Postgraduate Conference 2019: To the Lighthouse

Discover what 2019's Postgraduate Conference was all about.

21 August 2019

This year’s conference is entitled To the Lighthouse. We’ve been inspired by the image of the humanities as a beacon, with our research shedding light on and guiding us through complex issues and troubled times. Virginia Woolf’s novel of the same name is a contemplative and philosophical work, which pursues an understanding of the human condition through creative and academic works. Our conference will pursue a similar project, through the diverse research undertaken by SEFTMS students.

Abstracts

Will Abbiss – Media Studies PhD

‘Anything is possible now’: Sound, Image and Text in Stephen Poliakoff’s Dancing on the Edge

The climax of Dancing on the Edge’s (BBC Two, 2013) first episode demonstrates the spatial and aural binaries that facilitate the serial’s interrogative approach to Britain in the 1930s. As the Louis Lester Band plays “Dancing on the Moon”, the optimism of the interwar years is on display, with vibrant jazz music (performed by black British and American musicians) played in the high-class setting of the Imperial Hotel to the approval of Louis’ progressive supporters and even younger members of royalty. Meanwhile, an intercut sequence shows the band’s manager Wesley being deported to the US, where he expects to be executed, exposing the titular ‘edge’ society is near despite the positivity of the concurrent performance. Wesley’s deportation fosters mistrust over the self-made Donaldson, present at the performance, who earlier confidently assures Wesley’s imminent salvation. Such doubts develop across the serial, often facilitated by the spatial divisions within the primary hotel setting: these delineations allow numerous transgressions and ultimately murder to take place in enclosed areas and questions over guilt to increase. Alongside the textual culmination, the Louis Lester Band’s music (composed for the serial by Adrian Johnston) becomes separated from its performative origin, coming to signify the dark underside of the period through non-diegetic usage.

My paper will assess the co-ordination and contradictions between sound and image in Dancing on the Edge, as used to further its textual interrogation. The creative freedom afforded by the auteur status of writer-director Stephen Poliakoff, in conjunction with the public service ethos of BBC Two, will connect theories of televisual authorship to the serial’s historiographical point of view, presenting it as an exception to trends instigated by the internet-distributed television ‘revolution’. The association of the serial’s concept to the present day through its music, spatial tensions and self-conscious literary markers will also be analysed.

Samira Aziz – English PhD

‘He Who Strikes First Wins’: The Panopticon in Death Note

Edward Snowden's revelations in 2013 about government surveillance took the world by storm and rage, sparking debates on various aspects power relations and of human rights, namely the right to privacy. Experts in the fields of surveillance and security discussed the pros and cons of mass surveillance, justifying these measures to prevent crime, e.g. acts of terrorism. In fact, mass surveillance realizes Jeremy Bentham's Panopticon, which he envisioned on 1791, a prison with an ever-vigilant watchman compelling the inmates to regulate their own behavior. In other words, our modern society has perhaps, in many ways, turned into the Panopticon. This article explores the possibilities and impacts of such an incarceration system in the context of Death Note (2003-2006), by Tsugumi Ohba and Takeshi Obata. In this manga, Light Yagami, a brilliant high school student stumbles upon the titular notebook, which professes to have the ability to kill anyone whose name is recorded within its pages. Light then decides to use the notebook to create a heaven on earth after doing away with all criminals and sparing the lives of only those he considers to be pure. He uses modern technology such as the TV as his surveillance method and his methods seem to be successful. However, as the series goes on, the reader is eventually forced to question if it ends justifies the means: is it all right to hand over one's privacy if it guarantees one's security – or more relevantly in this frame – is it all right to trust a megalomaniac with moral judgements? Ultimately, Death Note brings to light crucial moral conundrums regarding good and evil in human nature and implicitly questions the efficacy of surveillance.

Alex Beattie – Media Studies PhD

From an Attention Economy to an Intention Economy

In Silicon Valley, the world’s most famous site of technological innovation, technologists are rejecting their inventions and disconnecting from the internet. According to reports, the technologists are not rejecting the internet per se, but the “attention economy”: the socio-economic system that commoditises user attention and incentivises technologists to create habitual technological experiences that glue users to their screens.

In this paper, I analyse a loosely-affiliated group of software developers, behavioural scientists, and entrepreneurs who are resisting the attention economy by creating technology-based ways that reclaim attention. These technologies include internet jammers, productivity apps, and a digital offline magazine. Drawing upon interviews and the walkthrough method (Light et al., 2016) I posit that these technologies reveal new assemblages of psychological design that aim to break tech habits and/or respect the intentions of the user (“intentional design”).

