Masters and PhD student profiles
Ricci-Jane Adams
PhD
Completion date
05 Feb, 2008
Supervisers
Assoc Prof Angela O'Brien
Project title
The power of paradox: Magical Realism in Australian Theatre
Project summary
This thesis investigates the genre of magical realism as a discourse of political change, especially in a postcolonial and historical sense. Considering the writing of Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Salman Rushdie and David Ireland, the thesis focuses initially on international magical realist texts, including the history of the emergence of this genre and how it has functioned as a political discourse. Secondly, magical realism is considered in an Australian context. This includes how the genre has been used and how it may be used in the future to generate change, deconstructing binary oppositions and resisting dominant ideologies through its subversive employment of language, identity, time and space.
Georgina Helen Boucher
PhD
Completion date
28 Aug, 2007
Supervisers
Dr Denise Varney
Project title
Subjects in-between: art beyond identity
Project summary
This project asks questions about the way recent trends in art offer new understandings of the self and a political intention to destabilise hierarchies of gendered and cultural dominance. By analysing diverse examples of dramatic text, performance, photography and popular culture, this study engages with art that explores themes of excess, ambiguity, transformation and hybridity in order to creatively shape new configurations of identity unfixed from the traditional identity grid. The artistic formulation of critically in-between subjectivities that move between oppositional categories, without being fixed to polarities along axes of difference, is the main focus of this thesis. It is my hypothesis that these examples provide new insight into a productive de-essentialisation of traditional identity. Placed within an intersecting framework of feminist and post-colonialist theory, I suggest these aesthetic themes operate as both strategic and creative metaphors for real identities.
Lucy Alice Butler
PhD
Completion date
23 May, 2008
Supervisers
Dr Christine Owen Dr Kevin Brophy
Project title
Eros the limb-loosener: dis-articulating romantic mythology in contemporary fiction
Project summary
This dissertation reads images of dismemberment in contemporary fiction by women as a critique of romance as cultural myth. It asserts the inherent violence of a romantic mythology based on binary thought, where apparent complementarity and completion is also opposition and separation. The short fictions considered in this thesis critique the role of story in perpetuating romantic mythology, suggesting the need to fragment narrative form in order to dismantle damaging fictions of romantic love. I will argue that the works also engage the construction of romantic love as 'lack' in the Western tradition, as images of dismemberment figure the conceptual violence done to the 'other' when the 'other' is reduced to an aspect of the imagined fulfilment of the self.
Alyson Campbell
PhD
Completion date
12 Sep, 2008
Supervisers
Dr Denise Varney
Project title
Beyond Shock Treatment: an 'affective' analysis of Sarah Kane's experimental theatre in performance
Project summary
Experiencing Kane: an ‘affective analysis’ of Sarah Kane’s ‘experiential’ theatre in performance.
Sarah Kane is accused of self-indulgent solipsism, where the world of her plays has ‘no sense of external reality’ (Billington). This thesis argues that, rather than marking a further retreat into her own world, the late works of Sarah Kane unleash a linguistic world that opens up the possibility of a new understanding of contemporary British reality. It is my contention, however, that Kane’s formal innovations demand an interpretation - an ‘affective analysis’ – that, paradoxically, seeks the meaning in Kane’s work through its asignificative use of language.
This ‘affective analysis’ examines Kane’s use of theatre’s corporeality and liveness to create an ‘experiential theatre’ that makes ‘direct intellectual, emotional and physical contact with the needs of the audience’. Taking Merleau-Ponty’s assertion that ‘to perceive is to render oneself present to something through the body’ as a starting point, I suggest that the one element that remains constant in Kane’s continual experimentation is her ability to exploit the ‘lived bodiliness’ of the spectator in order to create a visceral, corporeal response. The thesis argues that it is through this response that Kane’s work makes meaning, and asserts its social relevance.
