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EventsSeminar Day 1 03 | Seminar Day 2 03 | Seminar Day 3: Contexts 04 | Dissection 04 | Seminar Day 4 05 | Research Seminar Series 05 'Seminar Day 4'
Friday 27 th May 2005 In tandem with the monthly post-graduate Seminars this event aims to provide post-graduates with further opportunities to present papers and receive constructive feedback within a relaxed and supportive environment. Session 1 10am – 10.15 Amelia Johns (Creative Writing) Held Captive by Loss: an examination of the relationship between trauma, memory and narrative in post-apocalyptic literature. Abstract: In this paper I wish to address the way memory functions in post-holocaust literatures, affecting, as it does, the ground of collective cultural identity and of personal identity. This preoccupation with the question of memory and the impact of trauma has resulted in a contemporary focus on “reading the wound” in literatures that address traumatic memory, particularly in the works of theorists Geoffrey Hartman and Cathy Caruth. In this project I will apply a reading of traumatic representation to Ray Bradbury's “Fahrenheit 451”, which represents collective memory as impacted upon by historical trauma. I will also be exploring the poetics of trauma in literature, which I will do through a close reading of my own short story “The Anniversary.” 10.15 – 10.45 am Anja Kanngieser (Theatre Studies) Raised Fists and Shattered Ideologies: Avant-Garde Aesthetics and the Mythology of Subversive Identity Abstract: This paper examines the notion of subversive artistic identity, with a focus on aesthetically concerned political collectives prevalent in 20th Century Germany and France such as the Dadaists, Kommune 1 and the Situationist International. The subversive artistic protest events enacted by such groups were performed through a variety of media such as performance art, montage, texts, sounds, poetry and architecture. Through these modes, such artists intended to disseminate the traditional division between the critical artistic institutions and the social sphere. Through the dissolution of traditional concepts these artists aimed to challenge and confront the spectator, re-invent ideas of socio-political responsibility and to draw attention to the way in which people interacted with their cultural milieu. Drawing upon arguments presented in the works of the Frankfurt School of Critical Theory, specifically the aesthetic theories raised by T.W Adorno and Peter Burger, this paper will compare and contrast these movements in order to illuminate the problematic nature of the deferred and re-presented aesthetic event, through which the difficulty for art to enact long-term practical socio-political difference is exposed. For, by continually revisiting such traditional means of dissent, such aesthetic ideologies have become somewhat impotent. Additionally, by relying heavily upon forms of previous aesthetic movements, the act of searching out new modes of subversive artistic events and forms is negated. 10.45 – 11.05 Francesca Haig (Creative Writing) Something is rotten in Blue Velvet … Abstract: This paper offers a reading of David Lynch's 1986 film, Blue Velvet, through Shakespeare's Hamlet. Blue Velvet offers a journey into a severed ear, which leads to the protagonist's exploration of the seamy underbelly of his all-American world. This paper takes as its starting point the severed, rotting ear, and considers its evocation of Hamlet's father's ear, into which Claudius pours the poison that sets in motion Hamlet's own discovery of the dark side of Elsinore. Without wishing to offer a reductive reading of Blue Velvet as a contemporary rendering of Hamlet, the numerous thematic and narrative similarities between the two texts serve to illuminate Blue Velvet's 11.45-exploration into the dark side of human life and relationships, in particular the Oedipal drama. While reading Lynch through Shakespeare may seem to be unexpected and bizarre (Lynchian, even?), it is also a strategy that offers a counterpoint to and elaboration of the film's existing critical reception. 11.05 am – 11.15 Break (tea, coffee and biscuits) Session 2 11.15 – 11.45 am Christy Dena (New Media and Creative Writing) Abstract: Polymorphic narrative is narrative in many forms, narrative as expressed over multiple texts. This paper provides an outline of the emerging phenomenon of multi-channel storytelling. The conceptual and creative heritage is posited, along with current iterations. Fours levels of the narrative domain -- narrative ecology, narrative universe, work and text -- are introduced and discussed. Relations observed between texts are offered as a step towards a taxonomy. 