Dissertations / Theses on the topic '3699 Other creative arts and writing'

The following is a collection of works of fiction set mostly in Western Kentucky, with one short story taking place in Richmond, Virginia, in the year 2063. No characters in this collecting of fiction is meant to depict any real, live person, and no setting is meant to portray an existing place on earth. These works were written between February, 2012, and April, 2014.

Hemlock and Other Stories is a collection of short stories focusing primarily on the importance of geography and cultural identity in modern America. Other stories explore similar themes but contain international and/or historical settings. Ultimately, most characters in the selected stories must find ways to reconcile heritage with present-day demands.

Renovations and Other Stories is a linked collection of ten fiction stories that examines the ways by which women renew or restore themselves. The collection is set in the imaginary city of St. Clair, South Carolina, a town balancing historical accuracy with the sensational tourist industry; Carolinians who trace their ancestries back to the American Revolution with suburban newcomers; and the notion of cherishing the past with moving forward. Many of the characters struggle with identity, whether it is regional or feminine individuality. The protagonists must challenge self-image when faced with situations that make them reconsider their places in their marriages, schools, jobs, and in their lives. Relationships among women, especially mother-daughter bonds, are an important motif throughout the collection. These stories cover the lifetimes of two generations of Carolinian women. A baker struggles to break free of her Northern transient upbringing. A history student yearns to escape her past as a victim of bullying to form a new, confident identity while saying goodbye to her estranged mother. Another girl explores the confused social politics of the South which alienate her from a childhood friend. I intend to examine, through fiction, how people come to appreciate one another, often a moment too late, and how sometimes we completely misunderstand ourselves.
ID: 031001372; System requirements: World Wide Web browser and PDF reader.; Mode of access: World Wide Web.; Includes reading list (p. 174-177).; Title from PDF title page (viewed May 21, 2013).; Thesis (M.F.A.)--University of Central Florida, 2012.
M.F.A.
Masters
English
Arts and Humanities
Creative Writing

This creative thesis is a collection of original poems entitled Other. The poems in Other reflect my study of the aesthetics of poetry as well as that of how women are represented as poets and as the subject of poems. Some of these poems are the product of my particular interest in the use of persona. Most reflect my desire to achieve self-reflection, to write from my experiences and perception, while still maintaining the universality that is an essential element of successful poems. The critical introduction situates my poems within the framework of the poetic mode Personal Classicism—poetry that is emotionally based but relies on formal techniques and controlled elements in order to maintain distance. My primary goal in the critical introduction is to link my poems to the Personal Classicist lineage, which includes H.D., Elizabeth Bishop, and Louise Gluck – to whom I will pay particular attention.

A novel about a man injured while working on an oilrig in the Gulf of Mexico, set primarily in Louisiana, Nevada, and California. While recovering from his injury, the protagonist is contacted by his dead brother’s daughter—a person whom he did not know existed—and he journeys to San Francisco in search of her.

Cauldron Calling is a compilation of poems ranging in poetic forms from the sonnet to free verse to lyric prose that incorporates a number of processes including: hypnopompic texting, hypnagogic automatic writing, and direct observation. The purpose of this myriad of poetic forms is to peer through the psychic shells we create and examine the workings of the mind so as to give form to the nebulousness found within while most closely recreating physical experiences of pain. In the collection, domestic spaces, particularly kitchens, serve as filters and lenses through which to process anxiety and pain. Conversely, domestic spaces are viewed as areas of both liberation and confinement and the voices of the various speakers throughout the manuscript struggle with this duality/plurality and whether there is a choice to participate in the intergenerational recycling and handing down of these beliefs and behaviors or not. Through sound sense, enjambment, deep image, and the elevation of the mundane, these poems are meant to give insight into the feminine experience as it relates to ritualistic acts of release as opposed to product-driven enterprises for mass consumption.

