Scholarship has firmly established that the short story cycle is well-suited to representations of community. This study considers eight North American examples of the genre: four by Canadian authors Stephen Leacock, Duncan Campbell Scott, George Elliott, and Alice Munro; and four by American authors Sarah Orne Jewett, Sherwood Anderson, John Cheever, and Joyce Carol Oates. My original idea was to discover whether there were significant differences between the Canadian and American cycles, but ultimately I became far more interested in the way that all of the cycles address community formation and disintegration. The focus of each cycle is a small community, whether a small town, a village, or a suburb. In all of the examples, the authors address the small community as the focus of anxiety, concern, criticism, and praise, with special attention to the way in which, despite its manifold failings, the small community continues to inspire longings for the ideal home and source of identity. The narrative feature that ultimately provided the critical framework for the study is the recurring presence of the metropolis in all of the eight cycles. The city, set on the horizons of these small communities, consistently provides a backdrop against which author and characters seem to measure and understand their lives. Always an influence (whether for good or bad), the city’s presence is constructed as the other against which the small community’s identity is formulated and understood. The relationship between small community and city led me to an investigation into the mythology of the small community, a mythology that sets the small community in opposition to the city, portraying the former as the keeper of virtue and the latter as the disseminator of vice. The cycles themselves, as I increasingly discovered, challenge the mythology by identifying how the small community depends, in large part, on the city for self-understanding. The small community, however, as an idea, and a mythic ideal, is never dismissed as obsolete or irrelevant.

Persistent Pasts: Historical Palimpsests in Nineteenth-Century Prose traces Victorian historical discourse with specific attention to the works of Thomas Carlyle and George Eliot and their relation to historicism in earlier works by Sir Walter Scott and James Hogg. I argue that the Victorian response to the tense relation between the materialist Enlightenment and the idealist rhetoric of Romanticism marks a decidedly ethical turn in Victorian historical discourse. The writers introduce the dialectic of enlightened empiricism and romantic idealism to invoke the historical imagination as an ethical response to the call of the past. I read the dialectic and its invitation to ethics through the figure of the palimpsest. Drawing upon theoretical work on the palimpsest from Carlyle and de Quincey through Gérard Genette and Sarah Dillon, I analyze ways in which the materialist and idealist discourses interrupt each other and persist in one another. Central to my argument are concepts drawn from Walter Benjamin, Emmanuel Levinas, Richard Rorty, and Frank Ankersmit that challenge and / or affirm historical materiality.

Defining rarity as a relative quality in matter roughly opposite to density, this dissertation focusses on the way material qualities of molecular gases, such as semi-opacity, permeation, and blending, inform modernist representations of embodied spatial experience. In modernist writing, rare matter—including air, fog, smoke, and haze—functions as an active component of the sensory environment, filling up the negative space that sets off subjects from objects, and characters from settings. Representing matter across the full range of the rarity-density spectrum allows modernist writers to challenge the ontological status of such boundaries, and to develop dynamic spatial models of the self-world threshold. The Introduction defines rare matter and examines its function as a sensory medium that can alternately define and blur subject/object boundaries. Interpreting dynamic thresholds as products of authorial activism, I argue that modernist narratives disrupt the normative constructions of the self-world boundary that prevailed in biomedical discourse around the turn of the century. Chapter 1, seeking to expand the scope of modernist object studies to include rare matter, analyzes illustrated books about London to demonstrate the increased cultural visibility of the atmosphere in the modernist period. Visual and verbal gestalt effects, modelled on the hermeneutic oscillation between looking at and looking through the fog, foreground the materiality of the atmosphere that fills up three-dimensional space, pressing up against the thresholds of the body and disrupting fixed distinctions between subjects and their surroundings. Chapter 2 shows how D. H. Lawrence harnesses the properties of rare matter to construct dynamic representations of the self-world boundary. In his early novels and his criticism, the oscillation between self-diffusion and self-differentiation expresses characters’ psychological responsiveness to changing interpersonal and ontological pressures. Chapter 3 demonstrates how Virginia Woolf takes advantage of rare attributes like permeation, fluid motion, and variable particle spacing to model process-oriented communities that incorporate dynamic shifts between social autonomy and collective identity. The Conclusion examines rare imagery in modernist scenes of narration, arguing that dynamic self-world thresholds help to articulate a responsive form of reader-text interaction that allows for the alternation of independent and collaborative reading practices.