David Carlin
PhD
Completion date
02 Sep, 2007
Supervisers
Dr Kevin Brophy Dr Scott McQuire
Project title
Beyond telling: trauma, narrative and representation
Project summary
Thesis explores the concept of trauma and its relation to narrative, in the context of autobiographical writing. Can trauma be represented, or is it always what lies beyond and at the margins, only accessible through its traces? Is the act of narration a search for a cure or in itself a form of erasure? Does the narration of trauma promote remembrance or forgetting?
James Henry (Jim) Chambliss
PhD
Completion date
05 Feb, 2009
Supervisers
Dr Barb Bolt 70% SCA Dr David Williams 30% Physiology Assoc Prof Angela O'Brien
Project title
Sparks of Creativity: the influence of epilepsy on art
Project summary
The central goal of this research is to examine the influence of epilepsy on artistic expression. The proposition is that temporolimbic epilepsy can stimulate and enhance artistic creativity when misfiring of electrical impulses leads to altered functioning and hyperstimulation of areas of the brain that control the visual, emotional, imaginative, and intuitive functions.
Hsueh Sheng Chen
PhD
Completion date
28 Feb, 2007
Supervisers
Dr Peter Morse Maggie Hegarty Dr Ann McLaren
Project title
Salon Photography in China: the extension and transformation of an elite culture
Project summary
This thesis explores the development of amateur photography in China from 1910 to 1949, a decisive yet under-analysed period in the history of Chinese photography. These four decades span the most traumatic moments in the history of modern China and in this period there were two crucial develpments in the history of the medium there: the introduction of amateur photographic societies and the institutionalisation of art photography. The thesis argues that photography has been used as a tool to revive the ideal of traditional literati amateurs. When artists were unavoidable professionalised and commercialised under drastic social changes, photography provided a popular alternative to address the need for personal aesthetic and even moral pursuit.
Thomas Considine
Masters of Creative Arts
Completion date:
03 Nov, 2006
Supervisers
Dr Peter Eckersall, Mr Paul Monaghan
Project title
Riven by Theory: the work of Peter King and Going Through Stages in Context
Project summary
I propose to examine the philosophy and practice of small theatre companies in Melbourne in the period 1988 to 1994. In this period a number of companies were created, made a significant contribution to Melbourneºs theatrical practice but most had dissolved as companies by 1994. I will focus in particular on the work of Going Through Stages. I hope to argue that the theatrical milieu in Melbourne in the late eighties and the existence of supporting institutions ( funding bodies, established theatre companies and academic institutions) provided an initial impetus for these companies, but changes in this environment were an important factor in the demise of these companies.
Marie Couper
PhD
Completion date
20 Jan, 2009
Supervisers
Dr Angela O'Brien Ms Hilary Crampton
Project title
The Legacy of Edouard Borovansky
Project summary
The purpose of this research is to trace the legacy of Edouard Borovansky founder of the Borovansky Ballet Academy and the Borovansky Ballet Company, in a manner fitting to the memory of a man and his dream of an Australian ballet company. My aim is to record the impact of the Borovansky Ballet Company on those people who were associated with it in any way, and to position Borovansky 's work in the development of ballet, and consequently culture, in Australia. This study will test the hypothesis that, although recognised in the media and literature as the 'Initiator', 'Foundation Layer' or "The Father of the Australian Ballet', the depth of Borovansky's contribution to ballet in Australia has not been fully examined nor honoured.
Jennifer Decolongon
PhD
Completion date
06 Jun, 2010
Supervisers
Dr Anne Maxwell, Dr Denise Varney
Project title
Border disputes: Philippine drama in English - practice, theory and formation[s] of [post]national identity
Project summary
This project investigates the role of Philippine English-language drama in the narration of Filipino national identity. Philippine English-language drama is envisaged as a series of border territories within which local/global and colonial/postcolonial identities, disputes and alliances are both rigorously contained and at their most unstable. Employing a comparative literary historical approach to the texts, one that "take[s] hybridity into account to allow for the negotiation of the multiple identities specifically produced by displacement and diaspora, conquest and cultural imposition" (Linda Hutcheon, "Rethinking the National Model," Rethinking Literary History: A Dialogue on Theory, OUP 2002, 17), the project reconsiders the production, reception and circulation of narratives of national identity in literary and performance terms as well as the ways in which these have been accounted for to date in teleological developmental chronicles of Philippine literary and cultural relations.
