Tesi sul tema "Short stories, Australian"

This thesis offers a critical survey and a comprehensive bibliography of the Australian short story in the 1980s. Conceived partly as an continuation of Stephen Torre’s study of Australian short fiction of the 1940-1980 period, it starts where Torre’s thesis stopped, focusing on Australian short story writing published in the ten years between 1981 and 1990. Torre has summed up the 1940-1980 period as ‘a time of development and innovation’ in the history of Australian short fiction. In comparison, the 1980s is probably best described as a decade of unprecedented expansion and diversification. During that time, Australian short fiction broke away from its earlier domination by monolithic traditions and became a much more eclectic and pluralistic form. Contributing to this eclecticism and plurality were five different streams of story writing created by five separate groups of writers. Due to constraints of space, the critical text of the thesis examines only four of them.

The problem with which this thesis is concerned is the relationship between literature and politics. By means of a biographical and historical study two significant writers of the 1930s/40s I examine the ways in which the pressures of Depression, the threat of fascism and the onset of war influenced Australian writing. In particular, I ask whether the political issues of the period affected what these authors wrote and how they wrote it. My conclusion is that pressure of political concern caused significant personal, philosophical and political changes in Barnard and Davison, and that it affected both the genre in which they wrote and the content of their fiction. They turned from fiction to cultural commentary, historical writing, political pamphleteering and activism. They utilised short fiction as a means of discussing their worries about the state of the world and in order to promote values they felt threatened. When they returned to longer fiction their work bore, to differing degrees, in its ideas, arguments and imagery, the influence of their political engagement. More generally, I conclude that liberal humanism was the major animating philosophy of writers in the 1930s and that their concern with political issues grew from their conviction that western liberal democracy was the most fruitful soil for the production of art, a climate of freedom which they felt threatened by both fascism and war. This anxiety is the most important factor in both their politicisation and the work they did under the latter???s influence.

This collection of short stories is about being a twenty-something in the 90s, trying to get by, have a little fun and make somewhat of a mark in the process. It’s about the process of growing up, and the seemingly desperate need to hold onto all those youthful pursuits. It’s about finding out that life as an adult tries to suck the life out of you, rather than allowing you to suck the life out of it. That constant struggle, the battle of wills between attending to your needs or just satisfying your wants. This is a time for you when your needs and wants are siblings, bickering in the back of the car on a long drive up the coast. The characters in these stories are having their good time while it lasts. Avoiding the inevitable: maturity, responsibility, adulthood. And so they should. After all, these aren’t called ‘the best years of our lives’ for nothing. The stories celebrate your life as a twenty-something.

This thesis is a broadly chronological study of representations of Japan and the Japanese in Australian novels, stories and memoirs from the late nineteenth century to the twenty-first century. Adopting Edward Said???s Orientalist notion of the `Other???, it attempts to elaborate patterns in which Australian authors describe and evaluate the Japanese. As well as examining these patterns of representation, this thesis outlines the course of their development and change over the years, how they relate to the context in which they occur, and how they contribute to the formation of wider Australian views on Japan and the Japanese. The thesis considers the role of certain Australian authors in formulating images and ideas of the Japanese ???Other???. These authors, ranging from fiction writers to journalists, scholars and war memoirists, act as observers, interpreters, translators, and sometimes ???traitors??? in their cross-cultural interactions. The thesis includes work from within and outside ???mainstream??? writings, thus expanding the contexts of Australian literary history. The major ???periods??? of Australian literature discussed in this thesis include: the 1880s to World War II; the Pacific War; the post-war period; and the multicultural period (1980s to 2000). While a comprehensive examination of available literature reveals the powerful and continuing influence of the Pacific War, images of ???the stranger???, ???the enemy??? and later ???the ally??? or ???partner??? are shown to vary according to authors, situations and wider international relations. This thesis also examines gender issues, which are often brought into sharp relief in cross-cultural representations. While typical East-West power-relationships are reflected in gender relations, more complex approaches are also taken by some authors. This thesis argues that, while certain patterns recur, such as versions of the ???Cho-Cho-San??? or ???Madame Butterfly??? story, Japan-related works have given some Australian authors, especially women, opportunities to reveal more ???liberated??? viewpoints than seemed possible in their own cultural context. As the first extensive study of Japan in Australian literary consciousness, this thesis brings to the surface many neglected texts. It shows a pattern of changing interests and interactions between two nations whose economic interactions have usually been explored more deeply than their literary and cultural relations.