11.45 – 12.15pm Terri McNeilage (Creative Writing) Persephone's Promise: The Construction of the Daughter in Women's Autobiographical Literature Abstract: This research takes the myth of Demeter and Persephone as a thread informing questions about Persephone's role; she is silent throughout and seems to be a pawn between her mother, her husband and Zeus. What would she say if she could speak? What of the voice of the daughter? And what of her mother, searching in tears for her? Does she search out of love and unselfish care, or are there ulterior motives in her desire to have her daughter returned? This research explores a 'dark Demeter', the mother who searches in symbiotic rage; this is the Demeter whose search is born from pathological rage because she sees Persephone as completely belonging to her, because she cannot exist without her daughter - because she desires her own reflection be returned. What does the daughter's voice sound like in the face of this dark Demeter? 12.15 – 12.45 pm Ben Ben Goldsworthy (Creative Writing) Confessional Criticism, or Rousseau and Me. Abstract: Confessional criticism seeks to challenge the patriarchal tradition of a disengaged and distancing academic voice, by introducing the personal experience of the 'writer' or 'critic' through explorations of their relationship to the theoretical. In this paper I mean to explore the possibilities of the genre through a discussion of my own problematic relationship with the father of the modern confessional, Jean Jacques Rousseau. 12.45 -1.30 LUNCH Session 3 1.30 – 2.00pm Georgie Boucher (Theatre Studies) Blurring the interior: The Diary Project , 2004 Abstract: My paper will discuss the performance event, The Diary Project , by Renato Cuocolo and Roberta Bosetti, which took place during the Melbourne International Arts Festival, 2004. This installation involved Cuocolo and Bosetti moving in to the George Adams gallery and occupying the space domestically for the entirety of the festival. The invitation from Bosetti and Cuocolo for an audience to enter the literal interiority of their living space, as well as the interior of their intimately personal diary, created performance which profoundly overlapped the realms of theatre and real-life. My paper proposes that The Diary Project inhabited a fluid, in-between performance space which allowed a dislocation of meaning, suggesting new ways to think about memory, space and reality. 2.00 – 2.30pm Ricci-Jane Adams (Creative Writing) Welcome to Lallyland: The Plays of Lally Katz as Magical Feminism Abstract: This paper furthers the discussion of the playwriting of Lally Katz, one of Melbourne's most prolific young writers, as magical feminism. In investigating Katz's writing as a feminist discourse synthesised with the political revisioning of magical realism, I investigate Katz's most recent writing via this strategy. Magical feminism functions as a type of decolonisation, and this discussion locates Katz's writing in contemporary Australian theatre to explore the contribution that such a synthesis makes to the suggested rise of the political in theatre at this time in Australia. 2.30 – 3.00pm Alyson Campbell (Theatre Studies) It ain't over till…? Abstract : The absence of a curtain call, like many absences, speaks louder than the presence of one. This paper is a tangent sprouting from my writing up of Brink Theatre's production of Sarah Kane's 4.48 Psychosis. Struck by the vehement response of the audience to the failure of the actors to return to the emptied stage to ‘take a bow', I began to ponder the crucial, liminal position of this act that has long survived the disappearance of the actual curtain itself. The paper is an informal musing on what Bert States calls the 'seam' of the curtain call, a ''border category' between aesthetics and manners' (Great Reckonings in Little Rooms 1985:198), that in the end suggests that director Geordie Brookman's refusal to have a curtain call is not just an aesthetic conceit but a decision that reinforces the deeply political core of the play. 3.00 – 3.30pm Jane Montgomery Griffiths (Theatre Studies) Eidos and the Actor: Performing the Body in Sophocles' Electra Abstract: What are the boundaries of representation in tragic performance? Where does the actor draw the line between 'representing' and 'becoming' her character? Using the work of Mary Douglas, Julia Kristeva and Elizabeth Grosz as a starting point, this paper explores the relationship between the actor's body and the performative eidos in portraying Sophocles' Electra. It argues that the actor's mask is a construct of subjectivity; an ontological entity rather than theatrical property. In the relationship between representation and being, the lines of demarcation and identity are endlessly blurred in realm of the abject: a state of being which destroys the dichotomous security of self and other. The mask comes to signify not a blank canvass for audience projection, but a distorted mirror reflecting the oscillating subjectivities of actor, audience and part. 3.45 close and pack up After drinks from 4pm in the Deep Dish Bar
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