I argue that technologies within the attention economy use psychological design to encourage automatic, mindless, or unconscious user behaviour. In contrast, technologies using intentional design promote effortful, mindful or intentional ways of thinking. I offer two critiques of intentional design: that neither technologists (or users themselves) can conceive of what the intentions of users are, and more surreptitiously, that intentional user behaviour is often conflated with aspirational norms of productivity or health.

With both Google’s Digital Wellbeing and Apple’s Screen Time entering the attention reconfiguration market, I speculate about a future shift in the Silicon Valley from an attention economy to an “intention economy”: an emergent socio-economic system which commoditises aspirational user behaviour.

Patrick Biggs – English PhD

What is Light Verse?

My thesis aims to illuminate the rather murky history of light verse from Byron’s Beppo (1818) onwards. The introductory chapter, from which this paper is largely drawn, explores some of the challenges that critics and scholars have faced in seeking to define “light verse.” The term is described by Francis Teague in The Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics as an “omnium gatherum,” embracing “folk poetry, nonsense verse, kitsch, and more.” This diverse range of material makes comprehensive definitions difficult to formulate. Anthologists have often resorted to simply noting light verse’s common characteristics, which include verbal wit, technical virtuosity, and simplicity of expression. None of these characteristics, however, is in itself a sufficient criterion, as this paper begins by illustrating. The paper then proceeds by sketching the evolution of the term’s meaning over the course of the past two centuries, from its origins as a narrow synonym for vers de société to its vastly expanded signification today. The four focal critics in this sketch are Isaac D’Israeli, Frederick Locker-Lampson, W. H. Auden, and Kingsley Amis.

Talia Crockett – English PhD

Trauma of the Camps: The Use of Flashbacks in Young Adult Holocaust Novels

Holocaust literature is a challenging space in which to write, as it seeks to convey that which cannot ever truly be represented in words: the atrocities of a death machine that resulted in the destruction of millions of innocent lives. Young adult authors have the added challenge of creating texts that convey the trauma of the Holocaust in a way that can be processed by teen readers. This paper will examine a small sample of a subset of fiction that uses a specific literary device to represent a single mode of trauma: young adult Holocaust fiction that uses the technique of the flashback to convey the trauma of the concentration camp. In Wolf by Wolf (Ryan Graudin, 2015), chapter-long flashbacks to the concentration camps provide context for trauma, whereas in After the War (Carol Matas, 1996), concentration camp flashbacks interrupt the text when we least expect them, mimicking the experience of trauma for the reader. Kanada (Eva Wiseman, 2006) takes place largely in the concentration camps themselves, but uses the motif of dreams within flashbacks to blur the line between nightmare and reality. By using the technique of the flashback, young adult authors are able to create a text that shines a light on one of history’s darkest times, exposing the horror and educating a young reader, while also mimicking the effects of trauma in an attempt to promote empathy for these experiences. The technique simultaneously places the action outside of the concentration camps themselves, allowing a young reader to process these horrors in a way that they are able to understand.

Kieran Dale-O’Connor – English MA

Tangata ngākau, tangata raho: modes of masculinity in the writing of Bruce Stewart

This paper explores representations of masculinity and boyhood in the short stories of Bruce Stewart (Ngāti Raukawa, Te Arawa). This research is based around decolonizing methodologies as promoted by Brendan Hokowhitu (Ngāti Pūkenga), Linda Tuhiwai Smith (Ngāti Awa, Ngāti Porou), and Ani Mikaere (Ngāti Raukawa, Ngāti Porou), among others. Discussion begins by locating Stewart’s writing in contrast to other Māori authors, New Zealand writing more broadly, and other contemporary Indigenous literature.

British colonial views of Māori men and Māori masculinity have often gone unquestioned, untested, and persist in contemporary views and stereotypes. Such views are not just the result of colonization, but also as part of the ongoing process of colonization itself. This paper examines and critiques the contemporary criticism of Māori literature that echoes British colonial views.

Stewart’s stories present a broad range of characters, experiences, and settings that showcase Māori life in 20th century Aotearoa. As such, his writing does not lend itself to easy, reductionist interpretations about Māori boys and men. It is precisely because of this that his writing serves to challenge the insidious stereotypes that pervade discussions about Māori masculinity. Stewart does, however, suggest through one of his characters that there are essentially two types of men in the world and that one (tangata ngākau) is and has been preferred in te ao Māori. The paper finishes by examining what tangata ngākau means in Stewart’s stories and reflects on how this may fit within the context of mātauranga Māori.

