Winter Harmonica

Poem

Last goodbyes in Havana

Poem

Garden Apartment, Taube

Poem

Paris 1947 : The woman of fashion

Paris 1947 is the site of one of twentieth century fashion’s fictive highpoints. The New Look combined drama and poetics through an abiding rhetoric of elegance. In doing so it employed traditional modes of femininity, casting the woman of fashion in the guise of an ambiguous ‘new’ figure: half fairytale princess, half evil witch. This fashionable ideal was widely disseminated through key photographic representations, Willy Maywald’s 1947 image of the Bar Suit being a case in point. It was precisely such mythic formulations of ‘woman’ which Simone de Beauvoir was to take to task just two years later with the publication of The Second Sex. Driven by frustration with the status quo of real women, de Beauvoir recognised the role of fictive representations, both textual and visual in defining women. This paper reads key sections of The Second Sex through a comparative analysis of two iconic images of French women from 1947; Cartier-Bresson’s classic portrait of de Beauvoir and Willy Mayhold’s spectacular evocation of Christian Dior’s New Look. Cued by a compelling range of similarities between these images this paper explores links between fashion, feminism and fiction in mid-century French culture.

Soundage : a practice-led approach to Gertrude Stein, sound, and generative language

In this practice-led research project I work to show how a re-reading and a particular form of listening to the sound-riddled nature of Gertrude Stein's work, Two: Gertrude Stein and her Brother, presents us with a contemporary theory of sound in language. This theory, though in its infancy, is a particular enjambment of sounded language that presents itself as an event, engaged with meaning, with its own inherent voice. It displays a propensity through engagement with the 'other' to erupt into love. In this thesis these qualities are reverberated further through the work of Seth Kim-Cohen's notion of the non-cochlear, Simon Jarvis's notion of musical thinking, Jean-Jacques Lecercle's notion of délire or nonsense, Luce Irigaray's notion of jouissant love and the Bracha Ettinger's notion of the generative matrixial border space. This reading then is simultaneously paired with my own work of scoring and creating a digital opera from Stein's work, thereby testing and performing Stein's theory. In this I show how a re-reading and relistening to Stein's work can be significant to feminist ethical language frames, contemporary philosophy, sonic art theory and digital language frames. Further significance of this study is that when the reverberation of Stein's engagements with language through sound can be listened to, a pattern emerges, one that encouragingly problematizes subjectivity and interweaves genres/methods and means, creating a new frame for sound in language, one with its own voice that I call soundage.

Disclose

Table of Contents “your darkness also/rich and beyond fear”: Community Performance, Somatic Poetics and the Vessels of Self and Other - Petra Kuppers. "So what will you do on the plinth?”: A Personal Experience of Disclosure during Antony Gormley’s "One & Other" Project - Jill Francesca Dowse. Food Confessions: Disclosing the Self through the Performance of Food - Jenny Lawson Participation Cartography: The Presentation of Self in Spatio-Temporal Terms - Luis Carlos Sotelo-Castro Disclosure in Biographically-Based Fiction: The Challenges of Writing Narratives Based on True Life Stories - Donna Lee Brien. Closure through Mock-Disclosure in Bret Easton Ellis’s Lunar Park - Jennifer Anne Phillips. Disclosing the Ethnographic Self - Christine Lohmeier Celebrity Twitter: Strategies of Intrusion and Disclosure in the Age of Technoculture - Nick Muntean, Anne Helen Petersen. “Just Emotional People”? Emo Culture and the Anxieties of Disclosure - Michelle Phillipov.

Spatial metaphor as spatial technique in the work of Michel Foucault

This essay argues that the deployment of spatial metaphor in the writing of Michel Foucault is indivisible from his spatial politics. Beginning with his 1967 essay "Of Other Spaces," the development of Foucault's spatial politics and his growing awareness of the importance to his work of spatial (particularly geographic) metaphors can be charted. The focus here is not the concretisation of Foucault's early spatial obsessions—particularly with regard to the concept of "heterotopia"—into a theory or model. Rather, I am concerned with the way in which those obsessions inform Foucault's major works, in particular The Archaeology of Knowledge and Discipline and Punish. These works, I argue, do not develop a theory of space, but instead perform, through their rhetoric, a kind of spatial praxis. In this sense, Foucault's metaphors become "spatial techniques" for the practice and production of power–knowledge.

Flathead (Origin of the Specious)

A three channel video work that was produced under the psuedonym Eve Roleston that explored the arbitrary nature of signification as it played across a range of images, texts and sounds. The work aimed to provide a considered engagement with the contingent, polymorphous and unstable qualities of the material on each of the three screens. This work forms part of my practice-led research undertaken for my PhD. It deals with reconsidering the relationship between politics and aesthetics by employing strategies of humour, play theory and the fictocritical

The monadic environment : evoking emotion and memory in participatory performance

This practice-led research project examined the audience experience of immersive environments in participatory performance. Drawing upon the work of artist Ilya Kabakov, Gaston Bachelard's Poetics of Space (1964) and Leibniz's theory of the monad, the study investigated how an immersive space can be constructed to evoke emotion and memory recall in participants. The research consisted of two cycles of creative experimentation resulting in the presentation of a final piece entitled Dulcet. The research contributes new terminology to the discourse surrounding the participant experience in immersive environments, specifically space-as-memory, the role of ambiguity in spatial design and the construct of the monadic environment.

Hyperlinking history and illegitimate imagination : the historiographic metafictional E-novel

‘Historiographic Metafiction’ (HM) is a literary term first coined by creative writing academic Linda Hutcheon in 1988, and which refers to the postmodern practice of a fiction author inserting imagined--or illegitimate--characters into narratives that are intended to be received as authentic and historically accurate, that is, ostensibly legitimate. Such adventurous and bold authorial strategies frequently result in “novels which are both intensely self-reflexive and yet paradoxically also lay claim to historical events and personages” (Hutcheon, A Poetics 5). They can be so entertaining and engaging that the overtly intertextual, explicitly inventive work of biographical HM can even change the “hegemonic discourse of history” (Nunning 353) for, as Philippa Gregory, the author of HM novel The Other Boleyn Girl (2001), has said regarding this genre of creative writing: “Fiction is about imagined feelings and thoughts. History depends on the outer life. The novel is always about the inner life. Fiction can sometimes do more than history. It can fill the gaps” (University of Sussex). In a way, this article will be filling one of the gaps regarding HM...