Dan Disney
PhD
Completion date
04 Mar, 2008
Supervisers
Dr Kevin Brophy, Mr Philip Salom
Project title
The Archaic Shudder: toward a Poetological Pragmatics of the Sublime
Project summary
Incorporating early theorisations of the sublime (from Longinus, Kant, Burke, the Romantic poets, et al) and contemporary counterparts (the ideas of Zizek, Lyotard, Bloom, et al), I will re-read Heideggerian poetics and Freud’s unheimlich before speculating a model of how poems, unconcealed, enact their poets, interfused and mediated via an uncanny re-cognition within the sublime abyss of language.
Amy Espeseth
PhD
Completion date
31 May 2009
Supervisers
Dr Majion J Campbell and Dr Tony Birch
Project Title
Critical: Meaning to Metamorphosis: The Elemental Memory of Kathleen Norris
Creative: What Remains
Project Summary
Critical
Meaning to Metamorphosis: The Elemental Memory of Kathleen Norris investigates ways of understanding the nature of both the natural and supernatural worlds through the intersection of ecofeminist theory and Kathleen Norris' poetry and creative non-fiction. Although not considered an inherently ecological or feminist text, Norris' complex work will be extricated from its usually restrictive religious interpretation and instead be studied from an existentialist, essentialist and panpsychic perspective. The thesis investigates the evolving perception of the physical and spiritual world and the ongoing conversation and convergence of different religious, political, ethnic, scientific, and philosophical beliefs in regards to the (alleged) human/nature divide. Norris' work identifies both spiritual and poetic formation as lived sensory experiences in the material and spiritual worlds; this focus is interpreted as a meditation on the metamorphosis of self, including evolution, adaptation and acclimation. Examining critical perspectives on gender, place and religion, the thesis will trace the ontological and spiritual revolution being led by radical ecofeminists.
Creative
What Remains is a narrative of metamorphosis. The female protagonist undertakes a journey of transformation from believer to heretic, helpmeet to feminist, virgin to not ... and occasionally back again. Charting this path across America and Australia, the changing inner landscape of the character is mirrored by the outer landscape of freezing snow and burning dust. As a traditional nature writer, Sarah sees her world through the biology of the birds that surround her both physically and intellectually. When she begins to acknowledge the additional spiritual and psychic significance of her birds, she recognises that her world is populated by creatures and spirits both of and beyond the material world. The protagonist divines her past, present and future from the sights and sounds of birds, moving her from fragmentation towards integration, from inconsequential scribbler to influential augur. Via embrace of elements and alteration of virtues, What Remains seeks to embody the radical ecofeminist revolution.
Russell Fewster
PhD
Completion date
08 Oct, 2009
Supervisers
Dr Peter Eckersall Assoc Prof Angela O'Brien Dr Susan Luckman
Project title
An examination of the relationship between the live actor and visual technologies in text-based theatre
Project summary
This thesis aims to develop an understanding of the philosophical, aesthethic and political principals governing the use of video projection with the live actor. Live performance needs to distinguish between the 'lived body' and the digitally replicated body las the acceptance of mediatised reception codes renders consumers potentially unable to make the distiniction. The aura is destroyed as the body is extended, displaced and mutated into a video form that is a copy of the original. A duality of seeing is needed that considers first a phenomenological comprehension and then a semiotic reading of the live actor. Both serve to reinstate the primacy of the live actor.
