Thesis (M.Phil.) - University of Queensland, 2003. / Includes bibliography.

Humankind yearns for reconciliation, fulfilment and salvation, and the human heart has always sought deliverance from negative forces. In particular, this yearning for salvation is most apparent when poets envisage such yearning in living situations and in recognisable life circumstances. Reading them shows how the quest for salvation is being achieved in daily steps that incarnate movements of hope and a contesting of despair. This dissertation captures some significant images of salvation expressed in selected Australian poetry. It argues that what is classically called final salvation is imaged in the trope of transcendence in poetry. Because the concept of salvation both indicates the right path and promises a way of liberation and fulfilment, gaining salvation is not an escape from the world, but rather an engagement with it, through just and humane actions. The study’s poetic selections image salvation as redressing wrongs, regenerating the land, seeking new life, and envisaging better states of affairs. This dissertation functions at the interface of theology and poetry. It shows how a reader in the Christian community may identify some key images in public poetry as foreshadowing religious salvation. This is possible because, like the poet engaging in an aesthetic experience, the believer brings a remarkable openness to reality in the exercise of the religious imagination. This analogical imagination identifies images in poetry that do touch the human spirit in deeply spiritual ways. The study employs the competence of methodical hermeneutic interpretation. It proceeds as an aesthetic-theological reading employing critical-analytical scholarship. Rather than attempt a formal explication of authorial intent, the hermeneutic reads in a careful excavation of the poems for those significant “scraps of experience” that coax the imagination towards hope in the mystery of salvation. The dissertation approaches the poetic texts using “Christian literary theory” as its hermeneutical framework. The dissertation presents readings of selected poetry and prose of three celebrated Australian voices, Judith Wright, Les A. Murray and David Malouf. The study’s primary data are their poetic images recognising and affirming the dream of transcendence embodied in human happiness, moments of rescue and relief, events of forgiveness and transformation, and insights for a better life for humans and the planet. The study shows how poetical insights image partial fulfilments in transcendent perceptions, transformed personal destinies and envisaged social reforms. This exercise in contextual theology searches for depth and perennial resonances that sustain Australians in their culture. The discussion is especially concerned with the poetic use of the trope of hope and its effects, and especially with the power of metaphor for accessing the sublime. The study distils ten virtues for salvation from the readings of the selected poems as pathways for implementing salvation in the world. The study presents poetic images of promise, rescue and transformation that refresh discourses regarding salvation.

This dissertation employs the methodologies of postcolonial theory and hyperreal theory (following Baudrillard), in order to investigate articulations of identity, nation and representation in contemporary Australian poetry. Informed by a comparative analysis of contemporary Latin American poetry and cultural theory (in translation), as a means of re-examining the Australian context, this dissertation develops a new transnational model of Australian poetics. The central thesis of this dissertation is that contemporary Australian poetry engages with the postcolonial at its limits. That is, at those sites of postcoloniality that are already mapped by theory, but also at those that occur beyond postcolonial theory. The hyperreal is understood as one such limit, traceable within the poetry but silenced in conventional postcolonial theory. As another limit to the postcolonial, this dissertation reads Latin American poetry and theory, in whose texts postcolonial theory is actively resisted, but where postcolonial and hyperreal poetics nevertheless intersect. The original critical context constructed by this dissertation enables a new set of readings of Australian identity through its poetry. Within this new interpretative context, the readings of contemporary Australian poetry articulate a psycho-social postcoloniality; offer a template for future transactions between national poetry and global politics; and develop a model of the postcolonial hyperreal.

Thesis (Ph.D.) -- University of Western Sydney, 2000. / "This thesis is presented for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy at the University of Western Sydney, Hawkesbury" Bibliography : leaves 170-191.

[No Abstract]

Thesis (M.Phil.) - University of Queensland, 2006. / Includes bibliography.

Thesis (PhD)--Macquarie University, Division of Humanities, Department of English, 2005. / "March 2002". Bibliography: p. 324-344.

Thesis (M.A. (Hons)) -- University of Western Sydney, 2000. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 25-26).

