....................................................................................................................... ii RÉSUMÉ ........................................................................................................................... iii DEDICATION ................................................................................................................... iv ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS ................................................................................................ v TABLE OF CONTENTS ................................................................................................... vi LIST OF FIGURES ......................................................................................................... vii

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Talking Nonsense: Spiritual Mediums and Female Subjectivity in Victorian and Edwardian Canada

Two components go hand in hand in this practice-led PhD – The Light in the Labyrinth, a young adult historical fiction novel, and its complementary exegesis that illuminates and contextualises what underpins the creation of this work. The Light in the Labyrinth constructs the fictional experience of my teenage female character, Kate Carey, the bastard daughter of Henry VIII and niece of Anne Boleyn, as she witnesses the last months of Anne Boleyn’s life. My exegesis explicates the position of The Light in the Labyrinth in the young adult historical fiction genre. It also explicates my writing methodology of autoethnography, using the prism of Feminist Standpoint Epistemology, and how this methodology enables me to construct fiction through an imaginative and empathetic response to historical research.

https://researchbank.swinburne.edu.au/file/17dc371d-0749-48d2-9f8b-b9f1d5f4efa1/1/Wendy Dunn Thesis.pdf

The light in the labyrinth: young adult novel and exegesis

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 semiopacity, 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

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Atmospheric Modernism: Rare Matter and Dynamic Self-world Thresholds

............................................................................................................... 3 Acknowledgments ................................................................................................ 5 Transliteration ....................................................................................................... 6 CHAPTER ONE .................................................................................................. 10 Introduction ......................................................................................................... 10 1.1. The Kurdish novel: from writing in Kurdish as a political act to aesthetic political writing ................... 10 1.2. Research Questions ............................................................................................................................. 22 1 3. Kurdish literary criticism: the lack of analytical and theoretical close reading of Kurdish novels ....... 23 1.4. (Magical) realism, modernism and postmodernism: a clarification ...................................................... 27 1.5. Theoretical framework.......................................................................................................................... 33 1.6. Methodology ......................................................................................................................................... 37 1.7. The criteria for selecting the novels ..................................................................................................... 39 1.8. Dissertation outline ............................................................................................................................... 43 CHAPTER TWO ................................................................................................. 46 A prophet for our time in Bachtyar Ali’s Şarî Mosîqare Sipiyekan: magical realism and subjectivity ................................................................................................. 46 2.1. Şarî Mosîqare Sipiyekan a self-reflexive magical realist novel: the realm of new subjectivities? ..... 49 2.2 Mozart: a divine magical music ............................................................................................................. 57 2.3. The return to folk tale heroes ............................................................................................................... 60 2.4. “Angel” or “villain”: a narrow presentation of Womanhood .................................................................. 68 2.5. Love: reinforcing an unequal relationship between two sexes? .......................................................... 72 2.6. The transformation of subjectivity in a moment of epiphany................................................................ 77 2.7. The diminishing of the official nationalist discourse ............................................................................. 80 CHAPTER THREE ............................................................................................. 89

Subjectivity in contemporary Kurdish novels : recasting Kurdish society, nationalism, and gender

Learning the Languages of Nostalgia in Modern and Contemporary Literature Tasha M. Buttler Chair of Supervisory Committee: Professor Carolyn Allen Department of English This dissertation builds upon recent discourses on nostalgia that focus on the generative potential of a sustained melancholic stance and position the past as resource for the future. My particular interest is in the potential for de-subjectification out of regulatory regimes, as outlined in the work of Judith Butler, particularly in The Psychic Life of Power. This text has allowed me to develop a robust theory about accumulated experiences of love and loss that are central to the formation of “character” that repeats or disrupts patterns of social relation. I differentiate between politicized nostalgia and experiential nostalgia, suggesting that the latter can make use of inevitable experiences of loss by initiating and sustaining a melancholic agency. I use various literary texts and memoirs to identify how the thwarting of melancholia can lead to nostalgia’s obverse: the desire to return suffering, or what Czech author Milan Kundera calls litost. These instances of thwarted grieving are positioned against a set of characters in the work of Virginia Woolf, Eva Hoffman, and Clarice Lispector who allow themselves to honor their experiential nostalgia rather than reverting to politicized nostalgia that repeats representations and clichés associated with empire. Often these characters’ grievances are undirected or misdirected criticisms of social politics and cultural inheritances that perpetuate gendered, racialized, and class identities, or even nationalistic practices that have led to loss and suffering. This study further examines the psychic economics associated with exile since, arguably, cultural inheritances are more readily perceived by those who have greater “vantage points.” In most cases, exiles must re-negotiate words, gestures, and subjectivities, and may be able to see naturalized practices with heightened sensitivity in her or his choices to repeat new social practices or to modify them, pushing the limits of cultural intelligibilities. Although all of the characters in this study struggle to represent the psychic maneuvers associated with loss of something beloved, ironically, most of these novels suggest that these dynamics are inadequately representable in language. My final argument is that the nascent subjectivities that emerge out of the characters’ and authors’ experiential nostalgia, and the texts that strive to account for these experiences, are of consequence for more than just the transformed individuals. The final novel used in this study, Lispector’s The Hour of the Star, manipulates the instruments available to narrate genesis (language) to break orders of repetition, to recodify language, and to unsettle the reader, inviting us to experience the radical alterity of another’s psyche and develop affective possibilities for new moral epistemologies spoken through the fragmented languages of nostalgia.