This thesis examines ambivalence in the provision of intergenerational care to older Australians through analysing disciplinary and discursive literatures, reviewing fiction and memoir and writing an anthology of short stories about caring for older people. This enables a unique and complementary dialogue between two knowledges—one derived from official knowledge or institutional discourse about care and caring, the other from unofficial knowledge derived from fiction and memoir—to probe ambivalence more deeply.

This research project asserts the primacy of creative practice as a key method of enquiry and explores how fictional stories, re-imagined from historical events of the mid-twentieth century, may provide different ways of viewing a world which was inhabited by once-silenced children, now known as the ‘forgotten Australians’. To this end, the thesis is made up of a creative component in the form of a book-length collection of short fiction that is accompanied by a critical component positioning the thesis contextually, theoretically and methodologically. The research reveals overwhelming evidence of a culture of endemic abuse within Australian child welfare organisations whereby harm was done to children in the context of policies and programmes that were designed to provide care and protection. During this era, ideologies underpinning community beliefs were patriarchal, conservative and insular. It was purported that children were ‘committed’ to imposing, regimentally run institutions ‘for their own good’. The project draws on sources from disciplines including history, psychology and literary studies, as the investigation exposes the blurred boundaries which exist between fiction and nonfiction; personal and social memory; official and unofficial narratives; knowing and not-knowing the past. In doing so, it argues that although there can be no single narrative of history, fictional narratives provide another conduit into stories from the past and have the potential to act as agents for social change.

On the face of it, terms like 'the author,' the canon,' literature' - and its many sub-categories, 'lyrical poetry,' Australian short fiction,' and so on - appear simply to describe essential, objective, positive, things. While such terms are certainly descriptive, they have a much more fundamental function, in fact constructing the two main properties that make up cultural activity of a text-based kind: who can be thought of and who counts in cultural production; and what can be thought of what counts as a cultural product. Questions about who makes and values certain kinds of texts are questions about the nature of the cultural field in which agents and their products compete. They are questions which attempt to dislodge the view that literature can be thought of as a set of cultural products which exhibit special features (literary features) that can be identified by disinterested users of this literature. In order to answer such questions, as I try to do in Part 1, I have cast my net widely across a range of literary, sociological, historical and institutional theories to uncover some of the practices that determine how agents operate in the cultural field, to show how 'the author' and 'the text' are not simple, objective categories to be consumed by 'the reader.' Rather, 'the author,' the text' and 'the reader' are the outcomes of contests between various players, embedded for longer or shorter periods in the practices current in the field. So-called post-structuralist theory and the cultural theory of Michel Foucault, in problematising cultural production, provide a useful starting point for an examination in Chapter 1 of the problem of the author, authority and authorising as social practices. No longer free-standing and neutral, cultural producers and the texts they produce become interested parties in a cultural system. But such a view opens up a new set of problems: to do with the view of a cultural producer or text as a kind of automaton in the system; and to do with the question of the capacity for social agents to effect change in that system. I turn to social theory in order to explain how it is that social agents are more than the ghosts in the machine that post-structuralist theory might suggest, at once able to obey and to change the prescriptions that pre-exist at any particular cultural moment in which texts are used. To see why particular kinds of cultural agent and product characterise and endure in the cultural field requires an understanding of the historically constructed and institutional ways in which the field works. Writing and reading books are institutional practices and the agents who have, since the eighteenth century, been credited in western culture with the central place in this cultural production have, as I try to show in Chapter 2, continued to occupy this position by virtue of institutions which foreground writing as a product of the originary genius of the individual, autonomous and copyrightowning author. Authors, that is, are products of historically particular social practices which apply in the field of cultural production. They occupy a social position which has been reasonably durable, my focus in Chapter 3, because the chronically recurring commercial and pedagogical practices embedded in institutional behaviour continue to have a hand in the consecration of the individuals who achieve the name 'author' and in the initial production and subsequent valorising of particular 'literary' texts. My method in Part 2 is to examine several case studies in order to see how agents and institutions in the cultural field work in more detail. My focus is to show how short story anthologies, critical studies and other key practices construct 'Australian short fiction.' Anthologies are a major institution in the production and reproduction of the sub-field of 'Australian short fiction.' They help to determine what is to count as 'Australian short fiction,' who are to count as writers, editors and critics of 'Australian short fiction' and how 'Australian short fiction' is to be read. Apparently objective cultural landmarks like 'The Bulletin style,' Australian women's writing' and 'The Balmain school' - case studies examined in Chapters 4 and 5 - each owe a great deal to short story anthologies. Anthologies are not, of course, the only institutions that determine the sub-field, as I show in Chapter 6. Reference guides and critical studies function in the same way, determining, for example, what 'fiction' or 'the work of David Malouf means and how it is to be read. But the personnel who produce, deliver and consume certain kinds of content, the activity that dominates the sub-field of 'Australian short fiction,' are also maintained by means of other institutions, like 'small magazines,' Australia Council grants and 'Writers in Residence' programs, writers' festivals, and so on, my focus in Chapter 7. In the pages that follow I suggest that there is some kind of bedrock 'reality,' an objective mechanism that constructs the object called 'the cultural field' that my analysis has 'uncovered.' Besides this archaeological trope, a favourite of mine, my 'case studies' also imply a kind of quasi-scientific objectivity. Analytical 'study' stands outside, usually above, the 'cases' which I scrutinise in Part Two. But if I am right, if texts are the products of always contestable and historically contingent social practices, then the same must be true of my own text too: it is as much a case to be studied and, if studied, can be shown to be equally the product of always contestable and contingent social practices. This is not cause for panic, merely for caution. My thesis is not an attempt to get any closer to the truth, only to suggest how we might reorientate ourselves to some texts.