Emma Fenton – English MA

Incoherence and Opaque Meanings in Sally Alatalo’s An Arranged Affair

Incoherence is defined as a logical contradiction, a thing cannot both “be” and “not be” at the same time. Setting aside negative assumptions about incoherence, this paper explores the productive space of misalignment to be found in incoherence in contemporary conceptual writing (texts in which the idea is the most important aspect of the work). Sally Alatalo’s piecemeal, yet strictly linear, appropriated text, An Arranged Affair, offers a way of viewing the structures that usually rest invisibly beneath a coherent textual whole. Alatalo appropriates text from various pulp romance novels—a “recycling” of material—to consciously arrange and manipulate a disjunctive whole. On one level, the reader directly encounters the intentional and expressive sections of original texts, on the other, the boundaries of separate source materials are undefined, defaced by a new and less transparent authorial intent. In spite of the many contradictions that arise, syntactical to ontological, there remain some structural threads of similarity. Patterns in images, expressions and tone guide a readerly course that becomes more about determinations of artifice, than the contents of any one work. Alatalo thus produces an enactment of the romance genre as a whole. In her disfiguration of singular form, Alatalo allows the reader to shape possible meanings out of incoherence, real or otherwise.

Ehsan Hazaveh – Media Studies PhD

Humanitarian storytelling through photographs with and for resettled refugees in Wellington

This research project explores creative methods of storytelling through photography to portray a vulnerable and marginalised community: former refugees living in Wellington, New Zealand. The project explores photographic representational techniques that can not only empower and give voice to those communities, but also challenge dominant stereotypes about refugees and support humanitarian actions.

The aims of this study are to develop insights surrounding issues associated with the photographic representation of refugees and to explore the collaborative construction of possible counter-narratives that might lead to the formulation of a practice framework for representing refugees using photography. These counter-narratives will bring the diversity of refugees to the surface by offering personal stories, contextualising their experience, raising awareness about the plight and human rights of the refugee community in New Zealand, evoking empathy and, therefore, facilitating the process of social change. The study has designed a photographic narrative framework by determining effective methods of photo storytelling, framing and aesthetic techniques, focusing on different ways of taking, selecting, editing and curating photographs.

Photo elicitation interviews have been used to ‘explore’, ‘produce’ and ‘co-curate’ the counter-narrative along with participants. Photo elicitation is a qualitative research method that employs images to evoke data in order to find out how other people experience their world. The data provide a basis for systematically producing visual counter-narratives that highlight the experiences of former- refugees. By employing these methods, refugees can represent their world as well as interpret it. The process of developing this research framing has enabled the development of powerful counter-narratives that challenge prevailing stereotypical depictions which in turn have the potential to shape improved humanitarian outcomes, shifts in public attitudes and political perspectives in New Zealand.

Francis He – English MA

Dying yet still abiding light: Paradoxical Desire in Philip Sidney’s and John Donne’s poems

Inspired by conventional Petrarchism, early modern English poets adopt the concept of paradox in their articulations of desire while revealing significant progression and innovation. Desires expressed by the poet-lovers in Philip Sidney and John Donne’s poems are culminations of attempts to coordinate the incongruent and contrasting extremes. This paper examines how desire operates as paradox in Sidney’s Astrophil and Stella, and in Donne’s amorous poems. I argue that paradoxical desires are the inevitable consequence of the poet-lover as a desiring subject who approaches a supposedly insuperable obstacle when corresponding with his object. While Sidney reverses the Neoplatonic ladder of love, Donne applies Sacramental discourse to unify the distant extremes in order to solve the problem. As Donne argues in his Paradoxes and Problems, “by Discord things increase”. For Sidney and Donne, though earthly and fleshly desire keeps the poet-lovers from reaching it, they constantly yearn to imitate and represent the ideal Lighthouse, the Divine archetype, by means of “Discord” and performance of paradoxical unity. Thus, the living experience of their desire is like the sunset light as described by Donne in his amorous poem “The Paradox”—“the light which bideth yet / When the life’s light is set”.

Catherine Joule – English PhD

In Defiance of Type – Enlightenment and Pratchett’s Count de Magpyr

Vampires have been a part of the popular British imagination for some time: becoming a stock figure across the 1800s, and largely cemented as a horror stereotype in Bram Stoker’s Dracula. Vampires often build up tensions between old and new in works of literature, being old old-fashioned and un-living remnants of an earlier, more superstitious time. Contrasting with this established stereotype, the Count de Magpyr, antagonist of Terry Pratchett’s novel Carpe Jugulum, presents himself as a modern man with a more enlightened outlook. His attempt to take over the small medieval-esque kingdom of Lancre forms the central basis of conflict within the novel, and his mission to overcome his and his family’s weaknesses brings deeper tensions to the fore.

