Cirrus@Austlit

'This thesis consists of an exegesis, ‘A Changed Man’, and a novel, ‘Losing Face’. Together they analyse the intersection of masculinities, shame and suburbia in Australia. The exegesis closely reads Christos Tsiolkas’ The Jesus Man (1999) and Peter Polites’ The Pillars (2019) to argue that it is the key characters’ experience of the intersection of masculinities, shame and suburbia that drives them to lose their morality and commit violent and reprehensible crimes. ‘A Changed Man’ discusses the academic research which informed the development of my work of fiction, ‘Losing Face’, and more broadly, attempts to offer research which can inform the reading of similar texts, to better understand the often violent outcomes of the characters’ experience of the intersection of masculinities, shame and suburbia. The introduction of the exegesis highlights key concepts that will be used as a framework for analysing the novels in the two chapters that follow. Chapter One addresses The Jesus Man (1999) and Chapter Two addresses The Pillars (2019). The conclusion proposes that The Stefano brothers in The Jesus Man and all key characters in The Pillars including Pano, Kane and Basil, exist and operate in various kinds of habitus (suburban, social, family, work) that crossover and bring with them a different set of pressures to conform. Negotiating this overlap of pressure, and dealing with the conflict of shame and consecrated manhood, is what drives the characters to act out destructively and violently. The key characters in the novels lack mobility and control which amplifies their visceral experience of the intersection of masculinities, shame and suburbia. To remedy this pressure they lose their morality, exploit others, and undertake violent and reprehensible actions. The creative component of the thesis, titled ‘Losing Face’, tells the story of a troubled young Lebanese-Australian man living in Western Sydney in 2019. Throughout the novel, I aim to engage with and recognise the complexities of masculine identity as part of contemporary and diverse Australian culture. Additionally, the novel attempts to introduce nuances of sexuality and ethnic identity that are not often depicted in texts with similar key characters and themes. At the centre of ‘Losing Face’ is the sexual assault of a young woman in a suburban car park. This event draws on how the key characters’ performance of masculinity leads to violent outcomes that subordinate, traumatise and injure women.' (Publication summary)

'This exegesis is prefaced with an introduction to finding the “real” site of remote Aboriginal communities within The Swan Book. An examination of the literature identifies the contextual and conceptual depth of the novel and the critical challenges it raises. Michel Foucault’s related concepts of power and heterotopia, the utopian community and heterotopic sites of deviation and resistance are surveyed in order to establish how sovereignty is exercised in postcolonial Australia. The possibility of ethical relations of power raised within The Swan Book are then considered.'  (Publication summary)

'In Sydney, the period between the two world wars was a time of rapid change, when ‘modern’ was considered a goal to which the city and its people should strive. The 1930s were bookended by the opening of the Harbour Bridge in 1932 and the 1938 Sesquicentenary of the First Fleet’s landing, two events that figured Sydney as the triumphant end point of a narrative of national, white Australian progress. This period also saw the publication of a number of novels by Australian women writers that took the contemporary city as their setting and scrutinised urban modernity as a state of being and an ideological position. This thesis takes as its focus five novels that depict and debate the multiple and often combative discourses of modernity that flowed through Australia’s first and most populous urban centre in the interwar period: Seven Poor Men of Sydney (1934) by Christina Stead, Jungfrau (1936) by Dymphna Cusack, Waterway (1938) by Eleanor Dark, Foveaux (1939) by Kylie Tennant, and Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow (1947; 1983) by M. Barnard Eldershaw. Through close reading within and across the novels, I argue that this generation of women writers pioneered a distinctly Australian, modern urban poetics that is best described as aqueous. Responding to Sydney as a dynamic estuarine environment, each writer mobilises water as location and literary device, infusing the modern city’s spaces and processes with productively aqueous qualities of changeability and circulation, unsettlement and motility. Making heuristic use of a Benjaminian framework for dialectical urban thinking, I read this aqueous poetics of Sydney against the narrative of progress epitomised by the Bridge and Sesquicentenary, arguing that in contradistinction to this narrative, the novels present an Australian urban modernity of material emplacement in an unpredictably watery sphere, where history settles and sediments, multiple ideological schemas flow into one another, and relations between bodies, space and power generate constant contestation.'