Learning the Languages of Nostalgia in Modern and Contemporary Literature

The Essays of Virginia Woolf Volume 5: 1929 to 1932 Ed. Stuart N. Clarke (Boston and New York: Houghton Mifflin, 2010) xxix + 705pp. The Essays of Virginia Woolf Volume 6: 1933 to 1941 Ed. Stuart N. Clarke (London: Hogarth Press, 2011) xxxi + 736pp. In 1904 Virginia Woolf inaugurated her life as a professional writer with a review of W. D. Howells' The Sons of Royal Langbrith (written, she claimed, in half an hour) and a personal account of her visit to the Bronte parsonage at Haworth (this took longer--somewhat under two hours--to write). The enviable facility of these first ventures was not to last, of course, nor did these fledgling efforts seem especially precocious. Still, they are worth revisiting for intimations of preoccupations that would last a lifetime. The Howells review opens by making a workmanlike distinction between the novel of thought and the novel of action; her "pilgrimage" to Haworth, which she found "dingy and commonplace," causes her to wonder "how far surroundings radically affect people's minds" (E1 5). Thus are introduced two of the major themes that will dominate the great essays to come: one I might call, in my own workmanlike way, the aesthetic theme, in which Woolf explores and ultimately champions the inventive forms, the psychological emphasis, the uncensored subject matter that give modern fiction its power and distinction; the other the socio-political theme, which examines and often laments how baleful environments can affect people's minds, by which she means both their hearts and their imagination. With the recent publication of the final two volumes of Woolf's collected and uncollected essays, reviews and occasional pieces, we at last have an indispensable chronological record of what and when Woolf thought what she did about art, about politics, about human character. Stuart N. Carke has taken over the editorial stewardship of this monumental project from Andrew McNellie, the impeccable, eloquent editor of the first four volumes. Clarke has proved a worthy successor, maintaining the same high standards and practices that made the previous volumes so pleasurable as well as informative to read and consult. Thanks to their exemplary work, we can survey Woolf's essays arrayed majestically from end to end and can appreciate anew and in greater depth how much the modern essay--at once relaxed and exacting--owes to her determination to record as honestly as she could her reactions to books, to social and political issues, to people and to places and to do so, moreover, while acknowledging the importance of mood--of bored or flagging spirits as much as exalted enthusiasms--in accounting for one's opinions, which were, she often reminded us, of the moment. The mood deepens, as does the gravity of her concerns, in the works that make up these last two volumes. Volume 5 includes all the essays written between 1929 and 1932, years following the exhausting labor of The Waves and the impressive polemical achievement of A Room of One's Own. The essays from these years predictably reflect her feminist values and continue her critical assault on the generic boundaries traditionally separating poetry and prose. She is ardent in her appreciation of the vigorous colloquialisms and new coinages of American fiction, which she praises for capturing the freshness and impertinence of contemporary reality. But she continues to be adept at taking the long view, as exemplified in The Common Reader: Second Series, reprinted here in its entirety, which begins with "The Strange Elizabethans" and concludes by attempting to answer the rather timeless question of how one should read a book. The sixth and last volume of the complete essays runs from 1933 to 1941, years that tested but failed to subdue her feminism and pacificism. Three Guineas belongs to this era, as do "Thoughts on Peace in an Air Raid" and "The Leaning Tower." Although these essays were written during wartime and while she was battling the debilitating depression that would finally cause her to take her life, there is very little of an end-of-the-world feeling about them. …

Maria DiBattista

Papers

The Essays of Virginia Woolf