Thesis--Wisconsin. / Vita. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 361-365).

This thesis takes as its broad area of study the solo instrumental music produced since 1960 by the virtuoso performer-composer, and focuses on the works of Australian clarinettist and composer Brigid Burke. The 1960's in music was a decade like no other; the effects of serialism and indeterminacy, the rise of electronic music, and the general climate of experimentation resulted in an explosion of new musical ideas and compositional approaches. One development of this period was the growth of a musician type new to the twentieth century: the virtuoso performer-composer. Brigid Burke (1960- ) is a clarinet soloist, visual artist and a composer of over one hundred works. The majority of Burke's compositional output comprises works for clarinet. In writing almost exclusively for the clarinet, the instrument of which she is a national and international performer, Burke can be viewed as continuing the virtuoso performer-composer trend emanating from the 1960's. The aim of this thesis is to investigate the extent to which Burke's clarinet works represent a unique voice in the international and Australian contemporary clarinet repertoire. Four of Burke's works were chosen for study: Three Sounds on Buildings 2 (2005),

In Celtic religious studies, it is often difficult to find reliable textual sources if you are working with pre-Christian religion, since all text is written in a Christian context. As a result, Celtic scholars have to look outside of the pre-Christian Celtic context, to search for knowledge elsewhere. For example, one may use texts from Classical writers (such as Caesar) who wrote about Celts they encountered, or look to Christian material (in particular saints’ lives) to search for clues of pagan traditions which may have survived into Christianity. This has resulted in that certain Celtic pagan deities which we do not have a lot of information on, are compared to or even equated with other religious figures from outside of the pagan Celtic context. One such example is the pagan, Irish goddess Brigid, who is frequently equated with the Roman goddess Minerva, and also said to be the predecessor of the Christian Saint Brigid. Some also make comparisons between Minerva and the saint. This thesis aims to make an extensive textual analysis where all of these three characters are compared and discussed. Are they actually ‘the same’, and if not, how similar or different are they? Is the equating valid, or do we need to take another approach within the Celtic field? Using discourse theory and a comparative method, the research eventually shows that some of the characters’ most important traits are lost when we do equate them with each other.

This thesis posits post-humanism as a philosophy that engages directly with the problem of anthropocentrism and is concerned primarily with the metaphysics of subjectivity. It studies five literary texts (James Joyce's Ulysses, Virginia Woolf's Flush, Djuna Barnes' Nightwood, Brigid Brophy's Hackenfeller's Ape and J.M. Coetzee's Elizabeth Costello: Eight Lessons) that challenge the humanistic or classical subject through critical engagement with what this subject traditionally saw as its antithesis - the animal. These texts contest various fixed assumptions about animality and disrupt the status-quo of the human. Breaking with the tradition that treats animals exclusively as a metaphor for the human, they attempt to see and understand animality outside the framework of anthropocentric suppositions. This project aims to describe the strategies these texts employ to conceptualize animality as well as the methods they apply to delineate its subversive potential and to disrupt the human- animal binary. Its theoretical framework combines the work of thinkers belonging to the new but thriving field of Animal Studies with the ideas of Jacques Derrida, Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari. It is this project's great ambition to contribute towards the development of new post- humanist ethics defined by its...

The thesis considers Felix Guattati's notion of transversality, Fernand Deligny anti-pedagody, and Brigid Brophy's novel In Transit (1969) to argue that the terms of subsumption and stratification have the potential to address the conceptual apparatus of the avant-garde to avoid certain foreclosures concerned with the rhetoric of revolutionary transformation traditionally associated both with vanguardism in a politico-ideological sense and with the avant-garde as an aesthetic and critical project. To unlock the critical potential of the terms of subsumption and stratification in regard to the avant-garde, the theoretical framework of Félix Guattari and Fernand Deligny developed as a result of their clinical experience with psychotic and autistic patients, respectively, is used to foreground how subsumption and stratification are inherent in the notions of transversality, group subjectivity, assemblage of enunciation, signification, schizoanalysis, tracing, and mapping. Using these, the thesis argues that in order to address the theoretical foreclosures associated with the notion of the avant-garde, the latter should be viewed in the light of the complementary operations of subsumption and stratification. To substantiate the argument, the thesis juxtaposes Félix Guattari's notion of transversality,...

