Surprisingly enough, while it is generally acknowledged that emotion plays a vital part in the negotiation of every day life, there has been until recently a scarcity of communications scholarship directly concerned with its study. To date, those examining this variable have largely relied for the theoretical and methodological support on models imported from psychology. While their studies have arguably had a positive impact on our understanding of some aspects of emotion, this dissertation contends that an over-dependence on psychological theories and methods has resulted in a blinkered approach to its study. In general, the focus of research and scholarship has been on either display and recognition of facial expression, physiological response to environmental stimuli, subjective verbal labeling, and behavioral manifestation. On closer inspection, a positivist discourse which considers emotion in methodologically individualistic and empirically behavioral terms has informed much of this work. Building on behaviorism, intentionalist analytical philosophy, and phenomenology, emotion research in Communication Studies has tended to neglect the social. More sophisticated approaches to grasping this latter variable, found in Sociology and Anthropology, consequently have had little impact, leading communications scholars to consistently define emotion in terms of individual motivations, drives, desires, wants, and dispositions rather than as a process located in a social world. / In light of this, this dissertation strove not only to assemble a history and provide a critique of emotion study in psychology, but to relate it to advances being made in Sociology and Anthropology, especially those pertaining to communication and postmodernity. Alongside this, it endeavored to: (1) furnish a theory and methodology for explaining those relationships; (2) illuminate a way in which emotion can be reconceived as a formative and independent social variable integral to the reproduction of postmodernity; and (3) analyze the practices and discourses that have contributed to the historically changing, oftentimes, inconsistent and disputed, study of emotion. After the principle issues were introduced in the opening Chapter, the second Chapter outlined the relationships between emotion, the everyday, media, and postmodernity, with the everyday representing a key theoretical construct necessary for understanding our time. This Chapter closed with an exploration of so-called postmodern emotion. Using several theoretical frameworks, Chapter 3 tracked historical, discursive, and disciplinary interests in emotion and Chapter 4 relations between theories of emotions through pre-modern (5thC B.C.-1890), modern (1890-1960), and postmodern (1960-) periods. Next, Chapter 5 charted the etymologies of the primary emotion terms, while Chapter 6 explored approaches to the study of emotion in Communication Studies, or Communicology. After an initial analysis of 'bibliometric' data, the three primary traditional approaches were then systematically identified and examined. A fourth postmodern approach, the constructionist, was presented and assessed in the last Chapter. There it was argued that, from this perspective, communication constitutes reality and not merely provides a conduit for preformed intentional and emotional states. There, the concept of social emotion was advanced, the idea of emotion as socio-culture performance developed, and a rules based theoretical f

This study contends that postmodern American fiction dramatizes an important shift of philosophical perspective on the fetish in keeping with recent theories of fetishism as a cultural practice. This shift is defined by the refusal to accept the traditional Western condemnation of the fetishist as primitive or perverse, and by the effort to affirm more productive uses for fetishism as a theoretical concept spanning the disciplines of psychoanalysis, Marxian social theory, and anthropology. Analyzing the depiction of fetishistic practices in selected contemporary American novels, the dissertation utilizes fetish theory in order to clarify the unique textual and historiographic features of postmodernist fiction. It also emphasizes the way in which conventional ideas about history and teleology are necessarily challenged by an affirmative orientation toward the fetish. Part One of the dissertation, comprising the first two chapters, traces the lineage of Western thinking about fetishism from Hegel, Marx, and Freud to Derrida, Baudrillard, and Jameson, among others. Recognizing that traditional theories attribute the symbolic power of the fetish to its mystification of historical origins, Part One posits that poststructuralist and postmodernist contributions to the subject enable, but do not develop, an alternative concept of fetishism as a practice with constructive historical potential. Part Two of the study seeks to develop this historical potential with reference to prominent descriptive models of postmodernist fiction, and through close readings of five contemporary American authors: Thomas Pynchon, Kathy Acker, Robert Coover, John Hawkes, and Don DeLillo. The four chapters of Part Two each examine the fictional representation of fetishism within a different theoretical framework, focusing on, respectively: temporality and objectivity in postmodern fiction theory; the interrelation between psychoanalytic theory and female fetishism in novels by Pynchon and Acker