Defining rarity as a relative quality in matter roughly opposite to density, this dissertation focusses on the way material qualities of molecular gases, such as semi-opacity, permeation, and blending, inform modernist representations of embodied spatial experience. In modernist writing, rare matter—including air, fog, smoke, and haze—functions as an active component of the sensory environment, filling up the negative space that sets off subjects from objects, and characters from settings. Representing matter across the full range of the rarity-density spectrum allows modernist writers to challenge the ontological status of such boundaries, and to develop dynamic spatial models of the self-world threshold. The Introduction defines rare matter and examines its function as a sensory medium that can alternately define and blur subject/object boundaries. Interpreting dynamic thresholds as products of authorial activism, I argue that modernist narratives disrupt the normative constructions of the self-world boundary that prevailed in biomedical discourse around the turn of the century. Chapter 1, seeking to expand the scope of modernist object studies to include rare matter, analyzes illustrated books about London to demonstrate the increased cultural visibility of the atmosphere in the modernist period. Visual and verbal gestalt effects, modelled on the hermeneutic oscillation between looking at and looking through the fog, foreground the materiality of the atmosphere that fills up three-dimensional space, pressing up against the thresholds of the body and disrupting fixed distinctions between subjects and their surroundings. Chapter 2 shows how D. H. Lawrence harnesses the properties of rare matter to construct dynamic representations of the self-world boundary. In his early novels and his criticism, the oscillation between self-diffusion and self-differentiation expresses characters’ psychological responsiveness to changing interpersonal and ontological pressures. Chapter 3 demonstrates how Virginia Woolf takes advantage of rare attributes like permeation, fluid motion, and variable particle spacing to model process-oriented communities that incorporate dynamic shifts between social autonomy and collective identity. The Conclusion examines rare imagery in modernist scenes of narration, arguing that dynamic self-world thresholds help to articulate a responsive form of reader-text interaction that allows for the alternation of independent and collaborative reading practices.

Scholarship has firmly established that the short story cycle is well-suited to representations of community. This study considers eight North American examples of the genre: four by Canadian authors Stephen Leacock, Duncan Campbell Scott, George Elliott, and Alice Munro; and four by American authors Sarah Orne Jewett, Sherwood Anderson, John Cheever, and Joyce Carol Oates. My original idea was to discover whether there were significant differences between the Canadian and American cycles, but ultimately I became far more interested in the way that all of the cycles address community formation and disintegration. The focus of each cycle is a small community, whether a small town, a village, or a suburb. In all of the examples, the authors address the small community as the focus of anxiety, concern, criticism, and praise, with special attention to the way in which, despite its manifold failings, the small community continues to inspire longings for the ideal home and source of identity. The narrative feature that ultimately provided the critical framework for the study is the recurring presence of the metropolis in all of the eight cycles. The city, set on the horizons of these small communities, consistently provides a backdrop against which author and characters seem to measure and understand their lives. Always an influence (whether for good or bad), the city’s presence is constructed as the other against which the small community’s identity is formulated and understood. The relationship between small community and city led me to an investigation into the mythology of the small community, a mythology that sets the small community in opposition to the city, portraying the former as the keeper of virtue and the latter as the disseminator of vice. The cycles themselves, as I increasingly discovered, challenge the mythology by identifying how the small community depends, in large part, on the city for self-understanding. The small community, however, as an idea, and a mythic ideal, is never dismissed as obsolete or irrelevant.

"Image and Text" focuses on the consequences of multi-media interaction on the concept of a work's meaning(s) in three distinct publishing trends in nineteenth-century Britain: graphic satire, the literary annuals, and book illustration. The graphic satire of engravers James Gillray and George Cruikshank is replete with textual components that rely on the interaction of media for the overall satirical impact. Literary annuals combine engravings with the ekphrastic poetry of writers including William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Robert Southey, and Letitia Elizabeth Landon. Book illustrations provided writers Sir Walter Scott and Alfred, Lord Tennyson a means to recycle previously published works as "new" texts; the engravings promote an illusion of textual originality and reality by imparting visual meanings onto the text. In turn, the close proximity of text to image changes visual meanings by making the images susceptible to textual meanings. Many of the theoretical implications resulting from the pairing of media resound in modern film adaptations, which often provide commentary about nineteenth-century visual culture and the self-reflexivity of media. The critical heritage that has responded to the pairing of media in nineteenth-century print culture often expresses uneasiness with the relationship between text and mechanically produced images, and this uneasiness has often resulted in the treatment of text and image as separate components of multi-media works. "Image and Text" recovers the dialogue between media in nineteenth-century print forms often overlooked in critical commentary that favors the study of an elusive and sometimes fictional concept of an original work; each chapter acknowledges the collaborative nature of the production of multi-media works and their ability to promote textual newness, originality (or the illusion of originality), and (un)reality. Multi-media works challenge critical conventions regarding artistic and authorial originality, and they enter into battles over fidelity of meaning. By recognizing multi-media works as part of a diverse genre it becomes possible to expand critical dialogue about such works past fidelity studies. Text and image cannot faithfully represent the other; what they can do is engage in dialogue: with each other, with their historical and cultural moments, and with their successors and predecessors.