This paper explores the tension between the rational and the irrational, between enlightenment and tradition, in Carpe Jugulum with particular reference to the Count de Magpyr. My research, in general, investigates Pratchett’s use of stereotypes, particularly in constructing his antagonists, in the ‘Witches sequence’ of his Discworld novels. In comic fantasy, recognizable tropes and character types allow for greater elaboration as they provide a clear foundation upon which the conceits of the novel and its comedy can be built but, at the same time, these complicate the novel’s relationship with the reader and restrict certain possibilities. The Count de Magpyr overtly combats the limitations associated with vampires in common knowledge both within and without the novel, thereby drawing the reader’s attention to the very stereotype he attempts to escape whilst constructing a new monstrosity of his enlightenment.

Yuanyuan Liang – English PhD

Intersecting Trauma: Trauma and Place in Margaret Mahy’s Memory

Trauma is a keynote in the YA fiction by Margaret Mahy. Many of her novels are concerned with individual trauma and its communicability, as in cases of inter-generational trauma. In addition to such vertical transmission, Mahy’s stories also deal with horizontal intersecting trauma, as exemplified by her 1987 novel Memory. In this story, multiple traumas belonging to different characters arise independently, but when people come together, their traumas intersect. Drawing on Jungian view on house as the symbol-of-self, I argue that the motif of house is significant in reflecting the inhabitants’ trauma, providing a space for story-telling and symbolising healing. The protagonist Jonny Dart, traumatised by the false memory of being responsible for the death of his sister Janine, tries to find out the truth in his search of Bonny Benedicta, the witness of the fatal event. However, he first encounters Sophie West, an elderly lady with Alzheimer’s, and ends up staying in her home, the “Tap House”. The strange residence not only brings together the problems of both Sophie and Jonny, but also offers the clue to finding Bonny, who turns out to be a next-door neighbour. Adopted by the Benedicta doctors who take pride in their anti-racism, the ethnically-mixed Bonny feels unloved because her adoption might have been a gesture, making a political point. Meeting up with Bonny does prove therapeutic and this is prefigured by the tap that gives the house its name. The water discharging from the tap in the rain symbolically baptizes Jonny as if making him a new person. In addition, Sophie’s house provides a space for Bonny’s story-telling, as Bonny not only addresses the trauma of her upbringing but also reassures Jonny that he is not liable for Janine’s death.

Caitlin Lynch – Film MA

Cyborg sampling: Terror Nullius as new activist cinema

Since cinema’s origins, political activists have undone and reshaped the medium’s formal properties to interrogate and disseminate critical philosophies of power and mediation. In its film Terror Nullius (2018), artist collective Soda_Jerk takes up the baton of this activist tradition and invigorates it through digital editing techniques and contemporary political commentary. Terror Nullius is a ‘mash-up’ film that samples 174 film, television, music video and news clips into a “political revenge fable”.  Manipulating footage to show queer, migrant, indigenous, women and animal characters enacting vengeance on figures of white, heterosexual masculinity, Soda_Jerk model an anarchic form of media reclamation with a blatant disregard for copyright. This paper locates Terror Nullius in a long history of oppositional cinema, drawing on the Soviet filmmakers’ theory of montage and Third Cinema’s definition of subversion. It then considers Terror Nullius as a unique form of film activism that engages with the free culture movement and embodies the cyber-queer philosophy of Donna Haraway’s “The Cyborg Manifesto” (1984). Using the metaphor of a lighthouse, this paper argues Terror Nullius illuminates alternative, cyborg routes for media creation and consumption by projecting the media of the past back to us in critical ways.

Paige Macintosh – Film PhD

The Cultural Value of Trans: Aesthetics and Authorship in Contemporary Trans Media

The growing popularity of transgender characters in contemporary film and television has intensified debates about trans authorship. Arguments for more “positive” representation—which have dominated conversations about LGBTQ media since the 1980s—have given way to debates about who has the right to produce, write, and claim legitimacy for queer narratives. In this era, trans media is increasingly valued based on its engagement with trans consultants and creators. Tangerine (Baker 2015) arguably marks the beginning of the cultural shift, as the film’s paratexts consistently deployed its trans stars as markers of the film’s trans legitimacy. Following Tangerine’s critical and commercial success, it seems that concerns about trans representation have shifted from cross-gendered performances in films like Dallas Buyers Club (Vallée 2013) to issues of authorship for shows like Transparent (Soloway 2014-present).

