Title page and synopsis only v.2; Title page, table of contents and abstract only. The complete thesis in print form is available from the University of Adelaide Library.Abstract from Exegesis: As writers create stories within fragile and contested territories, they are often confronted by difficult ethical questions. When the lives of people from different cultures, races and genders intersect, whose story should be told? Does the person of white, European ancestry have the right to tell his/her part of that story? Does a man have the right to tell a woman's story? If so, from whose point of view? If not, should stories be peopled only with one's own race, one's own gender? Must a person of mixed identity write only about one race, one ethnicity? If so, which one? What is the responsibility of the writer to create stories of the world she/he observes and lives in rather than the ideal one in which most of us would like to live? How does the writer construct writing practices that embody theoretical and ideological values without privileging polemic over artistic integrity? These questions are not just philosophical for me as a writer. The answers determine what I will or will not permit myself to write, especially since I want to approach story-telling with a sensitive eye to the power of literature to show readers a world of diverse and intersecting experiences. This essay explores the responses to such questions by a number of highly respected international writers whose work has informed my writing. It also looks at the ethical use point of view as a strategy for entering the space of intersecting human experiences within contested geographic and political terrain.
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Thesis (Ph.D.) -- University of Adelaide, School of Humanities, 2006
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Cleave, Kaye L. "Gifts from Catherine." 2006. http://hdl.handle.net/2440/56813.
Full textAbstract:
Title page, contents and abstract only. The complete thesis in print form is available from the University of Adelaide Library.The memoir dealing with the 1st year following her daughter’s death, has developed from 5 personal essays on grief submitted for a Master of Fine Arts in Writing, University of San Francisco, 1992 and is intended to honour her daughter’s life and tell her own story. The exegesis: The ethics of life writing, grew out of the questions explored in the process of writing the memoir: What does it mean to write the ’truth’?; What must I consider when writing about others?; and, Should I reveal information that is regarded as secret or private?
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Thesis (Ph.D.) -- University of Adelaide, School of Humanities, 2006
35
Behin, Bahram. "Aspects of the role of language in creating the literary effect : implications for the reading of Australian prose fiction / by Bahram Behin." Thesis, 1997. http://hdl.handle.net/2440/19041.
Full text
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Cleave, Kaye L. "Gifts from Catherine." Thesis, 2006. http://hdl.handle.net/2440/56813.
Full textAbstract:
The memoir dealing with the 1st year following her daughter’s death, has developed from 5 personal essays on grief submitted for a Master of Fine Arts in Writing, University of San Francisco, 1992 and is intended to honour her daughter’s life and tell her own story. The exegesis: The ethics of life writing, grew out of the questions explored in the process of writing the memoir: What does it mean to write the ’truth’?; What must I consider when writing about others?; and, Should I reveal information that is regarded as secret or private?Thesis (Ph.D.) -- University of Adelaide, School of Humanities, 2006
37
Taylor, Johnson Heather. "And the Word was Song: a novel." Thesis, 2006. http://hdl.handle.net/2440/47791.
Full textAbstract:
v. 1 [Embargoed] And the Word was Song : Novel -- v. 2 The return to mother: exegesis accompanying the novelThe novel manuscript And the Word was Song is a work in five parts, structurally (and very loosely) mirroring the first five books of The Old Testament. It is the story of Lily May, a young woman who travels around the world trying to find meaning in her life after her prostitute, heroin-addicted mother has died. Throughout her journeys, Lily May comes into contact with people who have issues with sex and / or addiction, always forcing her to remember her mother, a loving yet entirely flawed woman. Some of her fellow travellers are neglected children; some are street-smart gypsies; some are lovers; all are unknowingly Lily May’s mother substitutes. Through an impending birth, a return to her childhood home and an unexpected discovery of a half-sister, Lily May is able to end her journey and accept her mother for who she was: an imperfect woman who gave birth to her, then loved and cared for her the best that she could. The story is about spirituality, sexuality, love, addiction, acquiescence — and Elvis. Ultimately it is about mothers. The exegetical essay is a reflection on the journey from daughter to mother. I discuss the structuring of my novel manuscript and explore ways in which memory is accessed in the recreation of the maternal bond. Through an imaginary conversation with my mother about the legitimacy of psychoanalysis in re-evaluating mothers and maternity, I look at three concepts of mother substitution, considering ways in which the subconscious reconstructs the mother in the relationships women have. I deliberate on homecomings, both literary and personal, and consider the ethics of using my mother’s stories to further my own story.
