Cirrus@Austlit

'Representing a nonhuman animal consciousness in literature is problematic, because we human animals cannot know what nonhuman animals think, or indeed, how nonhuman animals think. This means that when we imagine a nonhuman animal consciousness, we have no choice but to use the tool we have available to us: human language. By shaping nonhuman animal thought with human language, we anthropomorphise the animal: we shape (morphos) its internal sequences with human (anthropos) language.

'This thesis mobilises recent debates in critical animal studies and posthumanism as a conceptual framework to investigate anthropomorphism as a narrative device. Drawing upon Bruno Latour’s conceptualisation of text as an anthropomorphous construct, and theoretical debates in the humanities spearheaded by Jacques Derrida, Cary Wolfe and Donna J. Haraway, which challenge structures of human privilege organised around a narrow and implicitly ableist conceptualisation of the human subject, this thesis contends that while a piece of writing will be anthropomorphic on a very fundamental level, it does not mean that it must be anthropocentric, and does not mean that it must serve or reify the speciest logic of humanism. Rather, the act of shaping nonhuman animal consciousness with human language forces us to bump up against the limits of humanism and so see the structure for what it is: a historically specific model of both comprehending the world and maintaining the supremacy of a specific idea of Man.

'This thesis is part exegesis, part artefact, and the two uneven halves are foreshadowed by an introduction. The exegesis is a theoretical meditation on anthropomorphism’s humanist and posthumanist potential. It takes as its case study Cerdiwen Dovey’s collection of short stories, Only the Animals—a sustained, creative examination of anthropomorphism as both a literary device and thematic concept. The novel is a story about a breast cancer survivor, some other humans, some mutton birds (or short-tailed shearwaters), some Australian fur seals, and some octopuses who make Eaglehawk Neck, on the Tasman Peninsula, and its surrounding waters, their home. While the majority of the novel is focalised through its human characters, this narrative is crosshatched with stories focalised through the nonhuman animals whose lives brush up against the lives of those humans. It is driven by the following questions: how might anthropomorphism, as a literary device, produce a posthumanist frame for, or thread of, the narrative? In other words, what might these anthropomorphic animal stories do to the larger human-focussed, or anthropocentric, narrative? How might they unleash new or different ways of experiencing the story? The novel is titled The Octopus and I.'

Source: Publisher's blurb.

'Bushrangers have a powerful grip on the Australian psyche. Ned Kelly is celebrated as Australia’s most popular folk hero. Bushranger Captain Thunderbolt has been immortalised in his home state of New South Wales, with a major highway named in his honour. For the town of Uralla in the New England District, the Thunderbolt legend looms large. He is a major tourist draw card for the region. The legend of Thunderbolt embodies a larger telling of a collective struggle against a system of injustice and oppression.'

'A closer examination of events reveals that Thunderbolt’s Aboriginal wife, Mary Ann, was crucial to his survival. Yet she has been erased from the legend. Many of our folk heroes could not have survived without the support of Aboriginal Australians. However the mateship ethos continues to exclude both Aboriginal people and women. In documenting the life of Worimi woman Mary Ann and her partnership with Thunderbolt, the rhetoric of mateship is challenged. Reciprocal relationships that developed between Aboriginal and settler Australians will be investigated. It is important to consider the range of relationships that emerged on the frontier and the bearing that geography played in such encounters. By adopting a place-centred approach one is able to closely examine the complexity of race relations that existed in colonial times.'