My dissertation is motivated by two general problems within contemporary North American racial politics. First, the increasing ideological impetus of a “post-racist” society contradicts a spate of events that are symptomatic and constitutive of racial and ethnic essentialisms. Second, the logic of multiculturalism and antiracism has often been expressed in a language of race and identity rooted in a rigid system of immutable differences (Hall, 1997; Ang, 2001). The challenge is to deconstruct race and ethnicity in a language that is critical of new racisms as well as the ways in which racial and ethnic difference is seized and diffused by market multiculturalism. While some theorists have used elements of postmodern theory to develop a “resistance multiculturalism” sensitive to shifting social meanings and floating racial signifiers (see McLaren, 1994), they have rarely explored the political possibilities of “ludic postmodernism” (parody, pastiche, irony) as a critical response to multicultural ideologies. If part of postmodernism as an intellectual movement includes self-reflexivity, self-parody, and the rejection of a foundational “truth,” for example, the various racial and ethnic categories reified under multiculturalism are perhaps open to revision and contestation (Hutcheon, 1989). To develop this particular postmodern critique of multiculturalism, I draw on three case studies concerned with identity and representation in North American popular media. The first case considers vocal impersonation as a disruption to the visual primacy of race by examining the stand-up comedy films of Dave Chappelle, Russell Peters, and Margaret Cho. The second case turns to the postmodern bodies of cyborgs and humanoid robots in the science fiction film I, Robot (2004) as a racial metaphor at the crossroads of whiteness, inhumanity, and redemption. The final case discusses the politics of irony in relation to ethnolinguistic identity and debates surrounding sports mascots. Each case study recycles racial and ethnic stereotypes for a variety of political purposes, drawing out the connections and tensions between postmodernism and multiculturalism. A postmodern critique of multiculturalism may offer antiracist politics an understanding of race and ethnicity rooted in a strategic indeterminacy, which allows for multidimensional political coalitions directed against wider socioeconomic inequalities.

Painting, central to Western art for many centuries, became problematised to an unprecedented degree in the 1960's. From the early 1970's, many Western artists abandoned its forms and traditions and embraced alternative forms. However, painting returned, and it remains the medium of choice for many artists. Painting in the post-modern era of art differs from that of the modernist era. The reconsideration of painting was apparent internationally and throughout Australia. / In South Australia, painting began to change significantly around 1970, and this change had some unique local characteristics. In this thesis, I describe the change in painting in South Australia and identify the main themes and innovations that characterised it by examining the work of important painters working in South Australia in the period c1970 to 2003. While South Australian art has been strongly influenced by Australian and Western artisitic trends, these trends have manifested themselves locally in characteristic ways - shaped, for example, by local and national politics, a strong feminist movement, the role of government-funded exhibition spaces, and an active art press, as well as prominent local practitioners. / This thesis takes the form of an overview rather than an in-depth analysis of all painting in South Australia in this period. It identifies some of the main artists and many of the main themes but is not intended as an exhaustive description, which would be beyond the scope of such a thesis. The intention is to provide a broad historical picture that identifies the forms, styles and characteristics of the painting that developed and the context in which it developed in this important three-decade period. This historical picture will serve as a framework for further analysis of specific art and artists, and it provides a basis for the assessment of painting at the beginning of the twenty-first century. The thesis builds on and draws into the historical picture some existing literature on South Australian painting. / South Australia is chosen for this study partly because of its unique characteristics and partly because there are some significant South Australian artists whose work is under-acknowledged. In Australian art history, the emphasis is traditionally on developments in Sydney and Melbourne. This thesis shows that South Australian painting since the 1970s has been important and is worthy of consideration. / Chapter 1 briefly outlines the nature of South Australian modernism at the end of the 1960s. Chapter 2 details the revolution in South Australian painting of the 1970s: the changed political, educational and institutional environment for art, the rejection of painting in favour of alternative forms, and the politicisation of painting's subject matter. Chapters 3, 4 and 5 outline the impetus for the return to painting in South Australia, the development of post-modern painting in the 1980s and 1990s, and the principal concerns and attributes of the new painting. Chapter 6 briefly looks at South Australian Aboriginal painting, whose nature differed from that of the Northern Territory, but which has had a nationally significant impact. Chapter 7 examines a sample of the work of emerging painters around 2000, and the context in which they work, so as to identify the nature painting at the beginning of the twenty-first century. / Finally, the discussion of South Australian painting in this thesis informs the consideration of painting as an art form generally. It shows that painting today is very different from that of the modernist era, but that it retains significant power and appeal. / Thesis (MVisualArts)--University of South Australia, 2004.