Thesis (Ph.D.) -- University of Adelaide, School of Humanities, 2006
38
Hooton, Fiona Art History & Art Education College of Fine Arts UNSW. "The impact of the counterculture on Australian cinema in the mid to late 20th century." 2007. http://handle.unsw.edu.au/1959.4/41008.
Full textAbstract:
This thesis discusses the impact of the counterculture on Australian cinema in the late 20thcentury through the work of the Sydney Underground Film group, Ubu. This group, active between 1965 -1970, was a significant part of an underground counter culture, to which many young Australians subscribed. As a group, Ubu was more than a rat bag assemblage of University students. It was an antipodean aspect of an ongoing artistic and political movement that began with the European avant-garde at the beginning of the 20th century and that radically transformed artistic conventions in theatre, painting, literature, photography and film. Three purposes underpin this thesis: firstly to track the art historical links between a European avant-garde heritage and Ubu. Experimental film is a genre that is informed by cross art form interrelations between theatre, painting, literature, photography and film and the major modernist aesthetic philosophies of the last century. Ubu's revolutionary aesthetic approaches included political resistance and the involvement of audiences in the production of art. Their creative wellspring drew from: Alfred Jarry, Dadaism, Surrealism, Futurism, Fluxus, Conceptual and Pop art. This cross fertilization between the arts is critical to understanding not only the Australian experimental movement but the history of contemporary image making. The second purpose is to fill a current void of research about early Australian Experimental film. This is a significant gap given it was a national movement with many international connections. The counterculture movement also contains many major figures in Australian art history. These individuals played their parts in the Sydney Push, Oz magazine and the activities of the Yellow House and have since become important multi arts practitioners and commentators. Thirdly, the thesis attempts to evaluate Ubu's political and social agenda for the democratization of film appreciation through their objectives of: production, exhibition, distribution and debate of experimental film both nationally and internationally. Ultimately the group would succeed in these objectives and in winning the war on repressive censorship laws. Their influence has informed the practice of many of Australia's current film heavy weights. Two key films have been selected for analysis, It Droppeth as the Gentle Rain (1963) and Newsfront (1978). The first looks forward to Ubu's contemporary practices and political agenda while the second demonstrates their longer term influences on mainstream cinema.
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Byrne, Trevor Lindon. "The problem of the past : the treatment of history in the novels of Peter Carey and David Malouf / Trevor Byrne." 2001. http://hdl.handle.net/2440/20325.
Full textAbstract:
Includes errata tipped in between leaf 224 and 225.Bibliography: leaves 226-238.
238 leaves ; 30 cm
Title page, contents and abstract only. The complete thesis in print form is available from the University Library.
Thesis (Ph.D.)--Adelaide University, Dept. of English, 2001
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Byrne, Trevor Lindon. "The problem of the past : the treatment of history in the novels of Peter Carey and David Malouf / Trevor Byrne." Thesis, 2001. http://hdl.handle.net/2440/20325.
Full text
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Bartlett, Anne 1951. "Knitting a novel : a retrospective view, and Knitting : a novel / Anne Bartlett." 2006. http://hdl.handle.net/2440/22312.
Full textAbstract:
Includes the novel and exegetical essay.With: "Knitting a novel" in the back section of the volume bound upside down.
Bibliography: p. 92-97.
97, 244 p. ; 30cm.
Title page, contents and abstract only. The complete thesis in print form is available from the University Library.
Thesis (Ph.D.)--University of Adelaide, School of Humanities and Social Sciences, Discipline of English, Creative Writing, 2006
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Walker, Malcolm. "The stone crown : a novel." 2007. http://hdl.handle.net/2440/56818.
Full textAbstract:
Title page and prologue v.2; Title page, table of contents and abstract only. The complete thesis in print form is available from the University of Adelaide Library."The stone crown is, in part, a contemporary reworking of the Arthurian legend." -- abstract, [v. 2], p. v.
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Thesis (Ph.D.) -- University of Adelaide, School of Humanities, 2007
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Bolton, Ken 1949. "At the flash & at the baci." 2003. http://web4.library.adelaide.edu.au/theses/09PH/09phb6943.pdf.