Research Doctorate - Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)
The creative component of this thesis is The Weight of a Human Heart, a collection of twenty short stories written in a variety of different styles, and utilising a number of diverse settings, from Africa to China to Australia. The collection is comprised of an equal number of realist and formally experimental short stories, including stories in the form of book reviews, homework assignments and graphs and charts. The critical exegesis maps out the major influences on The Weight of the Human Heart in the context of a survey of the Australian short story, an examination of metafiction, and a discussion of the work of James Joyce, Vladimir Nabokov and the Oulipo.

The thesis Deterrence Vivarium is made up of a creative component and an exegesis. The creative component is a collection of eight pieces of fiction ranging in style and length, from microfictions to short stories and concluding with a novella. The opening story “Amsterdam” begins with the protagonist attempting to deal with the disintegration and loss of a relationship. The world around them reflects this sense of decay and the central character’s helplessness in taking control in a world whose threat encroaches upon his very perception of the physical space around him. The story “ONFF” follows on by inviting the reader into the narrator’s willful misperception of the world around them, using a room in his parent’s house to teach found electronic objects a new way of thinking and being. “jesussaves82” is an online date gone wrong. Both participants are more concerned with the idea of connecting with another person, rather than thinking about who that person may be. With one of them acting like Jesus, it is bound to fail. “The Suitcase” is a story of memory in which the disappearance of a father and the finding of an old man with Alzheimer’s on the street coincide for a mother and child. “Deterrence Vivarium”, the title piece, looks at the method a couple on the cusp of retirement take to eradicate a series of older selves that are scaling their back wall and making camp in their yard. “To My Son” is an epistolary short story in which a father leaves a beautifying face brace patent for what he sees and declares is his ugly son. He hopes it will redeem with wealth his failure as a father so far. “Imago” finds the central character turned into a copy of Kafka’s Metamorphosis in the bedroom of a woman who took him home in a failed one-night stand. The final piece, “By Numbers”, is a novella that follows Callum Ryder, a man who has left his job for no particular reason beyond his dislike for his work. He redeems an offer for a free cosmetic procedure he found in his spam folder and finds himself entwined in the madness of Doctor Hensen and his elusive partner in their activities. The exegetical component acts as a critical map of the influences and motivations that are embedded in the creative process of the collection’s construction. It traces the relation of these pieces to a broader context, including the textual, the conceptual and social. It looks at the role and relationship of the exegesis and its purpose. And finally, draws out specific aspects of the writing as a collection, from its humor to its underlying concerns, and argues that in spite of the limits and breakdown of communication and language that are reflected in these stories, there is in turn a vital need to attempt to move towards empathy and understanding.
Thesis (M.Phil.) -- University of Adelaide, School of Humanities, 2017.