Francesca Haig
PhD
Completion date
15 Aug, 2007
Supervisers
Dr Christine Owen, Dr Dominique Hecq
Project title
Poetic writing and questions of history in the postmodern novel
Project summary
This thesis examines the contested space occupied by the postmodern historical novel, exploring the conflict betwen the postmodern problematization of history and the ethical need to engage meaningfully with the past. This need is particularly pressing in the case of histories that have been contested, underacknoweldged or denied. The thesis focusses specifically on three novels, Anne Michaels' Fugitive Pieves, Toni Morrison's Beloved, and Kim Scott's Benang, dealing with the Holocaust, American slavery and the treatment of Australian Aborigines respectively. The thesis argues that novels such as these use poetic, lyrical writing in a way that mobilises a sense of immediacy and inujustice in relation to the past, while still engaging with the postmodern interrogation of how we can know and transmit histories. A focus on specificity and alterity is an important part of these contemporary historical novels, which are both profoundly self-reflexive, and defiantly historical.
Simone Hine
PhD
Completion date
20 Feb, 2008
Supervisers
Dr Barbara Bolt Dr Felicity Colman, AHCCA
Project title
Memory and Cinema in Contemporary Visual Arts
Project summary
The exegesis will argue that in recent years there has been a re-conceptualisation of the way visual art practices position themselves in relation to cinema. It will be argued that changes have occurred due to the cultural and stylistic merging of cinema and art. Earlier postmodern artists, such as Cindy Sherman, incorporated cinematic methods into contemporary art in order to critique filmic representations (specifically in Sherman's work to expose stereotypical images). Frederic Jameson articulated the merging of 'high' and 'low' art forms as a key element of postmodern articstic production. Jameson cites Andy Warhol as a key example of this approach. The exegesis will argue that many of these postmodern artistic practices incorporated cinematic aesthetics into their artistic production in order to critique cinema from the privileged position of the gallery, thus maintaining the distinction between cinema and art and by extension 'low' and 'high' art.
Alina Hoyne
PhD
Completion date
07 Dec, 2007
Supervisers
Dr Peter Eckersall
Project title
Reenactment Culture: Reviving the past through performance
Project summary
This research investigates the problems of authentically performing the past, through an analysis of reenactment both as a cultural phenomenon and as a series of performances that aim to accurately recreate past events. In conducting this research I have three express aims. Firstly, to present a history of reenactment as a form of popular performance. Secondly, to examine the key problems of performing the past in postmodern culture, with particular focus on the emergent notion of authenticity or authentic experience. Thirdly, to investigate my hypothesis that instead of simply perpetuating a complacent nostalgia for the past, reenactments may have the potential to prompt a critical re-evaluation of historical narratives.
Until recently, the notable exception of Richard Schechner (1985, 1995 and 2003) aside, there has been little written in the field of performance studies about reenactments. In the last decade, however, there has been a dramatic increase in the volume of work produced in the fields of visual arts and performance studies on or about reenactment. Recently scholars including Rebecca Schneider (2001 and forthcoming), Peggy Phelan (2005), Baz Kershaw (1996, 1999), Mike Pearson and Michael Shanks (2001), have been involved in a critical re-evaluation of reenactment.
This research will contribute to this re-evaluation while simultaneously engaging with recent scholarship in the field of performance studies regarding repetition (Phelan 2005; Schneider 2001), mediatisation (Auslander 1999; Birringer 1998) and disappearance (Diamond 1998; Schneider 2004 and forthcoming) in performance.
Anja Martina Kanngieser
PhD
Completion date
01 Apr, 2008
Supervisers
Dr Denise Varney, Dr Fraser McDonald
Project title
Raised fists and shattered ideologies: the paradox of a ‘realisation’ of art, and some possibilities for everyday resistance
Project summary
This research investigates a specific intersection of political and aesthetic theory and praxis. It does so through a genealogical analysis of the motivated aesthetic events and actions undertaken by groups that I would present as exemplary of this intersection, such as the Berlin Dadaists (1918-1923), Gruppe SPUR (1958-1965), Kommune 1 (1967-1969), affiliates of the Situationist International (1957-1972), and contemporary German activists such as Berlin Umsonst (2003-present) and Rebel Art (2003-present).