As trans-authored texts and identity politics have become more mainstream, alternative forms of distribution have also created unprecedented opportunities for trans and non-binary filmmakers and trans storytelling practices. Netflix’s Sense8 (The Wachowskis and J. Michael Straczynski 2015—2018) is the first mainstream film or television show to feature a lead trans character (Jamie Clayton) written and directed by trans creators. More importantly, the show offers a trans approach to its concept and design. Sense8 deploys trans phenomenologies and aesthetics to explore “trans identity as an intra/intersubjective experience of entangled sensories” while using genre to disrupt temporal, spatial, and gendered boundaries (Keegan 110). With this context in mind, I will discuss an outline of a project that seeks to consider how the creators of contemporary trans media negotiate issues of authorship, the industrial consequences for trans and non-binary media producers, and the development of trans aesthetic and political strategies on the screen. I will use Sense8 as a case study to demonstrate the concerns my PhD hopes to address.

Margie Michael – English PhD

Place and Placelessness in Contemporary New Zealand Crime Fiction

Place is more than a cartographic description: it also describes societal and political values of an era as well as contributing to an understanding of the characters and how they belong in that environment. Importantly a well presented place gives an authenticity to what is often a less than credible plot - real life criminals are seldom as clever or disturbed as those we find in fiction!

Crime is always disturbing and displacing for those committing it and those investigating it and particularly for the victims - as the 11 year old kidnaping victim in Paul Cleave’s “The Laughterhouse” says “I don’t know what home is, anymore.”

This displacement, this lack of belonging has led me to consider the idea of placelessness. The concept can be evidenced in early crime fiction, usually by the investigator or more commonly the offender. However, contemporary crime fiction has introduced more complex and frequent use of placelessness.

In this paper I will discuss the works of Paul Cleave and Vanda Simon, two of New Zealand’s most successful contemporary crime writers, and show how they use both place and placelessness in very different ways. In “Trust No One” Paul Cleave’s plot revolves around a crime writer with early onset dementia and manages to bring the reader as well as his character to a state of placelessness.

Vanda Symon’s characters in “Faceless” are all displaced, not only those who are homeless but also those who would be assumed as settled, living in the suburbs. I will set against these novels other works by the authors which demonstrates very different ways of using New Zealand place.

Samantha Murphy – English MA

Feminism and form in the writing of Joanna Russ

Much has been written about Joanna Russ's feminism, and the feminist content of her science fiction -- her feminist women characters, and their radical actions, are credited as exemplary of 1970s feminist science fiction. As an active and divisive science fiction critic, Russ was and is still credited for her engagement with the generic properties of science fiction, particularly within her science fiction. We Who Are About To…'s ethical interrogation digs deeper than its content and engages with the generic tropes that put her characters in this position in the first place. Her subversion of this otherwise masculinist spacefaring narrative is evident not only through her feminist take on its ethical implications, but through her formal experimentations. My interests do not exclude the feminist or generic analyses of Russ's writing -- my interest lies in how these agendas interact dialectically and are expressed through form. From a formalist perspective, little has been written of Russ's prose, but close readings of We Who Are About To… reveal Russ's careful deployments of verisimilitude and modernist strategies, making an otherwise otherworldly science fiction concept realistic not just scientifically, but psychologically.

This paper will be an extended exercise in formalist reading of We Who Are About To..., treating Russ's prose with the kind of attention that has gone neglected in scholarship of her work. Its seamless transition between familiar science fiction adventure and the political treatise of a dying woman, written in Russ's combative and confronting style, demonstrate a formal complexity that reinforces if not wholly represent the complex ethical labours of its content.

Kerryn Palmer – Theatre PhD

Moonlight- Shining a Light on Child-Led Devised Theatre for Young Audiences

This paper explores devising Theatre For Young Audiences (TYA)  by examining a cross-institutional devising project, in which a creative ensemble of twenty-one tertiary students worked with their target audience, two groups of primary school-aged students, in order to create two new plays that identified, reflected, and responded to the interests of their audiences. By combining two different devising methodologies and an original partnership with children, a unique method of intergenerational theatre-making by young people (‘the students’) for young people (‘the children’) emerged. The interaction with the community of children was integral to the development of each piece. This paper will outline the collaborative practice developed during this process and focus on the making of Moonlight.

Devised for five to eight year olds, and using music, puppetry and movement, Moonlight represented the adventures of a young girl, Luna, after her nightlight goes out, prompting a journey through a stormy forest to conquer her fear of the dark.