Bibliography: leaves 308-316. / v, 346 leaves ; 30 cm. / Title page, contents and abstract only. The complete thesis in print form is available from the University Library. / This thesis seeks to understand the interrelation of knowledge, power and culture in the context of globalization. Crisis of Marxism has prompted intense reflection on the nature of modernity as a post-cultural phenomenon. This discourse highlights forms of domination and resistance neglected by Marxism and Liberalism. Intellectual developments in the West have acquired a halo of universality which makes it difficult for outsiders to recognise their limitations. The debate between modernists and postmodernists is a case in point. Post-colonial theorists appropriation of post-structuralism, thematic and methodological, raises questions about their own relationship to Western theory and whether their analyses neglect material aspects of globalization as well as problems specific to post-colonial societies. This thesis contends that it is unnecessary to absolutise the "culture vs. materialism" dichotomy. While it may be true that the cultural is "always already" political, critical theory must insist on foregrounding a more activist notion of political agency in a conjecture marked by global management of dissent, economic fundamentalism, media spectacles and cynical conflation of democracy with consumption. / Thesis (Ph.D.)--University of Adelaide, Dept. of Politics, 1998?

The mirror, central to traditional Western epistemology and representation, has shattered. Yet its metaphors, mechanisms, operations and poetics continue to powerfully shape and evocatively describe, contemporary Western culture. The exhibition, After Reflection, investigates realist representation in a post-mirror paradigm, through paintings, prints and projections that incorporate perceptual plays, virtual imaging and digital modeling. The dissertation charts the history of the mirror metaphor and its reconfiguration through post-modernity. It suggests that while the metaphor may be superceded it remains useful and evocative but only if considered in the form of a mirror-ball rather than as a planar mirror. The dissertation examines the mirror metaphor and its relationship to a wide selection of aspects crucial to the arrangement of contemporary Western culture, art and space. / The thesis is structured as a mirror-ball, in small fragments that both reflect on and illuminate aspects of the topic. The dissertation is thus divided into various ‘Shards’ – broad subject headings derived from the primary mechanisms and poetics of the mirror. Within each shard are a varied number of ‘Rays’ – lines of illumination arising from each shard that impact on particular aspects of Western culture. / The exhibition After Reflection includes further speculations around the theme of the mirror and with the arrangement of contemporary space – both pictorial and actual. It is not intended to illustrate the dissertation but to be an additional supplement that visually elaborates on issues enmeshed and parallel to those addressed in the dissertation. The works have all been completed during the period of the candidature (from March 2000) They include six oil paintings, a set of Lightjet photographs (from the “Echohouse’ series) generated from 3d modelling programs and then face-mounted to Perspex. There is an additional three larger scale Lightjet photographs from another series. Finally there are projected works. One is a self contained DVD projection and the other is Mirror Land - a large scale 3d animation covering two wall and projected in a chiasmatic arrangement. Both works feature an endless looping repetition. / All the works play with metaphoric aspects of the mirror and examine the construction of space in contemporary Western culture. This space has become increasingly rationalized since the Renaissance and mirror a more general abstraction whereby the real is evermore preceded by simulations. The work looks at the mirror land and suggests a mode of realism capable of addressing the situation where the real has increasingly been reconfigured into representation.