Through an examination of the ideological and artistic positions elucidated by these movements, I hypothesise that a particular amalgamation of aesthetic techniques and ideologies was enacted, which I would term to be a paradigm of resistance. This paradigm was predicated on a desire to supersede an archaic opposition between art and life, theory and praxis. I will show that this intersection was conceived to take place in the everyday realm, a site which, through its potential for liminality, could contribute to this overcoming. The dissolution of dichotomous categories was imperative to these movements as it was posited to be one of the fundamental conditions for the possibility of cultural revolution. This revolt could be brought about through the perceived ability of politico-aesthetics gestures and events to evoke socio-political consciousness and thus compel change.
My research will posit that this paradigm of resistance, extending from the Berlin Dadaists to the present day, whilst plagued by a number of theoretical and practical flaws nonetheless illuminates the potential for future modes of subversive action. I will suggest that these historical attempts were severely undermined by the activists’ implicit desire for definition and naming, thus inadvertently perpetuating the very structures they were attempting to destroy. This is not to suggest that these ideas for transgressive actions can be dismissed today as merely nostalgic utopianism or viewed simply as the faded remnants of a failed revolution. I will insist that through theoretical and practical recontextualisation the conceptual frameworks offered by these historical activists still hold relevance for contemporary gestures of dissidence.
Engaging closely with interdisciplinary modes of analysis including qualitative fieldwork data collection, this research will examine the largely unexplored area of liminal aesthetic actions and performative events undertaken by such groups in the everyday context as opposed to the canonical exploration of the residual art and textual objects. It is my intention that this manner of investigation will contribute to a more extensive understanding of these movements. Through the combination of critical analysis, interviews, observation, and direct participation my research will also present new information on the (as yet, academically unexplored) field of politico-aesthetic movements working in Berlin today.
David Kelman
PhD
Completion date
28 Jan, 2009
Supervisers
Assoc Prof Angela O'Brien, Kate Donelan (Education)
Project title
Significant Stories: An investigation into the making of social meaning in young people's enacted stories
Project summary
This thesis is an investigation into young people's enacted stories and the creation oof social meaning through the relationship of those stories to community audiences. This investigation will study young people's performance making in school contexts. The study will involve young people between the ages of 10-16 from diverse cultural backgrounds.
Elizabeth MacFarlane
PhD
Completion date
28 Aug, 2007
Supervisers
Dr Kevin Brophy, Mr Philip Salom
Project title
The Excruciating Moment: Putting pen to paper in J M Coetzee's Elizabeth Costello
Project summary
This thesis explores through both short fiction and dissertation Coetzee’s latest book Elizabeth Costello. The book cannot be responded to, as many reviewers have discovered, as a series of controversial polemics on animal rights, the problem of evil or the humanities in Africa. Rather, Coetzee asks complex questions about the value of literature, the responsibility and suffering of the writer, and the transferral of the ‘excruciating moment’ of writing from author to reader. The thesis explores these questions also in relation to Coetzee’s previous works and the essays of Maurice Blanchot.
Sean McMullen
PhD
Completion date
05 Dec, 2007
Supervisers
Dr Kevin Brophy, Dr Angela O'Brien
Project title
The medieval arcadia: the role of romantic literature in developing an idealised image of medieval society
Project summary
The PhD consists of a dissertation and novel. The dissertation demonstrates that a specific literary vision of medieval society developed in the Late Twelfth and early Thirteenth Centuries that became the foundation of most European literature using medieval settings. This vision is heavily interwoven with notions of chivalry and romance. These
novels are characterised by definable features common to their settings, characters, and attitudes. This vision has desirable features for readers, allowing them to escape to a simpler, more just, virtuous and romantic "past", which is considered desirable, even though it never existed. This dissertation will develop a composite picture of the
Medieval Arcadian setting, which will then tested against a selection of works from the Fourteenth to the Twenty First Centuries.