Scholarship has firmly established that the short story cycle is well-suited to representations of community. This study considers eight North American examples of the genre: four by Canadian authors Stephen Leacock, Duncan Campbell Scott, George Elliott, and Alice Munro; and four by American authors Sarah Orne Jewett, Sherwood Anderson, John Cheever, and Joyce Carol Oates. My original idea was to discover whether there were significant differences between the Canadian and American cycles, but ultimately I became far more interested in the way that all of the cycles address community formation and disintegration. The focus of each cycle is a small community, whether a small town, a village, or a suburb. In all of the examples, the authors address the small community as the focus of anxiety, concern, criticism, and praise, with special attention to the way in which, despite its manifold failings, the small community continues to inspire longings for the ideal home and source of identity. The narrative feature that ultimately provided the critical framework for the study is the recurring presence of the metropolis in all of the eight cycles. The city, set on the horizons of these small communities, consistently provides a backdrop against which author and characters seem to measure and understand their lives. Always an influence (whether for good or bad), the city’s presence is constructed as the other against which the small community’s identity is formulated and understood. The relationship between small community and city led me to an investigation into the mythology of the small community, a mythology that sets the small community in opposition to the city, portraying the former as the keeper of virtue and the latter as the disseminator of vice. The cycles themselves, as I increasingly discovered, challenge the mythology by identifying how the small community depends, in large part, on the city for self-understanding. The small community, however, as an idea, and a mythic ideal, is never dismissed as obsolete or irrelevant.

This thesis aims to reveal paradigms associated with the operation of Western architectural oligarchies. The research is an examination into "how" dominant architectural institutions and their figureheads are undermined through the subversive collaboration of younger, unrecognised architects. By appropriating theories found in Jacques Derrida's writings in philosophy, the thesis interprets the evolution of post World War II polemical architectural thinking as a series of political friendships. In order to provide evidence, the thesis involves the rewriting of a portion of modern architectural history, 1949-1987. Modern architectural history is rewritten as a series of three friendship partnerships which have been selected because of their subversive reaction to their respective establishments. They are English architects, Alison Smithson and Peter Smithson; South African born architect and planner, Denise Scott Brown and North American architect, Robert Venturi; and Greek architect, Elia Zenghelis and Dutch architect, Rem Koolhaas. Crucial to the undermining of their respective enemies is the friends' collaboration on subversive projects. These projects are built, unbuilt and literary. Warring publicly through the writing of seminal texts is a significant step towards undermining the dominance of their ideological opponents. It also appears that through the making of these projects, the unrecognised architects are able to convert themselves to being recognised as new figureheads. This thesis contends that as a consequence of the power within each of the three friendship partnerships, the architects are enabled to collaborate against the dominant ideology of their respective enemies and gain status. It also contends that a cycle of friendship and warring is the political system by which the institution of modern architecture has historically reengineered itself to suit the times.