The thesis addresses a mode of visual art criticism that it characterizes as “antipodal”. Antipodality is a false image of the world, a phantasm. An antipodal simulacrum could be described by what Jurgis Baltrusaitus has called a “depraved perspective”, which is a procedure of investigation dominated by the passion to objectify the empirical sign in a conceit of perverse logic. A perspective rendering taken to literalist excess (comparable to the literalising of figurative language) causes anomalies in and corruptions of what is depicted. The invention of the antipodes by cartographers of early modern Europe—a “logical” necessity of mapping that then required discovery of the antipodal land as a lost object—might be such an instance of a depraved perspective. In Baltrusaitus’s terms, we could say such depravity produces an “aberration” in the manner of the optical phenomenon in which a celestial body is apparently displaced and viewed as if it were elsewhere. Such an aberration forms the thematic content of this thesis; content which is the proposition of an aberrant critical conceit of “antipodality” as a simulacrum. This was a formative concept for my own activity of art criticism, in that it allowed a defining moment for an Australian postmodernism (notably in the 1980s) as an evacuated sign-system of art, a styling of art as pseudo-art. But it has acquired a trajectory for art criticism beyond the definition of Australian postmodern style. An antipodal art criticism is likewise a pseudo-criticism, that’s to say, it is a performative enunciation of falseness: it addresses a pseudo-object. Like the antipodes, art is a necessary fiction for criticism, a lost object that needs to be discovered. The most potent pseudo-art for Australian postmodernism was kitsch, and its style was camp. For contemporary art criticism, however, in a digital era, the most potent pseudo-art is pornography, notably digital pornography. Kitsch is the simulacrum of aesthetic form. Pornography is the simulacrum of eroticism. The thesis develops a critical discussion of works of art through the perverse logic of pornography as a depraved perspective. In this respect, “antipodality” provides the conceptual structure of this thesis, which polemically reflects on art criticism and the simulacrum through the media of visual art, film and literature. In a specific Australian context, the thesis discusses the work of Imants Tillers and Lindy Lee as oeuvres that have dealt with the false identity of the artist as originator of their performative but empty signature styles. The pornographic impulse of antipodality is dealt with through other modes of self-portraiture and performativity, notably in three generations of photographic technique and genre: Diane Arbus, Merry Alpern and Natacha Merritt. The performative nature of a pseudo-art is correlative to the performativity of pornography as pseudo-eroticism: both render dubious any authenticity of the desire motivating the performances. The thesis examines in detail three instances of falsely performative identities in film: the alluring and haunted figure of Madeleine in Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo; the ingenue, picaresque protagonist of Roger Vadim’s sci-fi fantasy Barbarella; and Gough Lewis’s humanistic documentary on a porn star whose notoriety derived from subjecting herself to “the world’s largest gang bang”, Sex: The Annabel Chong Story. Each of these cinematic portraits operates, with varying degrees and moments of artifice, a metafictional transgression of figural borders. This strategy as a type of erotic theatricality is considered in detail with, among other passing examples, two celebrated short works of libertine literature (by Vivant Denon and Jean-François de Bastide); two paintings—one by nineteenth-century French academic artist Jules-Joseph Lefebvre, the other by the quite un-academic painter Pierre Bonnard; and with an erotic, theatrical innovation called the “Attitude”, introduced by Emma Hamilton as an amateur drawing room entertainment in the late eighteenth century. Hamilton’s captivating tableaux are discussed in terms of the phantasm, and the thesis is inspired by two literary exemplars of phantasmic portraiture: Edgar Allan Poe’s figure of “the man of the crowd” and Guy de Maupassant’s “Horla”. The latter, in particular, is presented as an analogy for the performative effect of antipodal simulacrum of art criticism.

Thesis (Ph.D.) - James Cook University, 2003. / Typescript (photocopy) Title from document title page. Bibliography: leaves 318-346. Available in PDF format via the World Wide Web.

Thesis (M.A.)--University of Mobile, 2005. / Abstract. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 109-121).

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Ohio State University, 2007. / Full text release at OhioLINK's ETD Center delayed at author's request