'The violent encounters that occurred on the frontier between Aboriginal and settler Australians are well documented. However not all relationships were based on exploitation and violence. The union between Mary Ann’s Aboriginal mother and English convict father is celebrated by the Worimi today. Mixed marriage continues to be recognised as a central part of contemporary Worimi culture.' (Author's abstract)

'This thesis examines the different ways in which representations of A. O. Neville—Chief Protector of Aborigines / Commissioner of Native Affairs in Western Australia from 1915 to 1940—operate in a select group of texts. I argue that Neville is a highly charged synecdochic figure who stands in, discursively, for all white, bureaucratic administrators, in order to distil changing anxieties about Australia and its past. I examine key texts from Neville’s own writing to a range of more recent, fictional texts. I utilise a postcolonial approach in my analysis of the figure of Neville, through a reading of his continuing incarnations in Australian literature and culture. This project seeks to do with A.O. Neville what Kay Schaffer’s In the Wake of First Contact: The Eliza Fraser Stories did with Eliza Fraser.'  (Publication abstract)

'Through a close reading of Kim Scott's Benang: From the Heart, this thesis interrogates what whiteness in an Australian colonial context looks like from an Aboriginal perspective. Its central proposition is that Scott's narrator, Harley, discovers whiteness as a consequence of discovering his Aboriginality...' (Source: Abstract)

'This study is based on several assumptions: it recognises that the person who is deformed has an existence both in the world and in the novel; it recognises that in both the world and the novel the deformed-being has borne a negative
stigma. It also recognises that a literature reflects its culture, as must the characters who exist within that literature. As Harry Heseltine states succinctly: 'No writer invents his metaphors ex nihilo; in the long run he finds them somewhere in the range of possibility that his culture makes available to him'. This study asks: can that most marginalised of all characters, the deformed-being, provide any revelations about the self, about the novel, the reader of the novel, and the culture within which all exist? The answer in each case is an unequivocal yes. Each chapter is devoted to a particular character in a major Australian novel; comparisons are made with other literary works, Australian and non- Australian. The individual chapters reveal the metaphors and symbolism attached to the character's particular deformity, and demonstrate how the deformed body informs the body of the text. The whole study presents an overall picture of deformity as a fairly consistent and an often-utilised metaphor. Chapter One provides a general survey of deformity as a metaphor. Chapter Two looks at Louis Stone's Jonah (1911), in which the hunchbacked larrikin character is a post-colonial interpretation of the traditionally conjoined outcast states, deformity and criminality. In Chapter Three the dwarf Jackie in Ruth Park's Swords and Crowns and Rings (1977) is seen as a metaphor for non-conformity during a time when Australia was signalling a resistance to the Old-World moulding. Chapter Four is also concerned with the post-colonial identity as revealed through the dwarf and half-caste Billy Kwan in C. J. Koch's The Year of Living Dangerously (1978); it questions an identity that is 'imposed', whether at a national or individual level. In Chapter Five the relationship of the hunchbacked dwarf Rhoda Courtney with her adopted brother, the artist Duffield, in Patrick White's The Vivisector (1970) places deformity in the tradition of the kunstlerroman. In Chapter Six, Koch's The Doubleman (1985) is shown to combine elements of the kunstlerroman while raising questions about the post-colonial identity through the dualities arising out of the doppelganger: spiritual, bodily, and cultural displacement are all focussed by the device of Richard Miller's lameness. Chapter Seven moves from deformity that is congenital or disease-originated, to disability or deformity that is human-caused (either by negligence or intervention), thus allowing a discussion of the importance of the etiology of deformity as a device: in Thea Astley's The Acolyte (1972) Jack Holberg's blindness is caused by fly-strike. Chapter Eight examines the use of terror evoked through archetypal evolution of the lame crone Hester Harper in Elizabeth Jolley's The Well (1985). In Chapter Nine the crypto-dwarf Arthur Blackberry in James McQueen's Hook's Mountain (1982) is portrayed with the accompanying baggage of dwarf mythology; his implicit demise raises questions about our responses towards the deformed. Chapter Ten is a literary history of eugenics, as seen primarily through Eleanor Dark's Prelude to Christopher (1934) and Christina Stead's The Man Who Loved Children (1940). The conclusion discusses the initial, problems of dealing with a taboo topic, along with reasons for excluding autobiographical treatments of deformity, biographical portrayals, war novels, and children's literature. Finally, Leslie Fiedler's comment that deformity is the reigning metaphor of our age is shown to be particularly apt in an Australian context.'

Source: Abstract.