The novel, entitled "Moonstalker", is set in southern France in the opening days of the Albigensien Crusade against the Cathars. It traces the development of chivalric values in a group of papal knights who are forced to escort a group of Cathar women and children to sanctuary from the papal army in the kingdom of Aragon.
Terri Louise McNeilage
PhD
Completion date
01 Aug, 2007
Supervisers
Assoc Prof Angela O'Brien, Ms Sari Smith
Project title
Persephone's promise: the construction of the daughter in women's autobiographical writing
Project summary
The central contention of this thesis is that the textual evidence illustrated in the chosen autobiographies shows that writing autobiographicaly about the traumatic mother-daughter relationship provides an exit point, in the form of reparation, from that trauma. The thesis closely examines various memoirs and autobiographies through the lens of autobiographical and feminist theory. The ways in which the author constructs a speaking position for the daughter and the daughter's experience is a central concern, together with the textual devices the author employs to reconstruct and represent memories. Ideas of representation, identification, trauma and transgression are explored. The social construction of the familial positions of mother and daughter is discussed as a reading practice.
Rosemary Helen Michael
PhD
Completion date
14 Feb, 2011
Supervisers
Dr Kevin Brophy, Dr Christine Owen
Project title
The Art of Navigation
Project summary
Novel: The story of three girls who attempt to conjure Ned Kelly via a seance, and instead call up Edward Kelley - charlatan, magician and scryer to Elizabeth the First. Through the story of Nat's possession, 'The Art of Navigation' explores issues of identity and moments of singularity (and questions what we know and what is real) as time ceases to travel and the present mirrors the past.
Dissertation: I am researching the blurring of fiction and non-fiction in genres such as ‘fictional memoir’, ‘literary history’, and what I’m tentatively calling ‘auto-lie-ographies’. I am investigating the increasing popularity of ‘reality lit’, and arguing that this is the result of anxiety (and a resultant attempt at authority) on the part of authors, as well as market demand. That this is both the consequence of publishers chasing a frontier readership and a side-effect of the globalisation of publishing.
Helen Milte Bastow
PhD
Completion date
09 May, 2007
Supervisers
Dr Christine Owen, Ms Sari Smith, Assoc Prof Kevin Brophy
Project title
In the outside - body and text in the other of landscape
Project summary
Theorising the novel as a site for semiotic correspondence with the other of landscape.
Paul Monaghan
PhD
Completion date
27 Feb, 2008
Supervisers
Dr Denise Varney, Assoc Prof Angela O'Brien
Project title
Chained to Diotima's Staircase: Prometheus, metaphysics and theatre in antiquity and modernism
Project summary
This thesis explores the metaphysical and theatrical importance of the Prometheus myth in antiquity and the Modernist period. In the history of Western philosophy and the arts, Prometheus ‘corresponds to the need for transcendent being’ (Bachelard). The Greek myth is an exploration of the vertical relationship between God and Man and its various manifestations (One and Many, Idea and Creation, General and Particular, Noumenon and Phenomenon, Reality and Appearance, Mind and Body, Stasis and Change), their contiguity and separation, and the possibility of transformation from one into the other. ‘Diotima’s staircase’ is Plato’s metaphor for the philosopher’s journey from the phenomenal world of imperfect appearance and suffering to the noumenal world of transcendent reality, and thus the staircase is used in this thesis as both a metaphor for the two-way traffic between man and god, and as an emerging actuality in Modernist theatre. The thesis sits within a broad canvas of the expression and embodiment of metaphysics in theatrical practice, and the relationship of Modernism to Greek antiquity, and therefore straddles the disciplines of Theatre Studies and Classical Studies (including Classical Reception Studies).