Humanity is living through a time of major ecological crisis exemplified by anthropogenic climate change and planetary-wide ecological system collapse. This is a driver for widespread and intersecting humanitarian and social crises including resource wars, famine, mass migration, and displacement. These entwined ecological and social crises are underpinned by global colonial capitalism that fuels systems of violent and inequitable extraction of wealth and resources from lands, people, and creatures. Indigenous and settler scholars acknowledge that addressing and dismantling colonialism is essential to effective action on the impacts and drivers of climate change, and other ecological and social crises, and the development of sustainable societies for the future. The research proposes that for settler individuals and communities to take action against ecological and social violence, they must develop ways of being, doing, and knowing that attend to the issues of colonialism and extractivism. For settler-colonists, engaging with and through place is particularly important due to the centrality of land and the subsequent ongoing role of colonialism in severing, masking, ignoring, and denying the relationship between land and people’s embodied identities and lived experiences. Tender places uses creative and pedagogical practices to examine the moral responsibilities of settler people in the time of ecological and social crisis. The research seeks to develop tools, processes that support anti-racist and anti-colonial creative practice that respond to ecological crises. The development of these tools and process has occurred through iterative engagement with a constellation of feminist, anti-colonial, Indigenous and queer scholarship including the work of Deborah Bird Rose, Max Liboiron, Claire Land, Ambelin Kwaymullina, Eve Tuck and Wayne Yang. The practices and ethics of engagement with anti-colonial and Indigenous literature are outlined within the exegesis. This doctoral research is undertaken as creative practice led research, with a 50/50 split between the creative product and the exegesis. I recommend viewing the work after reading the exegesis. As the creative works were created in three iterations, presented in multiple locations, and include an ephemeral durational installation, I’ve produced a website to create a permanent record of the work for assessment and documentation purposes. You can view the creative work here: https://tenderplaces.net/. The creative practice was undertaken at the Ilparpa Claypans, a series of 12 ephemeral claypans, located on ‘crown land’, 13 km southwest of the township of Mparntwe/ Alice Springs, in the Northern Territory, Australia. The popular recreational site was chosen due to my decade-long relationship with this place, and my distress over the impacts of dumping, four-wheel driving, and invasive weeds witnessed over this time. I undertook this research through the lens of Australian settler culture, as a queer, female, fourth generation Northern Territory settler of Irish, Scottish, and German descent. I bring my lived experience as an artist and activist to this inquiry. Through the research, I developed a practice of reading, walking, and making at the Ilparpa Claypans, as a method by which to investigate the use of critical race and environmental humanities literature as an agent of defamiliarisation, with the aim to disrupt the settler gaze within place. I documented new ways of seeing and being with/in place, which emerged from this disruption through field notes, photos, and creative works. These creative translations informed the development of three artworks reflecting on the impacts and responsibilities of settler people and cultures to the Ilparpa Claypans. Postcards from the Claypans was the first iteration of creative practice at the Ilparpa Claypans, which took place from May to June in 2019. In this iteration, individual walks were documented on individual postcards and mailed to individual peers in different parts of the world. The second work, Shadow Work is an autoethnographic map of settler experience and the impact on the Ilparpa Claypans was developed in January, 2019. This map is comprised of twelve cyanotypes created from dumped refuse and weeds found at the claypans. The third work, Testing Ground, was an 18-day durational performance installation, which positions the researcher’s body in service to place through daily visits to the Ilparpa Claypans to remove buffel grass (an invasive weed) and dumped items. These recovered items were used to create an installation that made visible the impacts of the ecological harms on the Ilparpa Claypans, alongside a soundscape created from field recordings and a public process journal of the 18-day practice. The exegesis locates the research inquiry theoretically and methodologically, and articulates the process, findings, and impacts. The autoethnographic component of the exegesis draws on the creative works, reflective writing, field notes, and formal research documents, to examine the development and use of arts and place methodologies and methods as a research process. Creative and reflective writing are used throughout the exegesis as a mode by which to locate the reader with my lived experience of place and process throughout the research lifespan. This exegesis, Tender Places, identifies and contributes processes for settler people to reflect on their complicity individually and collectively in ongoing colonial and extractivist drivers of entangled ecological and social violence. The methods and methodologies utilised in this project can aid the development frameworks of moral responsibility for the action that addresses these violences in order to restore social and ecological justice.