Using child-led provocations and gaining genuine feedback from the children about both the content and form of the play, meant that we created an original work that engaged, challenged and entertained our young audiences. This model of engaging children throughout the process of devising theatre, is optimistically, a path towards creating more quality and child-led devised theatre for young audiences.

Isabel Parker – English MA

Aesthetically Activating the Past: Edith Wharton’s The House of Mirth

Published in 1905, Edith Wharton’s The House of Mirth was composed in the wake of America’s fin de siècle period, occupying the gap between the nineteenth-century’s increasingly obsolete realist novel and the embryonic modernist literature of the early twentieth century. Nestled within this ‘hinge moment’ of socio-temporal transition, Wharton’s novel examines the tension between the past century’s contained, comprehensible mode of being and a contemporary state of fragmentation and atomisation. This paper will examine the way in which the aesthetic imagination and an active engagement with the material past are posited as viable means of self-preservation in the face of immense socio-cultural and economic upheaval. Lily Bart, The House of Mirth’s protagonist, functions as an aesthetic object whose relationships with fellow characters highlight the feasible and unfeasible ways of sustaining one’s self in the early twentieth-century’s increasingly hostile socio-economic environment. Indeed, Lily herself is bound to a socio-temporal frame shifting into oblivion. The House of Mirth seeks to ‘house’ her transient experience, aesthetically containing the material and immaterial consequences of one’s progression into a new, expanding cultural frame. In doing so, Wharton experiments with the nineteenth-century novel’s ability to adequately contain the past. Conscious of the limitations of aesthetically encompassing the totality of experience, Wharton constructs charged breaks and poignant absences in her writing. Deliberately rendering the narrative fragmented not only mimics the fractured nature of lived experience but encourages the reader to activate a meaning and sense of vitality within the work. Through her aesthetic rendering of Lily’s individual experience, Wharton questions art’s ability to operate as a recuperative mechanism. Can the arts meaningfully fold the past into an active future in a way that facilitates social, cultural and psychological restoration?

Rose Peoples – English Honours

‘The River’s Tongue’: A poetic jurisprudence of New Zealand’s rivers

This paper will present a “poetic jurisprudence” of the rivers of Aotearoa/New Zealand, drawing on poetry in order to construct a critique of our current system of river management in addition to a visualisaton of what an alternative legal approach to rivers could look like. I will do this by drawing on poems in which rivers are the subject matter, particularly those written by women and Māori poets, including the work of poets such as Airini Beautrais, Hone Tuwhare and Karlo Mila. Such an approach offers a rich source of analysis in its ability to allow the inclusion of voices from outside the legal sphere to participate in this vital legal conversation.

Throughout this paper I will interweave an ecofeminist analysis, highlighting themes which chime with ecofeminist jurisprudence. For example, the idea of creating or acknowledging a voice (either legal or poetic) of the rivers is particularly relevant to ecofeminist jurisprudence, as well as tikanga Māori. Such an exploration of the voice of the river is seen in poetry such as Hone Tuwhare’s “The sea, to the mountains, to the river”, where he writes, “nowhere is there greater fuss / to tear out the river’s tongue”. Poetry can also highlight how the ways we incorporate waterways into our stories about our country and how we might envision our relationship with the rivers going forward. This non-legal format can articulate a valid legal critique, but one which removes the obscurities and emotional distance often typical of legalistic language.

Dani Pickering – Media Studies MA

Encouraging political activation in a digitalised Aotearoa

Stagnant pay, increased work hours and other increasingly precarious working conditions are restricting the capacity of working people to meaningfully participate in political processes, worsening their economic disenfranchisement and further widening the inequality gap. Coinciding with this decline has been the rise of digital networking technologies, which are more closely associated with horizontal organising networks and recent movements (e.g. Occupy Wall Street) than traditionally centralised, hierarchical organisations (e.g. trade unions). These technological developments have fundamentally changed the ways in which people participate in politics today, with no clear consensus regarding their overall merit for class-based social movements. Using interviews with organisers from three social movement organisations seeking to activate and mobilise working-class audiences (Unions Wellington, Auckland Action Against Poverty and People Against Prisons Aotearoa), I conduct a thematic analysis of their media use and communications strategies. The results suggest pathways toward more effective political activation processes which further complicate existing assumptions about the deeply intertwined nature of online and offline engagement strategies.

