Research Doctorate - Doctor of Philosophy (PhD) / States are contingently formed, enacting modes of governing in diverse and prosaic ways. States’ roles in social governing are shaped by the specificities of institutional contexts and peopled practices. Yet much recent analysis of social governing ignores the influence of state institutions and workers. In such analyses, social governing is taken to be largely driven by an overarching mode of governance—neoliberalism. Indeed for many researchers, techniques of social governing such as interagency working represent practices through which to trace neoliberalism’s enactments, variabilities, co-options and resistances. In obscuring the prosaics of peopled states, our understandings centre on ‘the state’ as a coherent and cogent entity, one that increasingly governs the social in neoliberalised ways. The premise of this thesis is that interagency practices of social governing need to be examined from prosaic perspectives. Such an attention to everyday practice widens the analytical lens on social governing; allowing for disjunctive possibilities of everyday governing rather than focusing on over-determined discoveries of neoliberal rule. Indeed, a prosaics of state institutions relocates interagency workers and institutions from their positioning at the end-points of neoliberal rule and, instead, welcomes their diverse political and social actions as the very foundations on which governing is shaped. In so doing, it reveals practices of state institutions and interagency workers that can be creative, emotive and, as I assert, caring. In accessing everyday spaces through my research, I utilise a case study interagency programme of the New South Wales Government entitled Families First, which attempts to better facilitate the support of families with young children. It is an examination of the spaces of Families First that reveals the multiple ideological framings, congested institutional histories, changeable politics and everyday practices of workers that characterise state institutions and form the foundations of social governing. Rather than rehearse or raze understandings of neoliberal governing, the inclusiveness of a prosaic approach allows neoliberalism to co-exist as a potential practice of diverse interagency contexts; supporting hopeful perspectives on interagency working and nurturing a mutual language of prosaic politics, governing and ethics.

Research Doctorate - Doctor of Philosophy (PhD) / States are contingently formed, enacting modes of governing in diverse and prosaic ways. States’ roles in social governing are shaped by the specificities of institutional contexts and peopled practices. Yet much recent analysis of social governing ignores the influence of state institutions and workers. In such analyses, social governing is taken to be largely driven by an overarching mode of governance—neoliberalism. Indeed for many researchers, techniques of social governing such as interagency working represent practices through which to trace neoliberalism’s enactments, variabilities, co-options and resistances. In obscuring the prosaics of peopled states, our understandings centre on ‘the state’ as a coherent and cogent entity, one that increasingly governs the social in neoliberalised ways. The premise of this thesis is that interagency practices of social governing need to be examined from prosaic perspectives. Such an attention to everyday practice widens the analytical lens on social governing; allowing for disjunctive possibilities of everyday governing rather than focusing on over-determined discoveries of neoliberal rule. Indeed, a prosaics of state institutions relocates interagency workers and institutions from their positioning at the end-points of neoliberal rule and, instead, welcomes their diverse political and social actions as the very foundations on which governing is shaped. In so doing, it reveals practices of state institutions and interagency workers that can be creative, emotive and, as I assert, caring. In accessing everyday spaces through my research, I utilise a case study interagency programme of the New South Wales Government entitled Families First, which attempts to better facilitate the support of families with young children. It is an examination of the spaces of Families First that reveals the multiple ideological framings, congested institutional histories, changeable politics and everyday practices of workers that characterise state institutions and form the foundations of social governing. Rather than rehearse or raze understandings of neoliberal governing, the inclusiveness of a prosaic approach allows neoliberalism to co-exist as a potential practice of diverse interagency contexts; supporting hopeful perspectives on interagency working and nurturing a mutual language of prosaic politics, governing and ethics.

Que signifie repenser l’Histoire littéraire et l’Histoire du roman comme Histoire culturelle ? Le point de départ de notre questionnement sur les formes de représentation adoptées par l’Histoire littéraire porte sur la doxa critique selon laquelle il existe une relation génétique entre l’épopée et le roman, dont la source se trouve dans ce qu’il est convenu de voir comme le texte fondateur de la littérature, l’épopée d’Homère et celui de la théorie littéraire, la Poétique d’Aristote. Si l’épopée homérique est une œuvre de la tradition orale, quelle est sa relation avec le roman, issu, lui, de la scripturalité et de l’émergence de la prose ? Si les récits en prose narrative de fiction apparaissent dans des civilisations sans épopée, quelle est la condition nécessaire pour leur émergence ? Si, de plus, l’apparition d’une prose narrative de fiction est précédée de plusieurs siècles de celle d’une historiographie et que ce phénomène se répète aussi bien dans la Grèce classique qu’au Moyen Âge européen, ou encore en Chine, quelle est la condition nécessaire pour l’essor du roman ? Nous présentons ici l’ébauche d’une Histoire alternative des origines du roman dans la Weltliteratur, en relation avec l’émergence de la scripturalité et la prose et l’essor de l’historiographie À la croisée de plusieurs disciplines académiques, notamment entre les sciences humaines et sociales, notre recherche fait appel d’une part à la théorie et à l’Histoire de la littérature, d’autre part à l’Histoire de l’historiographie, ainsi qu’à la théorie et la philosophie de l’Histoire. / Is it possible to rethink Literary History and in particular the History of the Novel as Cultural History which seeks to differentiate between an historical object and it’s representation? Considering the critical doxa, according to which, there exists a genetic link between epics and the novel, leads to one of Western thinking’s most stubborn myths. If epics, and particularly Homer’s, is seen as the novel’s ascendant , although it belongs to oral tradition, how does it explain the fact that as Ancient civilizations as Egypt or China or Israel developed sophisticated prose narratives without having epics? Moreover, if Western literary history refers to Aristotle’s Poetics as it’s foundational text, although by the time it was written, fictional prose didn’t exist yet, and was only to develop a few centuries later, shouldn’t we seek for the missing link between the oral tradition and the rise of the novel? As against this hegemonic and unhistorical representation that considers the novel genre as a Western invention, and as opposed to the historical circumstances that gave birth to the novel, we consider that the key to understanding this phenomenon lies in the emergence of literacy and prose. Indeed, in all civilizations that developed fictional prose writing, it was systematically preceded, not by epics, but by historiography. Our PHD dissertation presents an alternative History of the novel, whose angle is intercultural and interdisciplinary, aiming at recreating a new chronology of the emergence of the novel as a an inevitable historical genre in world’s literature.