Masters Research - Master Creative Arts
Food, as a social signifier, is an important device in literature that has been used skilfully by writers like Woolf, Proust and Carver. My short story collection, A Taste of Dreams, employs food as a theme across the collection to reveal details about characters and the relationships between those who come together to cook and dine. The essay that follows examines suburban fiction and domestic routines including the preparation and consumption of food, food-related spaces such as the kitchen and dining table and the significance of meals beyond the food itself. Domestic fiction set in the Australian suburbs had a late and uncertain beginning. The image of the Australian bush and frontier dominated both art and literature through the nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries, well after the cities and suburbs were established. It was only after the Second World War, with the great postwar land boom, that artists and writers turned to the suburbs. Initially, this residential space, where the majority of Australians lived, was derided and spurned, viewed as homogeneous, status-oriented and uniformly conservative. Intellectuals attacked the architecture of the new landscape and concluded that the residents who bought into this lifestyle were conditioned by their streetscape. In the 1970s, new writers like Garner, Winton, Malouf and Updike emerged. They looked beyond the streetscape, front fence and lawns to reveal the details, the diversity and complexities of lives within the suburban milieu. Domestic situations were explored against a background of iconic symbols and signifiers—the backyard, shed, garage, bedroom, laundry and kitchen—to reveal the unique details of characters’ lives within the suburban home. A Taste of Dreams is a contribution to the genre of short story writing set in the Australian suburbs. Food links the stories and provides an avenue through which the reader can gain an understanding of the characters, their homes and their relationships.

Masters Research - Master Creative Arts
Food, as a social signifier, is an important device in literature that has been used skilfully by writers like Woolf, Proust and Carver. My short story collection, A Taste of Dreams, employs food as a theme across the collection to reveal details about characters and the relationships between those who come together to cook and dine. The essay that follows examines suburban fiction and domestic routines including the preparation and consumption of food, food-related spaces such as the kitchen and dining table and the significance of meals beyond the food itself. Domestic fiction set in the Australian suburbs had a late and uncertain beginning. The image of the Australian bush and frontier dominated both art and literature through the nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries, well after the cities and suburbs were established. It was only after the Second World War, with the great postwar land boom, that artists and writers turned to the suburbs. Initially, this residential space, where the majority of Australians lived, was derided and spurned, viewed as homogeneous, status-oriented and uniformly conservative. Intellectuals attacked the architecture of the new landscape and concluded that the residents who bought into this lifestyle were conditioned by their streetscape. In the 1970s, new writers like Garner, Winton, Malouf and Updike emerged. They looked beyond the streetscape, front fence and lawns to reveal the details, the diversity and complexities of lives within the suburban milieu. Domestic situations were explored against a background of iconic symbols and signifiers—the backyard, shed, garage, bedroom, laundry and kitchen—to reveal the unique details of characters’ lives within the suburban home. A Taste of Dreams is a contribution to the genre of short story writing set in the Australian suburbs. Food links the stories and provides an avenue through which the reader can gain an understanding of the characters, their homes and their relationships.