Full textAbstract:
"August 2003." Includes bibliographical references (leaves 166-177) Pt. 1. At the flash & at the baci: contents, poems, notes to poems -- pt. 2. Exegetical essay: note on the text, essay: How I remember writing some of my poems - why, even Consists principally of poems. The collection does not pursue any particular theme. It is organized chronologically. An exegetical essay written as a poem forms the second part of the thesis. The essay does not explain the poem's 'meanings' to any great extent but considers the poems' relation to each other and to poems written in the past.
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Bolton, Ken 1949. "At the flash & at the baci / Ken Bolton." Thesis, 2003. http://hdl.handle.net/2440/21996.
Full textAbstract:
"August 2003."Includes bibliographical references (leaves 166-177)
2 v. (131, 177 leaves) ; 30 cm.
Consists principally of poems. The collection does not pursue any particular theme. It is organized chronologically. An exegetical essay written as a poem forms the second part of the thesis. The essay does not explain the poem's 'meanings' to any great extent but considers the poems' relation to each other and to poems written in the past.
Thesis (Ph.D.)--University of Adelaide, Dept. of English, 2003
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Dalley, Hamish. "Postcolonialism and the historical novel : allegorical realism and contemporary literature of the past in Nigeria, Australia and New Zealand." Phd thesis, 2013. http://hdl.handle.net/1885/155168.
Full textAbstract:
The historical novel is one of the most prominent modes of contemporary writing in the former British Empire, yet the genre's postcolonial variant has not been the subject of critical analysis in its own right. This neglect can be explained by the dominance of a "resistance paradigm" in postcolonial studies, which tends to equate realism with naive mimesis and thus treats the historical novel as either a vehicle for imperialist ideology or a site of discursive conflict over the meaning of the past. As a result, the genre's epistemological and aesthetic complexities have been marginalised. This thesis responds to this neglect by critically analysing examples of the historical novel published since 2000 in Nigeria, Australia, and New Zealand. Historicised close analysis reveals that notwithstanding the anti-mimetic presumptions of much contemporary postcolonial criticism, and despite differences arising from contextual particularities, these texts are shaped by a common "realist impulse" that frames their narratives as defensible interpretations of the past. This ethical obligation to evidence-based interpretation has formal and epistemological consequences that manifest in an aesthetic framework I call allegorical realism. This term names a mode of representation in which fictional elements oscillate between ontological and conceptual registers in ways that simultaneously produce empathetically-unsettling relations to imagined individuals and interpretations of macro-historical change. This combination of affect and abstraction defines the genre as one based neither around assumptions about the transparency of language, nor overly pessimistic views that knowledge of the past is unachievable. I show that focusing analysis on allegorical realism allows critical attention to move away from its exclusive concern with textual resistance and instead explore how the genre is inflected by the various narratives it mediates and the specificities of postcolonial contexts. This research identifies three main variants of the contemporary postcolonial historical novel, each characterised by a different modulation of allegorical realism. Settler allegory comprises texts like Kate Grenville's The Secret River (2005) and Fiona Kidman's The Captive Wife (2006), in which colonists' alienation from occupied territory is reflected formally in the undercutting of allegorical procedures that align imaginary characters with their settings. Transnational historical novels, by contrast, stretch the spatio-temporal coordinates of allegorical realism to encompass processes taking place in global settings. This generates aesthetic effects that link apparently dissimilar novels like Witi Ihimaera's The Trowenna Sea (2009) and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's Half of a Yellow Sun (2006). Finally, melancholy realism describes texts like Chris Abani's Song for Night (2007) and Richard Flanagan's Gould's Book of Fish (2001)-texts which disrupt the boundaries between past and present to unsettle postcolonial complacency. Tracing allegorical realism across these modes reveals how postcolonial concerns continue to recreate the genre, and how the oscillation of the allegorical signifier can challenge dominant accounts of historical change. The genre provides a significant archive for exploring how postcolonial literature is characterised by disjunctive temporalities irreducible to dominant narratives of modernity, while nonetheless being shaped by processes that link the globalised world.
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Bugeja, Anthony, and Anthony Special risks Bugeja. "The Exegesis: a dissertation on the novel 'Special risks' / Tony Bugeja." 2004. http://hdl.handle.net/2440/22070.