"March 2002". / Thesis (PhD)--Macquarie University, Division of Humanities, Department of English, 2005. / Bibliography: p. 324-344. / Introduction: framing the texts -- Subversive voices -- Formulating a theoretical position -- Performance: a complete process -- On second thoughts: rewriting contemporary culture -- Performing On second thoghts -- Dialogic voices: Amanda Stewart and # -- Performing # -- Voices of desire: Ania Walwicz and Soft -- Performing Soft -- Marginal voices: Hazel Smith and Poet without language -- Performing Poet without language -- Conclusions: interpreting subversive voices. / This study considers the text and performance of four Australian experimental poets, Chris Mann, Amanda Stewart, Ania Walwicz and Hazel Smith. My aim is to demonstrate how the genre of experimental poetry uses language and performance in such a way as to rewrite existing dominant discourses. The challenge as an analyst is to find ways into such reflexive texts that use intertextual resources of critical theory as their subject matter. The perspective employed here engages with the theories posited by the texts and allows for a theoretical position removed from the structure and theories informing them. -- The study is organised in two parts. First, I consider the subversiveness of the genre drawing on Raymond Williams' notion of the emergent, followed by a discussion of important predecessors in the field of experimentation. I then outline the particular method of enquiry and theoretical framework used here to analyse the meaning potential of such works. Systemic Functional Grammar and Multimodal Discourse theory are discussed and their particular application in this study. The second part of the thesis applies these theories to the experimental works. -- I begin explaining my theoretical position by considering the weakness of the commonly used theories of Kristeva's 'semiotic' to analyse such works. I found Systemic Functional Grammar, as developed by Michael Halliday and then Terry Threadgold, to be a useful tool for elucidating the meaning potential behind the fractured grammars in the texts. It also provided a way of conceptualising enunciative positions and the way intertextual resources might be rewritten. From within this linguistic framework I was able to discern subversive messages from the intertwined theories ranging across the texts from Marxism, structuralism, psychoanalysis, feminism and multiculturalism. -- The performance posed another challenge as the improvised spoken texts, uniquely performed by these artists, create a subversive listening position for the audience, which engages with both the words and sounds for their sonic and semantic qualities. I consider many ways of addressing the role and behaviour of the performer and listener as well as the performance as a creative process, emerging from the two. I engage the model put forward by Kress and Van Leeuwen for analysis of multimodal texts which provides a functional approach to meaning potential in the performance and its varying layers. Within this model, I found prosody most useful for its ability to notate intonation, key, disjuncture and stress, exposing the dialogic voices and the relationship between semantics and sound in the performances. This form of communication is equivalent to the indexical entailment of sound and music which forms the basis for communication between performers, and between performer and audience. The dialogic situation is enhanced by both prosody and indexical entailment providing possible meanings. I use some traditional musicological analysis but my aim is to move away from such formalistic descriptions to consider culturally inscribed sounds and their interpretation using a functional model. -- Throughout, the complexity of experimental performance is evident but the theoretical frame used here might be applied to other works of this nature as a means of further understanding the semiotic web in subversive texts. / Mode of access: World Wide Web. / 344 p., music

Gwen Harwood is one of Australia’s most celebrated poets. Her longstanding collaboration with composer Larry Sitsky produced six substantial operas between 1963 and 1982; Fall of the House of Usher (1965); Lenz (1970); Fiery Tales (1975, based on Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales and excerpts from Boccaccio’s Decameron); Voices in Limbo (1977); The Golem (1980, first performed in 1993); and De Profundis (1982, a setting of Oscar Wilde’s letters). Both Harwood and her critics acknowledge the libretti as some of her best writing (Harwood cites her libretto for Lenz as her ‘selected poem’); to date, there has been no major study of these works. This thesis engages with Harwood’s opera texts, arguing for readings that are neither atomist nor reductive but jointly focused on both the effect of the text and the mechanics of its production. It begins by outlining the theoretical terrain of words and music studies and establishes an approach to Harwood and Sitsky’s operas based on the idea that opera’s textual exaggeration is a function of its multiple critical components; that is, the intersection of words and music, collaborative authorship, and dramatic language. The thesis then offers focused studies of each of these aspects in Harwood and Sitsky’s works, constructing a literary picture of the opera texts. Primary sources include the scores of the operas (usually copies of the composer’s autograph), selected correspondence between Sitsky and Harwood, drafts and typescripts of the libretti (held in the National Library, Canberra, and the Fryer Library, University of Queensland), and selected essays by Harwood on her words for music. / http://proxy.library.adelaide.edu.au/login?url= http://library.adelaide.edu.au/cgi-bin/Pwebrecon.cgi?BBID=1331575 / Thesis (M.A.) -- University of Adelaide, School of Humanities, 2008