Postmodernity's Search for Postgender: Bropy, Winterson and Place (Abstract) The thesis examines three formally very diverse texts published in 1969, 1993 and 2013 respectively that creatively approach and subvert the gender binary: Brigid Brophy's In Transit, Jeanette Winterson's Written on the Body and Vanessa Place's Boycott. Based on Jean-François Lyotard's conception of postmodernism as modernism in a constantly nascent state, the author advances a hypothesis of "postgender." This however does not mean overcoming gender for good (as it is sometimes understood, for example by Rosi Braidotti), but as a structural momentum, a possibility of subversion at the heart of any gender schema and currently therefore of genderism, i.e. the belief that gender is necessarily binary and that aspects of our gender are inherently linked to our sex assigned at birth. Apart from feminist theory and literary criticism, the thesis also touches on the field of transgender studies, psychoanalysis, philosophy of history and most importantly the work of Jacques Derrida. In so doing it tries to articulate the notion of postgender as part and parcel of the condition of postmodernity and a culmination of the modern split of the subject, leading to a certain cultural gender turn during the 1990s. The work nevertheless remains...

The premise of this thesis is that the ???concrete holographic image???, a laser transmission hologram which has an object or a hologram of an object as its subject, has unique spatial and temporal properties which can suggest a plurality of tenses to a viewer. There is a lack of comprehensive analysis of the holographic representational system within art related theoretical and critical writing and a tendency to analyse individual works only in terms of generalities which apply to the concepts surrounding the holographic medium. While these form an important background for art image production, in some cases corresponding to artists works, the existing written material on the subject is inadequate as a model from which to draw the all important temporal conclusions. To date the critical reception of holograms has made no mention of acuity, the size of the viewing frustum, the depth of the image and scant mention of interference phenomena which are the intrinsic factors which I believe precipitate temporal illusions. Therefore this thesis examines the concrete holographic image in great detail on its own terms, firstly through theories of the basic image forming phenomena of interference and diffraction and secondly through the techniques of production as they have been adapted for the making of my art works. The extent of the metaphorical and allegorical potential of the spatial and temporal properties of the concrete holographic image are put to the ultimate test in a commission for St Brigid???s Church, Coogee. The Shrine of the Sacred Heart commission for St Brigid???s requires a concrete holographic image to facilitate devotion to the Sacred Heart. The Sacred Heart is not a physical thing but a complex, evolving spiritual entity with a realist pictorial history.

The premise of this thesis is that the ???concrete holographic image???, a laser transmission hologram which has an object or a hologram of an object as its subject, has unique spatial and temporal properties which can suggest a plurality of tenses to a viewer. There is a lack of comprehensive analysis of the holographic representational system within art related theoretical and critical writing and a tendency to analyse individual works only in terms of generalities which apply to the concepts surrounding the holographic medium. While these form an important background for art image production, in some cases corresponding to artists works, the existing written material on the subject is inadequate as a model from which to draw the all important temporal conclusions. To date the critical reception of holograms has made no mention of acuity, the size of the viewing frustum, the depth of the image and scant mention of interference phenomena which are the intrinsic factors which I believe precipitate temporal illusions. Therefore this thesis examines the concrete holographic image in great detail on its own terms, firstly through theories of the basic image forming phenomena of interference and diffraction and secondly through the techniques of production as they have been adapted for the making of my art works. The extent of the metaphorical and allegorical potential of the spatial and temporal properties of the concrete holographic image are put to the ultimate test in a commission for St Brigid???s Church, Coogee. The Shrine of the Sacred Heart commission for St Brigid???s requires a concrete holographic image to facilitate devotion to the Sacred Heart. The Sacred Heart is not a physical thing but a complex, evolving spiritual entity with a realist pictorial history.