Joshua David Rimington Nelson
PhD
Completion date
30 Jul, 2007
Supervisers
Dr Graham Jones Dr Denise Varney
Project title
Ruptures, recuperations and regenerations: traumatic masculinity in American cinema 1975-2005
Project summary
The thesis will examine representations of masculinity in American cinema between 1975 and 2005. Focussing specifically on images of wounded males I will investigate the extent to which these representations serve to undermine or consolidate hegemonic ideologies of masculinity. The primary films investigated are 'Taxi Driver' (1976), 'Rambo' trilogy (1982-88), 'Fight Club' (1979), and the 'Passion of the Christ' (2004). Each of these films represents significant ideological shifts in the depiction of male suffering within American cinema. Taking into consideration the changing political landscape of American culture, the thesis will investigate the proposition that the relationship between representations of masculinity (the site of the dominant ideology) to the cinematic apparatus is intimately tied to social and historical shifts. The image of thew ounded male is loaded with dual importance, as both a figure that literally embodies the contesting of male privilege (through the bodily inscription of trauma) and which outwardly performs the loss of phallic power. However these 'ruptures' are inherently polysemic, embodying at various stages, both a progressive potential born out of a renunciation of phallic privilege, and a conservative appropriation of suffering as a strategy to reaffirm masculine control.
Edward Paterson
PhD
Completion date
30 Mar, 2007
Supervisers
Dr Denise Varney Dr Peter Eckersall
Project title
Postmonologue: politics and parody in performance
Project summary
The aim of this study is to explore the potential for contemporary performance to critique the intersection of neo-conservative and neo-liberal political ideology in contemporary Western society.
The study focuses on solo artist/performers whose political viewpoints help shape their performance practice and who in working as solo performers retain authorship and creative control of their material and can therefore be said to be responsible for the content. Anna Deavere Smith, Karen Finley, Laurie Anderson and the late Spalding Gray will be analysed as artists who engage critically with contemporary politics. They are viewed as artists who use the monologue form to communicate politics through utilising postmodern aesthetic techniques. The investigation focuses upon monologue, as an evolving form, as a resurgent performance genre that is particularly alive to contemporary culture and politics, employing a sophisticated manipulation of techniques that invite critical contemplation of its socio-political context.
Shivaun Margaret Plozza
Masters of Creative Arts
Completion date:
02 Mar, 2007
Supervisers
Ms Sari Smith Dr Dominique Hecq
Project title
Death, Philosophy and Laughter: The Comic Scene of Death in the English Literature of the Absurd
Project summary
The thesis will examin the relationship of death to the Comic in the absurdist literature of Douglas Adams.
Despite a deficiency in concern for the role of death as a Comic theme in contemporary literary criticism, the thesis will argue that an understanding of the absurd nature of human death is a central concern of metaphysical ontology and of literary criticism - where all knowledge relates to existence.
Through a close reading of select examples of Adams' literature the representation of death as the ultimate expression of the Comic ideal - where the Comic adjusts the individual toward an ironic understanding of the 'real' - will be examined as an alternative, as yet misunderstood, means to comprehend the irony of Being.
Mark Rashleigh
PhD
Completion date
28 Jul, 2008
Supervisers
Dr Sally Pryor Dr Frank Stagnitti, Dept Marine Science, Deakin Uni, Waarrnambool
Project title
Genetic Programming Strategies for the Manufacture of Computer Generated Forms
Project summary
The proposed investigation involves the use of genetic algorithms (GA)'s and allied strategies as part of software development to evolve three dimensional virtual forms presenting a high degree of originality and aesthetic appeal. The software will use such features as computer resident heuristic strategies and
schema (binary templates) to generate large populations of candidate forms that are subjected to specific 'fitness' criteria. In the creation of virtual art works this survival evaluation is generally practiced as interactive evolution, with a human operator providing the selection process. Since notions of 'aesthetic' worth are both subjective and cultural, designing software that can automate this selection process can be problematic and likely to produce unconvincing results. The focus of this thesis will be approaches to 'training' such programs in a bid to reduce some of the cognitive load involved in the interaction with large quantities of information often emerging from such human - computer collaborations. Final virtual forms and lineages will be the subject of exhibition as large static images and computer rendered animations.