Full textAbstract:
"March 2004"Errata sheet back page in both volumes.
Bibliography: leaf 65.
2 v. (v, 65 leaves, 244 leaves) ; 30 cm.
Title page, contents and abstract only. The complete thesis in print form is available from the University Library.
Thesis (Ph.D.)--University of Adelaide, School of Humanities, Discipline of English, 2004
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Hart, Alexander. "Writing the Diaspora : a bibliography and critical commentary on post-Shoah English-language fiction in Australia, South Africa, and Canada." Thesis, 1996. http://hdl.handle.net/2429/6638.
Full textAbstract:
In the aftermath of the Shoah (Holocaust)—the mass murder of 6,000,000
Jews—Jean-Paul Sartre wrote Reflexions sur la Question Juive (1946), in which he
concluded that the fate of the Jews, the fate of the individual non-Jew, and the fate of the entire world are inextricably and reciprocally intertwined. Building on Sartre's perception, Portrait of a Jew (1962) and The Liberation of the Jew (1966) describe what the author, Albert Memmi, terms "the universal Jewish fate": that of being the paradigmatic "colonized" Other—insofar as the Jews are a particularly oppressed minority, that is, their
marginalization epitomizes the fate of all humanity. Further, Memmi argues both that "to be a Jewish writer is ... to express the Jewish fate" and that a "true Jewish literature" is necessarily one which revolts against the imposition and acceptance of this fate. Sartre's
and Memmi's insights posit that Jewish consciousness acts upon both national and world consciousness. Memmi suggests that one means of expressing the Jewish consciousness is through literature. In their imaginative interpretations of the post-Shoah interconnections between the Jew, the nation, and the world, modern Jewish fiction writers of the Diaspora (dispersion)
—at least those whose work foregrounds tropes of Jewish sensibility, incorporating Jewish characters and themes—often delineate a world which, in the aftermath of Auschwitz, is socially and existentially even more precarious than it was before the war. This study examines post-Shoah Jewish consciousness and its relation to national/world consciousness,as represented in the English-language Jewish fiction of Australia, South Africa, and Canada, Commonwealth countries whose diverse Jewish literatures have been overshadowed by the predominant English-language Jewish literary culture of the U.S.A. The structure of this study is bipartite. Part B is an indexed Bibliography enumerating primary works by Jewish prose fiction writers of Australia, Canada, and South Africa. Part A is a critical commentary on Part B. The Introduction (Chapter 1) outlines the
theoretical bases for the study. The three following chapters scrutinize Jewish Australian (Chapter 2), Jewish South African (Chapter 3), and Jewish Canadian (Chapter 4) fiction. Among the writers considered are Australians B.N. Jubal, Judah Waten, David Martin, Morris Lurie, Serge Liberman, and Lily Brett; South Africans Nadine Gordimer, Dan Jacobson, Jillian Becker, Antony Sher, and Rose Zwi; and Canadians Henry Kreisel, A.M. Klein, Adele Wiseman, Mordecai Richler, and Robert Majzels. Each of these three chapters follows a similar format: a description of the origin, history, and demography of the Jewish community; an outline of the important pre-World War II Jewish fiction writers and their work; an examination of representative post-Shoah works; and concluding remarks about
the ways in which the works under consideration here contest and revise both the canons of nation and national literature and the very concepts of nation, canon, and canon-making. An Epilogue (Chapter 5) contextualizes the thematic patterns common to the Jewish fiction of the three countries and suggests ways in which this fiction can be located within the larger framework of Jewish Literature.
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Wright, Wendy Ella. "Intangible gifts : a novel with accompanying exegesis ’Japan, the love story and myself’." Thesis, 2007. http://hdl.handle.net/2440/61983.
Full textAbstract:
Title page, table of contents and abstract only. The complete thesis in print form is available from the University of Adelaide Library.The story is set in a small Australian city where there are strong undercurrents of religious and racial discrimination. Rosanna, the protagonist, narrates her life through fragments of memory, drawing upon her experience as a child and young woman in Australia and Japan. Her understanding of home is a major theme in the novel.