Research Doctorate - Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)
Watermark is a short story cycle exploring intergenerational and personal relationships in coastal communities. The stories observe the complexity of characters drawn together, but also separated, by family, topography and circumstance. Written to reflect experiences from the 1960s through to present times, the stories reveal individuals responding to the uncertainty and disorder of life-changing events and unexpected revelations. Located in a quintessentially Australian landscape, the characters transgress physical and metaphorical boundaries and experience pivotal moments of transformation, even if – and, as it will be argued, because – those times are fleeting or unsustainable. The stories oscillate between their autonomous status and their interconnection within the broader narrative framework of the short story cycle. This structural aesthetic enables continuity through recurring characters, settings and themes. Paradoxically, these elements combine to reflect fractured relationships and unstable characters against a backdrop that is constantly changing. The exegesis draws on the notion of liminality to explore the generic and thematic concerns that emerged during the composition of the stories, particularly in relation to the oppositions and paradoxes evinced above. It looks at the complexities and challenges of the short story cycle with close reference to three short story cycles with coastal settings – The Bodysurfers by Robert Drewe, The Turning by Tim Winton and Having Cried Wolf by Gretchen Shirm. These texts reveal that Australian short story writers regard the coastline as more than simply a setting; it is a place of transition and a viable site to explore character development and transformation.

Research Doctorate - Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)
This thesis includes a creative component, What Came Between, and an accompanying critical exegesis. What Came Between is a collection of twelve realist short stories about residents of adjoining terraces in inner-city Newcastle. The collection opens on the 28th of December 1989, the day of the Newcastle Earthquake, and ends a decade later on New Year’s Eve as the BHP steelworks closes and the city’s history of steelmaking comes to an end. This kind of collection, which gains unity from its consistent setting and recurring characters, belongs to the short story cycle genre. The exegesis discusses the two contexts most relevant to What Came Between, that is the realist mode and the short story cycle genre, and notes the relative influences of Raymond Carver and Tim Winton in both instances.

It is proposed that Australians of white settler heritage writing on the subject of Indigenous Australians in the period from the early 20th Century to the present day take a combination of three common approaches. The “haunted”, “contemporary representations” and “stepping back” approaches represent an evolving attitude in contemporary white Australian writing on Indigenous themes. This evolution occurs in a rough chronological order, however within this chronology the writing may exhibit a fluidity, moving back and forth between the three approaches. Texts by Patrick White and Judith Wright are used as primary examples of the three approaches, with secondary examples given from a range of contemporary white Australian writers. The evolution of Indigenous Australian writing is discussed within the “stepping back” approach. Parallels are drawn between the evolution of white and Indigenous Australian writing on Indigenous themes, with the argument that Indigenous writing displays both the “haunted” and “contemporary representations” approaches. The final approach for Indigenous Australian writers, however, is the “stepping forward” approach. The poetry of Kath Walker/Oodgeroo Noonuccal is the principal example given to illustrate this section, with additional commentary on a range of contemporary Indigenous Australian writing. Examples of the three approaches’ influence on the creative component of this thesis are discussed throughout the exegesis.
Thesis (M.A.) -- University of Adelaide, School of Humanities, 2012

This collection of short stories is about being a twenty-something in the 90s, trying to get by, have a little fun and make somewhat of a mark in the process. It’s about the process of growing up, and the seemingly desperate need to hold onto all those youthful pursuits. It’s about finding out that life as an adult tries to suck the life out of you, rather than allowing you to suck the life out of it. That constant struggle, the battle of wills between attending to your needs or just satisfying your wants. This is a time for you when your needs and wants are siblings, bickering in the back of the car on a long drive up the coast. The characters in these stories are having their good time while it lasts. Avoiding the inevitable: maturity, responsibility, adulthood. And so they should. After all, these aren’t called ‘the best years of our lives’ for nothing. The stories celebrate your life as a twenty-something.
Master of Arts (Hons) Writing

This thesis firstly comprises of (SNAPSHOTS) Snapshots of Broken Things : a collection of poetry and short prose fiction. Secondly, a critical and exegetical study which represents a concurrent and retrospective analysis and reflection of the creative work in relation to the central research questions, plus a literary-critical study of issues of identity and function pertaining to writers of literary fiction and poetry. The broad thematic concerns for the subject matter of SNAPSHOTS are personal and societal notions of identity: perceptions regarding the roles and functions of individuals within their famlies and communities; and the power structures, gender politics and social interrelationships inherent in these notions. In this regard SNAPSHOTS echoes the issues and concerns of the critical study, whilst the processes of its writing (detailed in a series of essays) serve as a major focus for investigation of the research questions regarding the function and identity of the writer.