Shey Pope-Mayell – English MA

Christological Allegory and the Aesthetics of Martyrdom in Oscar Wilde’s The Happy Prince and The Nightingale and the Rose

In the words of Late Victorianist Matthew Sturgis, "Oscar Wilde is apart of our world." (xi). One would be hard-pressed to prove Sturgis wrong; with his dandyish witticisms and decadent demeanour, Wilde continues to serve as a model of subversive grace, an aesthetic beacon, drawing his readers towards a lighthouse of beauty, even more than a century after his death. Few would suspect, therefore, that Wilde's work should offer any ethical guidance, given the tendency of late-nineteenth century aestheticism to place artistic beauty above ethical concerns. It is the purpose of this paper to argue otherwise. This paper examines the relationship between Christological allegory and aesthetic martyrdom in two of Oscar Wilde's early fairy stories, “The Happy Prince” and “The Nightingale and the Rose”. Throughout his work, Wilde develops an image of an aesthetic Jesus Christ, a martyr of beauty. Wilde dedicates much of his fictional oeuvre to illustrating this vision of Christ, usually through martyrdom and the relinquishment of selfhood. In doing so, he connects artistic beauty with ethics, thus synthesising a kind of aesthetic ethics, only achievable through self-sacrifice in service of a beautiful ideal, most commonly love. Both the Happy Prince and the Nightingale become two such martyrs and in doing so attain Wilde's Christ-like ideal, thus achieving a higher appreciation of beauty. This paper demonstrates how Wilde uses allegory to convey the martyrdom of these characters, which orientates his readers towards his model of Christhood and the aesthetic ethics that accompany it, not with the cold, judging hand of a Victorian didacticist but the warm, caring shoulder-pat of an aesthetic father-figure.

Lewis Rarm – Media Studies PhD (University of Auckland)

Terror: Live

To what extent can the immediacy of live-streaming bring the distant spectator into proximity with an event? In an article analyzing the aesthetico-political stakes of terrorist-produced media, Chouliaraki and Kissas, following Cavarero (2009), differentiate between terrorism and horrorism in our mediated environment: terrorism “is associated with proximity and addresses the eyewitness of violent death, horror is associated with mediated witnessing and addresses the distant spectator” (Chouliaraki & Kissas, 2018, p. 24-25). How then, should we make sense of terror attacks when they are live-streamed by the perpetrator? The Christchurch Mosque attacks marked the first time a terror attack was live-streamed on a mainstream social networking site, though as Bender (2019) notes, it was not the first iteration of performance crime (See Surette, 2015). In this paper, I argue that the capabilities of live-streaming technology represent a cultural transformation in contemporary practices of terrorism and its mediation. By live-streaming overt forms of violence, terrorists destabilize the terror/horror dichotomy by bringing distant spectators into proximity with death and seek to intensify the affective capacities of images in order to simultaneously garner support and paralyse a complicit audience.

Priyanka Roy – Theatre PhD

Cleopatra’s Rage: The Cognitive Ecology of Anger in Antony and Cleopatra

This paper explores feminine rage on Shakespeare’s stage, and in particular, Cleopatra’s wrath in Antony and Cleopatra. It is no secret that anger is a highly debated emotion, commonly interpreted as a sin in the early modern period. Even today, female anger brings forth heated conversations regarding its usefulness in the public–private sphere. However, textual and theatrical constructions of anger have presented an exceptional degree of gender-consciousness, whimsically defining significant masculine proclivities at one moment and denoting inherent feminine weaknesses at the next. Moreover, women’s anger is complicated when questions of race, class and sexuality come in to the picture. With the aid of the humoural theory and, what Mary Floyd-Wilson calls, “geohumoralism” (Floyd-Wilson 2003), I will discuss the ways in which emotions, such as anger, in the early modern period were viewed as embedded in one’s environment. The racial/ethnic categorisation of temperament raises questions with regard to the emotion and temper of the women, such as, Cleopatra. My aim in this paper will be to highlight how feminist reinterpretations and performative choices can unlock the ambiguities in Shakespeare’s texts and help illustrate the agential power of women’s anger in the early modern period. The site of resistance at Cleopatra’s disposal is her body–theatrum mundi–and she uses words and gestures to expose the patriarchal norms and push the limits of gender expectations: “Give me my robe: put on my crown. I have / Immortal longings in me…I am fire and air” (5.2.285). In this paper, I will examine Cleopatra’s “manly” anger­­; feminine rage as a performative choice; and how studying women’s anger in the early modern period can benefit our current conversation around women’s anger in the light of the recent #MeToo movement.

