In Tender Is the Night, F. Scott Fitzgerald retells the story of the Fall from Genesis through psychologist Dick Diver and his wife and patient Nicole, drawing poetic and thematic inspiration from John Milton’s Paradise Lost. This essay traces the progression of the Divers’ fall and ultimate separation through the novel’s three books and considers how the highly autobiographical foundation of the novel, which has drawn considerable critical attention, may in fact allow Fitzgerald to craft a work that aligns with and simultaneously expands upon Milton’s interpretation of the Fall.

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Cathy Caruth's pioneering study of trauma and the posttraumatic forges a connection between the psychoanalytic theory of traumatic experience and the literary as such. Since trauma defies linguistic processing, she explains, the language used to describe it will always be figural. For this reason Caruth privileges imaginative literature, with its highly mediated nature, as a means of representing the otherwise "unclaimed" experience of trauma. Her influential reflections inform a crucial direction within trauma studies: the search for a narrative voice that articulates trauma effectively. But how should we think about trauma that is not a singular "event" but a chronic occurrence? Over the last twenty years trauma scholarship has explored how trauma outstrips discursive and representational resources, but has only begun to address the ways gender, race, and class must complicate our understanding of the posttraumatic. I argue that in order to frame an adequate approach to the posttraumatic, we must take account of the cultural, political, and social matrix of trauma. The feminist psychotherapist Maria Root has developed an idea that she calls "insidious trauma" to refer to the cumulative degradation directed toward individuals whose identities, such as gender, color, and class, differ from what is valued by those in power. Though not always blatant or violent, these effects threaten the basic well being of the person who suffers them. Root's conceptualization provides a useful framework for understanding certain long-term consequences of the institutionalized sexism, racism, and classism that systematically denigrate the self worth of the socially othered who are rendered voiceless. Where Caruth privileges literary representations of the traumatic, I explore how literature can also be a privileged site for the articulation of insidious trauma. My study addresses literary representations of father-daughter incest and the complex trauma associated with it, showing how--in very different ways--six works of modern American literature compel us to confront the traumatogenic nature of social oppression, especially that which is endemic to the structure of the heteropatriarchal family and American racism and classism. F. Scott Fitzgerald's Tender Is the Night ambivalently exposes the gendered politics of psychological trauma, particularly the conspiracy of silence perpetuated by a psychiatric culture that revictimizes the female victim of incest. Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man uses a story of paternal incest to work through the trauma of racism, challenging stereotypes of black masculinity even as it reinscribes patriarchal phallocentrism. Referencing Ellison's depiction of father-daughter incest, Toni Morrison's The Bluest Eye marks a watershed in the inscription of incest narratives as it is written mostly from the perspective of what I call a "could-be" victim of incest. Morrison includes the perspective of the father while foregrounding the experience of the daughter, exposing child abuse as an extensive social and political problem ultimately supported by imperialist ideals. Enabled by Morrison, Dorothy Allison's semiautobiographical Bastard Out of Carolina is narrated by a young "white trash" woman who shares her story of sexual violation in defiance of that culture's patriarchal structure. Conforming to certain class stereotypes of father-daughter incest, Bastard Out of Carolina escaped the hostile backlash provoked by Kathryn Harrison's memoir, The Kiss, whose critical reception suggests that, even while allowing some discussion of incest, mainstream culture continued to collude in its silencing within the context of the white middle-class. Finally, I revisit a particularly infamous literary narrative of father-daughter incest, Vladimir Nabokov's Lolita, but in terms of the feminist appropriation of Nabokov effected in Azar Nafisi's memoir, Reading Lolita in Tehran. Problematically downplaying the sexual abuse of Lolita, Nafisi appropriates Nabokov's work to bear witness to the patriarchal subjugation of women in her home country, the Islamic Republic of Iran.

In Tender Is the Night, F. Scott Fitzgerald retells the story of the Fall from Genesis through psychologist Dick Diver and his wife and patient Nicole, drawing poetic and thematic inspiration from John Milton’s Paradise Lost. This essay traces the progression of the Divers’ fall and ultimate separation through the novel’s three books and considers how the highly autobiographical foundation of the novel, which has drawn considerable critical attention, may in fact allow Fitzgerald to craft a work that aligns with and simultaneously expands upon Milton’s interpretation of the Fall.

No description available.