Meredith Rogers
Masters of Creative Arts
Completion date
14 Jun, 2007
Supervisers
Dr Peter Eckersall
Project title
(Not) sitting down on stage: the chair in contemporary theatre/performance practice
Project summary
When Merce Cunningham danced with a bentwood chair strapped to his back in Antic Meet (1958) was the chair an extra limb of the one dancer or another dancer? Is it a prop; an obstacle; a stand-in human or all three simultaneously? Taking the chair as an object, which is almost universally in use on contemporary stages, I will be asking when does the way that humans interact with them, transform chairs into other objects and endow them with other resonances? How does this transformation happen?
The chair project will eventually return to the phenomenology of Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Gaston Bachelard to pursue a poetics of the object in relation to the actor and by extension to the spectator/observing participant.
Julian Savage
PhD
Completion date
06 Feb, 2006
Supervisers
Dr Peter Morse Dr Graham Jones
Project title
Screen/Writing, Screen/Play: Text, Film and the Electronic Thesis
Project summary
The existence of text in film - titles, inter-titles, subtitles, the rolling prologue or static epilogue, written and graphic coda within the diegesis (the handwritten or typewritten letter or note, signage, and, now, the ubiquitous computer screen) - seems as integral an aspect of a film experience as the representational human form.
Text has also been used to subvert or challenge dominant tropes by avant-garde and experimental filmmakers. This thesis will focus on the ways in which both conventional and non-conventional films have used text and how this relates to both the notion of cinema 'language' and how spectatorship ('reading') is formed and undermined by these practices. It is envisaged that this thesis will be presented in an interactive, web based form utilising original and primary creative materials integrated into the interface design and framed by the linear academic argument. Crucial to the research will be exploring the intersection between watching imagery of text and reading text.
While essentially a question concerning cinema the thesis will locate its argument within the context of the hybrid text, that is, one that incorporates written and visual material to form an electronic text. In researching and the presentation of this research in such a form it is to be argued that to examine the inherent tension of text and image in film the combination of these elements necessitates its own structures, strategies and ways of reading made possible through multi-media. The use of text in film will then be located in the broader sphere of "language technologies" that have developed in the last century. This may include reference to photography, architecture, painting, video, advertising, email, the web and text messages.
Miriam Alison Sved
PhD
Completion date
14 Feb, 2008
Supervisers
Assoc Prof Kevin Brophy, Dr Christine Owen
Project title
Writing in and out of the classroom: a study of tertiary creative writing and the Australian cultural wars
Project summary
My project is a two-part study of the discipline of Creative Writing as a site of artistic production operating across the two distinct and often conflicting spheres of academia and publication. The first section, deals with Creative Writing’s identity within the academy. The second section, dealing with Creative Writing’s place in a public sphere, will consist of analysis of the Australian publishing industry, focussing on tropes relevent to Creative Writing such as theory, history, identity politics and youth.
Gary Willis
PhD
Completion date
17 Jan, 2007
Supervisers
Dr Barbara Bolt Dr Charles Green
Project title
The Painter's Tongue
Project summary
My research proposal comprises two associated sections. The Future of Painting in the New Museum - a broad inquiry into the philosphic and aesthetic, political and ethical influences determining contemporary art's public profile today, specifically inquiring into the painter's place in this critical context. Ethos Mythos, Melbourne Moderne - my studio-based research project will consist of a suite of mytho-poetic figurative paintings set in the landscape of the design driven aesthetics of contemporary Melbourne architecture. Utilising 3D spatial software, 3D MAX, to re-model some of the exciting new architectural sites of this city.