Source: Abstract.

'‘North Coastal’ is the first stage of a five year project on the history of Aboriginal Sydney supported by the Australian Research Council and the Department of History, University of Sydney. It is intended for use in schools, especially in Sydney, by Aboriginal families and organisations, by the non-Indigenous people of Sydney who wish to know and share more of the lives and achievements of Australia's first peoples.'

'Each of the six geographical regions, of which ‘North Coastal’ is the first, will include a calendar of events, historical posters, interactive maps, videoed interviews, site visits and other features currently under development. An important priority for the project is to give equal weight to the achievements of the descendants of traditional owners, and to those who later came to live in Sydney.' (Source: Website)

'In Australia, we have not yet composed a literature of place in which the Australian geographies sing, so in this dissertation, the author goes travelling with some North American writers in their native landscapes, exploring the practice of landscape witness, of ecological imagination. They carry on there,looking for the ways in which the wild music of the land be discerned and expressed in words. He talks with them about the business of writing the life of places. He takes heed of the natural histories in which their works have arisen, looking for correlations between those physical terrains - the actual earth, the solid ground of their work - and the terrain of these writers' prose, wondering how the prose (and sometimes the poetry) may be said to be an expression of the place. This work, in a sense, is a natural history of six nature writers; it is an ecological imagining of their lives and works and places. Writing the Wild is a journey through the light, the wind, the rock, the water, sometimes the fire that makes the land that houses the writers who compose these lyrics of place. Most of what it learns about those writers, it learns from the places themselves. This dissertation takes landscapes seriously. It reads the works of these writers as though the landscapes of which and in which they write might be worthy of regard in understanding the terrain of their texts. It lets places show light on works of words composed within them.'

(Source: Author's abstract, http://library.uws.edu.au/adt-NUWS/public/adt-NUWS20040630.093441/index.html)

Author's abstract: 'The Concerto Inn' is a work of fiction that tells the story of two sisters, each of whom kills a person she loves, each of whom is on the run. The novel traces the strand of betrayal and violence that Madeleine and Isobel enact, and in its conclusion makes it clear that the two stories are the same story repeated. 'The architect's dream - project manual for The Concerto Inn' presents itself as the workbook of the Architect who has been commissioned by the elusive author of 'The Concerto Inn' to design and construct a library. It stands as an endnote, a companion piece to the novel and is part architectural treatise and part ficto-criticism. Infiltrated by a number of different voices in different registers. it considers aspects of narrative structure using the language and metaphors of architecture.

Source: Australian Digital These Program website, http://library.uws.edu.au/adt-NUWS/public/adt-NUWS20030613.110535/
Sighted: 05/09/2006

This thesis documents a personal journey that asks the reader to consider the volatility of genres and their use value as a hierarchy and/or in the Academy. It places itself in the limitary disciplines of cultural studies, gender studies and fiction, and offers a map of a journey across disciplines. The thesis (w)rites against the grain of the patriarchal Order, and the author articulates gender as a variable in knowledge making and takes an experimental approach to the collection and analysis of data through reading and writing strategies. The use of the bracket is to make a ritual of (w)riting and a contingency of (k)now-ing. The thesis comes in three parts, all of which are interrelated. Parts one and two contain collections of the author's short stories and poetry and Part three is comprised of her correspondence. Source: Author's abstract.

This thesis is an exploration of the concept of time and its influence on literature. It is presented through an original novel, 'The three arrows', a critical reflection on this work, and an essay exploring the catalyst of change generated by the perception of time. The novel is inspired by Stephen Hawking's A Brief History of Time and his 'arrows of time': the thermodynamic arrow, in which entropy increases; the psychological arrow, the direction in which we feel time pass; and the cosmological arrow, the direction of time in which the universe expands.

'The literary techniques adopted in the writing of the novel are discussed, as is the author's research into the construction of time in literary discourse and its relationship to religious, philosophical, historical and psychological constructions. The catalytic force of scientific thought and discovery as it resonates through these fields is traced. Modernist and Postmodernist writing is examined, the Modernists with their technique of time-displacement and the Postmodernists with their exploration of randomness and discontinuity in the belief that it is the profound and discernable effect of the entropy and escalating change in a world of scientific uncertainty on the writing process itself.