This thesis begins by situating the work of Walter Benjamin in its historical complexity and examining the conceptual underpinnings of his phantasmagoria. Benjamin's Arcades Project is considered in light of his attempts to resituate primary structuring dichotomies in a fluid and dynamic configuration. These dichotomies include the political and the apolitical, the material and the immaterial, and the past and the present. The phantasmagoria-as-metaphor is then employed as a methodological framework for analyzing the ever-circulating images of John F. Kennedy. / This thesis is primarily concerned with the conceptual tools necessary to argue that an image is more "real" than its real-life counterpart, that is, real enough to carry resonances that extend beyond both its diminutive "artifice", and its original context. The relations between the immaterial image and its material referent are discussed as complementary and shifting, rather than oppositional and static. This thesis explores the possible and the actual convergence of the image and its material counterparts.

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In recent years critical projects spanning philosophy, the social sciences, science studies, and nearly everywhere that has employed the term ecology have engaged in thinking humans and non-humans together as collectively producing outcomes, where objects do work beyond how humans perceive or make use of them. Taking Zelda Fitzgerald’s Save Me the Waltz as its focus, this thesis explores how this reorientation might contribute to literary studies and to literary criticism more specifically. The thesis considers a notion that novels constitute objects with biographies running “against” the biographic material of their authors, mobilizes actor network theory as a manner of mapping that biographic assemblage, and tentatively develops a biographic network approach as one alternative to traditional literary interpretative practices. Attending to the novel as an actor shifts critical focus away from its interior – the “text” or content – and expands traditional literary criticism’s default practice – interpretation – and logic – mimetic representation – in hopes of facilitating a discussion of Zelda’s novel in a manner which destabilizes the overdetermined themes that continue to scaffold her imaginary. Ultimately, this work argues that a biographic network approach can prove instructive as a “method” for dealing with other texts which remain relatively obscured at the margins of literary consciousness.

Abstract The role of policing within western democratic countries has become increasingly clouded. This nebulous role of policing has been impacted upon by such issues as, the diversity and complexity of social change, the advances achieved within the technology field and the increasing amount of legislation that has been passed in an endeavour to accommodate such changes. Over the decades these developments have required policing organisations to shift their focus from the original crime prevention in conjunction with community collaboration to one which is predominantly incident driven and enforcement focused. Through the adoption of various strategies utilising technology, beginning with the motor vehicle, the police organisation has also progressively widened the gap between itself and the community being policed. With the widening of this gap such traits as trust, familiarity, co-operation and information exchange between the two parties has declined. This appears to have a domino effect on the fear of crime and social disorder within the community, thus impacting on the quality of life of community members. Within recent decades some of the traditional policing practices - including random preventive patrol, rapid response and the need for additional police because of increasing crime - have been questioned and researched. The findings of these research projects have not supported the effectiveness of such policing strategies. The role of policing, thus comes into question and a return to the historical role of policing espoused when Sir Robert Peel established the London Metropolitan Police and drafted the Principles of Policing, which was issued to each newly appointed constable, is being revisited. This has been promoted in the form of the 'community policing' concept. This community policing concept is stated as consisting of three core components - personalised policing through a police officer being stationed within a set geographic area; police-community partnership and problem-solving. However, in order to establish and maintain a viable partnership, both parties must participate and be aware of what the partnership entails. Similarly, with problem-solving both the community and police must identify and prioritise the local community problems. Both of these core components are bonded together through the appointment of a police officer within the community providing personalised policing. This shift in policing focus would necessitate changes both within the police organisation and the community itself. It must be remembered that the reactive, incident driven model of policing has been in existence for several decades and changing such a model will require some time. Thus, the effective implementation of community policing requires an agreement as to what community policing means and then a marketing and training program so that at the outset both parties are on an equal footing. As for the problem solving component of community policing, the parties to the partnership need to accommodate the differing foci of the opposite party. From the policing perspective, this requires accepting input from the community rather than maintaining a controlling demeanour. The police therefore, need to adopt an approach espoused by Wilson and Kelling (1982) in their article titled, 'Broken Windows: The Police and Neighbourhood Safety' which has been discussed in several literary works dealing with the community policing concept [Edwards 2001; Kenney (ed) 1989; Trojanowicz & Bucqueroux 1994]. The community also needs to be involved and this can be achieved initially, by maintaining support and enthusiasm for the community policing activities initiated. The success of implementing community policing relies on the adoption of the core components. The two community policing components, police-community partnership and problem-solving are impacted on by the third core component of personalised policing within a particular area. The personalised policing component is the need to have stable and reasonably enduring police personnel deployed to respective community locales. By adding this factor to the community policing components there is provided a degree of continuity and thus both parties develop a degree of familiarity which can lead to trust and confidence. The implementation of community policing to this extent needs to be holistically addressed through the police organisational dimensions, namely the philosophical, the strategic and the programmatic. Through these dimensions a comprehensive development of the community policing concept can be undertaken.

Thesis (PhD.) --University of Adelaide, Dept. of English, 2005. / Includes bibliographical references. Also available in a print form.