Thesis (Ph.D.) -- University of Adelaide, School of Humanities, 2007
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Butler, Nancy. "Male and female relationships in Australian fiction 1917-1956." Thesis, 1990. https://vuir.vu.edu.au/18148/.
Full textAbstract:
My purpose in this study is to examine a number of
Australian novels which portray love relationships between
men and women, and to suggest some reasons for the quality of
these relationships as fictionally depicted. Traditionally,
Australian culture has been male dominated, therefore,
central to the culture are stereotypes of the masculine and
the feminine. Sexism in Australia and the gender stereotypes
which legitimize it have been recognised generally both by
historians and sociologists. Miriam Dixson and Anne Summers
have presented strong analyses of the effects of sexism in
Australian society, both past and present; even a nonfeminist
historian such as Manning Clark notes not only male dominance,
but the development of social humiliations to which men subject women. Manning Clark traces a possible
connection between this male dominance and the
disproportionate number of male to female convicts. Dixson
argues that the male convicts demeaned their female
ounterparts unconsciously as a means of compensating for
their own lowly positions. This, she argues, resulted in
the majority of women in early generations of white
settlement internalizing a negative self-image as the
defining trait of a sense of self, in contrast to the
potential positive 'real' self which her humanist
psychological orientation assumes. She attributes the main
problem to the men who settled in Australia as convicts,
rejects, and negative and resentful administrators. Likewise,
Summers has posed a socialist-feminist analysis to identify
the means of women's oppression in a patriarchal society.
She also argues that the problem lies with male power and
female colonization. But both writers recognise that women
accept their inferior status within patriarchy unconsciously,
and conform to patriarchal stereotypes of female sexuality.
Kay Schaffer has restated this case, though from the
viewpoint of more recent developments of social theory which reject the assumption of a 'real' self. Nevertheless,
these and others recognize that sexism has existed in
Australian culture since white settlement.
This sexism is shown in the depiction of love relationships in Australian fiction. However, I shall make a
distinction between writing that depicts sexism critically as
an element of Australian society/culture and writing that is
informed by sexism in its depiction of love relationships.
However, this is not a firm and definitive way of
distinguishing between works, because they may contain
elements of both factors.
50
Bowan, Kate. "Musical mavericks : the work of Roy Agnew and Hooper Brewster-Jones as an Australian counterpart to European modern music 1906-1949." Phd thesis, 2007. http://hdl.handle.net/1885/109691.
Full textAbstract:
In 1920 the Lone Hand reported that Sydney composer Roy Agnew (1891-1944) had “after
much anxious consideration been forced to abandon the limitations of key and tonal
relationship.” For this transgression, he was branded, among other things, a musical
Bolshevik. Three years later in Adelaide, Hooper Brewster-Jones (1887-1949) wrote the first
of his “formula” pieces which are part of a larger body of works that experiment with various
aspects of musical language. In this thesis, I will argue that together certain works of these
two isolated composers constitute an instance of what is known in conventional music history
terms as “progressive” or “innovative” music. As such it can be seen as part of the wider
international scene concerned with developing new means of musical expression at this time.
This significant fact has been overlooked by musicologists and historians dealing with this
interwar period, long dismissed as stagnant, producing only second-rate work: a pale
imitation of British pastoralism and “light” salon music. This study seeks to revise that longaccepted
story and show that there was an Australian musical intelligentsia in the early
decades of last century.
Drawing from a wide array of primary sources, including contemporary newspapers,
journals, letters, memoirs, unpublished music manuscripts and other archival material, I will
first, through analysis of selected works, demonstrate how the music fits into a broader
international framework, then, using biography as a lens, reconstruct their worlds in Sydney,
Adelaide and London, describing networks and important relationships that provide a context
for this music, and finally examine aspects of the two composers’ public output such as
performance, radio broadcasts and newspaper criticism that strengthen the picture of these
two composers as individuals who enthusiastically engaged with international modernism.
Central themes that emerge to underpin the study of these two figures are: the relationship
between exoticism, occultism and modernism (demonstrating that exoticism and occultism
were driving forces behind the development of early modernism); exoticism as a process by
which that from the outside is brought into and reinterpreted for the local and particular; an
interpretation of the diverse meanings and uses of that much-contested term modernism; and
the broad informal network of dissemination, communication and bi-directional influence
offered by the transnational British world and direct engagement with America and Europe.