From the 1990s onwards the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC) adopted a range of interactive multimedia activities: CD-ROM, web publishing, datacasting and interactive television. Drawing on extensive primary research, this thesis explores why the ABC pursued an interactive multimedia program under a neo-liberal rationality and how online publishing in particular has impacted on its role as a public service broadcaster. Drawing on neo-Foucauldian governmentality theory and Scott Lash’s critique of information, the thesis examines how the ABC operates as a technology of government in the transition to an informational society. While it considers the ABC as a localised, specific form of public service broadcasting, many of the findings have importance for analysis within the broader field of state intervention in media markets. It demonstrates that networked interactive multimedia are a communications strategy appropriate to the governance of a globally implicated market-state during a period of informationalisation – characterised by increased symbolic flows, spatial and temporal compression, decontextualised and disorderly relations of information. Public service media will transition this period, characterised by rapid social change and institutional upheaval, where they can incorporate and exploit the informational relations that threaten to diminish their utility as governmental assemblage. It finds that while ABC executives used technological change to adapt to the enterprise focus of neo-liberal government, the corporation was simultaneously transformed by disorganisational influences pursuing an ethics of internetworking. Contrary to Lash’s ideal schema of institutional decline, disorganisation – embodied in the ad hoc, program-maker led push for internet access and publishing – can become a force for organisational renewal. This is observable in the development of ABC Online, a public access web service. The conclusion drawn from ABC Online’s emergence is that the era of digitalisation exposes the ABC as a mutable object, a flexible strategy of national communications governance. It is not exclusively tied to a technical system, such as radio or television, or a practice such as broadcasting. Interactive multimedia such as ABC Online may help the ABC to readdress its contradictory political rationale – the call to represent a coherent national identity in the face of infinite lived diversity – and play a new role in connecting and engaging its users.This thesis re-examines that role in light of Lash’s observations about the nature of informational power. It explores at length the response to a new self-governing, performative subject, the user of interactive multimedia technology. The user, unlike the audience, is visible, often vocal and social. She negotiates both the space of a multimedia object and dialogic interactions within that space. Her exemplary expertise may rival that of the ABC’s program-makers. This analysis indicates that in response to informational phenomena, the ABC has reconceived its space of government, its pedagogy and its production of citizenship in order to remain an effective expression of governmentality. An online ABC may act as a mediatory, contextualising strategy that helps users negotiate the construction and function of difference. It may also be altered by user knowledge. These relations are possible, although preliminary in this research, while the ABC remains wedded to the more disciplinary relations of broadcasting. The implication is that a digitally networked ABC should not be a self-enclosed institution. It is part of an informational network: a multi-sector innovation system. It should not be divorced from its public or the market except in its ethics of exchange. It is a technology that through its technocultural relations socialises, is shaped by and melds with its sometimes unruly user/citizens. It influences, is influenced by and is part of a volatile mediascape. The ABC is organisation and disorganisation, the rigidity of the one generating the other and then being reincorporated, in a cycle of institutional and industrial change.

From the 1990s onwards the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC) adopted a range of interactive multimedia activities: CD-ROM, web publishing, datacasting and interactive television. Drawing on extensive primary research, this thesis explores why the ABC pursued an interactive multimedia program under a neo-liberal rationality and how online publishing in particular has impacted on its role as a public service broadcaster. Drawing on neo-Foucauldian governmentality theory and Scott Lash’s critique of information, the thesis examines how the ABC operates as a technology of government in the transition to an informational society. While it considers the ABC as a localised, specific form of public service broadcasting, many of the findings have importance for analysis within the broader field of state intervention in media markets. It demonstrates that networked interactive multimedia are a communications strategy appropriate to the governance of a globally implicated market-state during a period of informationalisation – characterised by increased symbolic flows, spatial and temporal compression, decontextualised and disorderly relations of information. Public service media will transition this period, characterised by rapid social change and institutional upheaval, where they can incorporate and exploit the informational relations that threaten to diminish their utility as governmental assemblage. It finds that while ABC executives used technological change to adapt to the enterprise focus of neo-liberal government, the corporation was simultaneously transformed by disorganisational influences pursuing an ethics of internetworking. Contrary to Lash’s ideal schema of institutional decline, disorganisation – embodied in the ad hoc, program-maker led push for internet access and publishing – can become a force for organisational renewal. This is observable in the development of ABC Online, a public access web service. The conclusion drawn from ABC Online’s emergence is that the era of digitalisation exposes the ABC as a mutable object, a flexible strategy of national communications governance. It is not exclusively tied to a technical system, such as radio or television, or a practice such as broadcasting. Interactive multimedia such as ABC Online may help the ABC to readdress its contradictory political rationale – the call to represent a coherent national identity in the face of infinite lived diversity – and play a new role in connecting and engaging its users.This thesis re-examines that role in light of Lash’s observations about the nature of informational power. It explores at length the response to a new self-governing, performative subject, the user of interactive multimedia technology. The user, unlike the audience, is visible, often vocal and social. She negotiates both the space of a multimedia object and dialogic interactions within that space. Her exemplary expertise may rival that of the ABC’s program-makers. This analysis indicates that in response to informational phenomena, the ABC has reconceived its space of government, its pedagogy and its production of citizenship in order to remain an effective expression of governmentality. An online ABC may act as a mediatory, contextualising strategy that helps users negotiate the construction and function of difference. It may also be altered by user knowledge. These relations are possible, although preliminary in this research, while the ABC remains wedded to the more disciplinary relations of broadcasting. The implication is that a digitally networked ABC should not be a self-enclosed institution. It is part of an informational network: a multi-sector innovation system. It should not be divorced from its public or the market except in its ethics of exchange. It is a technology that through its technocultural relations socialises, is shaped by and melds with its sometimes unruly user/citizens. It influences, is influenced by and is part of a volatile mediascape. The ABC is organisation and disorganisation, the rigidity of the one generating the other and then being reincorporated, in a cycle of institutional and industrial change.