Richard Shepherd – Film PhD

Cinema’s Experimental Night: A figural analysis

This short presentation explores the question of cinematic figuration, defined by Nicole Brenez as the encounter between “the plasticity of appearances and the indestructible evidence of the body”. The “experimental night” names a zone shared by cinema and subjectivity, that decenters both and implicates each in one another. It stretches between two extreme poles: the Open Whole and the Void. According to Deleuze, for whom it figures as a powerful cinematic concept it, “affects the visible with a fundamental disturbance, and the world with a suspension, which contradicts all natural perception”. Meaning, prior to any clear and distinct vision made by reason’s light there rumbles a physics of waves and particles, a creaturely haptics, an affective athleticism even. Erotics before optics. My talk will present a small corpus of bodily postures that flicker, bend, disappear, sigh, tremble and drift and live by night. These scenes run the gamut from early film to music video, direct cinema and essay film, nūbero bāgu, to that basket case called noir.

A figural analysis of this kaleidoscopic darkness proposes not only a theoretical illumination of the cinema but a critical writing strategy that thinks with and inside the vibrating rhythms of cinema’s kingdom of shadows.

Luke Somervell – English Honours

‘His business, was by writing, to persuade’: Dryden’s deconstruction of Slingsby Bethel with his own discourse in Absalom and Achitophel

Of all the “malcontents” that unite against King David in ‘Absalom and Achitophel’, the character of Shimei is one that receives some of the harshest satirical lashes from Dryden’s pen. He is, of course, Slingsby Bethel, the Non-Conformist merchant and sheriff of London and Middlesex during the Exclusion Crisis of 1679 - 81. During this crisis, his part for the Whig cause was mostly supportive, by empanelling the juries with supporters of the Exclusion cause. This has led scholars to assume that Dryden’s extended representation of Bethel as Shimei is used more for comedic effect, turning the sheriff into the absurd archetype of a hypocritical and stingy puritan that reflects poorly on the Whig cause. Yet this decision has led to a relative neglect of Bethel’s numerous political and economic treatises, which propagate Bethel’s Republican ideology. I will discuss how Dryden actively seeks to subvert and ultimately deconstruct this ideology, by examining his intertextual references to Bethel’s treatises in the portrait of Shimei. In this presentation, two treatises will be examined, The Present Interest of England (1680) and Vindication of Slingsby Bethel (1681). In turn, these will be mapped out onto the character of Shimei, insofar as they provide Dryden with the ammunition to represent the self-interest, hypocrisy, and absurdity also inherent in Bethel’s discourse, and by extension, his Republican ideology.

Amy Stimson – English PhD

Light and Likeness: Defamiliarisation and Light in J. R. R. Tolkien’s Middle-earth

From many ancient world civilisations worshiping personifications of light to J. M. Barrie’s Neverland whimsical fairy lights and protective night-lights in the nursery, the idea of light has been associated with the dual role of a beacon, both guiding and anchoring. Biblically speaking, the abstract idea of ‘being light’ in the epistles has since entered into common usage where light is equivalent to ‘seeing’ or testifying and direction. In this vein, author J. R. R. Tolkien has both consolidated and defamiliarised the Biblical and pagan associations of light in his Lord of the Rings books. Coming from a worldview in which Biblical truths shed light on the human experience, Tolkien turned his rich imagination to the shedding of light on the Bible through his fantasy world of Middle-earth. His use of light imagery – especially through the lighting of beacons of Gondor, Gandalf’s staff, and the Galadriel’s gift of a phial of Eärendil’s light to Frodo – provides a microcosm view of his larger project of defamiliarisation in fantasy with light functioning as testimony, as protection, as guidance. With a unique blend of both familiar and re-imagined imagery, Tolkien writes light as a not only a testimony of guidance, as a city on a hill, but often guidance itself.

Panel

Image by Hannah Höch, The Beautiful Girl, 1920

Thank You

Students who presented a paper at the conference, and everyone who came to watch.

Professor Harry Ricketts and Adél Taljaard for their guidance and support throughout the organisational process.

Professor Sarah Leggott for opening the conference.

AProf Nikki Hessell, Dr Nicola Hyland, AProf Anna Jackson, Dr Cherie Lacey, Dr Geoff Miles, Dr Missy Molloy, Prof Heidi Thomson and Prof Kathryn Walls for supporting our student chairs by acting as timekeepers.

Paul Tozer and his team for helping prepare Studio 77 for the panel.

James Macintosh for designing our posters.

The entire SEFTMS administration team for always being there.

Everyone who helped provide refreshments.

Special thanks to Dr Kathleen Kuehn.