The concept of ‘artistic terra nullius’ refers to the violent erasure of First Nations peoples in colony Australia and highlights their absence – particularly Aboriginal Women – in the white-dominated arts world. This doctoral research by creative project and exegesis sets out to document and respond to the work of Aboriginal women in art and community. I have used practice-led inquiry as the main methodology, informed by my own roles as artist, writer, curator, community researcher and as a Wemba-Wemba & Gunditjmara, matriarchal and sovereign woman. Practising community ways of 'being, knowing and doing' to witness, participate and respond to Aboriginal women's art making and activism, I developed a new body of visual works and a series of essays, together with an exegesis relating to the project as a whole. The exhibition in December 2019 at Footscray Community Arts Centre held two bodies of work in two spaces. The ontological (or Being) space was a healing space of unconditional love, one of memory, timelessness, and respite. It has been created as 'daily acts of repair' in collaboration with other Aboriginal women and family members in a new process of bush dyeing fabrics, clothing and rags to become 'healing cloths”, dyed with gathered gum leaves, bush flowers, plants and Wemba-Wemba family bush medicine gifted to me from my Aunties. As a three-dimensional space, it makes visible trauma trails and stains and visualises what respite and healing could look and feel like. Under the 1961 flickering Super-8 image of my great-grandmother, this space also recreates ‘home’, particularly resonating with Aboriginal women’s curation of ‘home’ even in Mission housing. The second space, an epistemological (or Knowing) space, was an active studio of photographic based works drawn from matriarchal family stories, both past, present and future, and archival research. It included scholarly and other literature on Blak art and representation, in a recreation of my home studio and office. These bodies of work were made over a four-year project, drawing on concepts of de-colonising, Aboriginal feminist standpoint theory (Moreton- Robinson) and sovereignty. In emphasising making art as both research and artistic outcomes, I demonstrate art as a sovereign act, based in cultural practice and sovereign values. Both the exhibition spaces and the exegesis weave across past, present and future, across research in family, community and the Aboriginal women’s arts-work, across multiple creative media and stories – in the process here called ‘Ghost Weaving’. Responding to various modes of oppression, patriarchy and racism, Blak women’s art is not only a form of resistance to colonising, to violence, to academia and the white art world. It is also an ethical foregrounding of other forms of knowing and being. The exegesis is in two main parts: the written, thesis-element and a series of appendices which include a pictorial record of the exhibition, links and lists of related works, including relevant essays.

This thesis is made up of two separate components: a creative manuscript titled Portrait with Still Life and its accompanying exegesis. The project as a whole problematizes the links between life and fiction, examines the power of female artistic ‘voice’, in both imagery and text, and discusses the significance of this voice in re- imagining silenced women’s stories. Furthermore, the intersection of image and text used throughout is central to the development of the overall structure of this thesis and its attempt to answer key questions: What is the potential of historiographical metafiction in creating awareness of the exclusion of women from official history and dominant narratives, particularly women who have been institutionalised or have transgressed societal norms? What is the possibility of female artistic endeavour, particularly artists who utilize disquiet and unease in their work, in highlighting the uniquely gendered experience of women in Western society? It further questions whether the use of imagery as a metafictional device in the creative manuscript can contribute to the analysis of subjectivity in historical writing and be used as a method to unearth silenced women’s stories. Portrait with Still Life is an experimental text that uses historiographical metafictional devices to highlight the gaps and omissions inherent in many women’s lives. The novel blurs the boundaries between fiction, historical writing, memoir and biography in order to explore and re-imagine the lives of women – both past and present. The hybrid nature of the creative work as fictional autobiography is a significant aspect of this text and its aim to highlight the links between life and art, and that it is rooted in fact. The narrative recounts the story of Sarah, a contemporary Australian woman suffering from mental illness, her quest to discover the mystery of her ancestor Rebecca, and how this process allows her to not only write Rebecca’s story but also come to terms with her own difficult past. The dream that Sarah harbours of finding connection with a haunting image of Rebecca, and the narrative she creates, is integral to her eventual freedom and recovery. The exegesis discusses the work of a number of female writers and artists, particularly women who have used autobiographical and historiographical metafictional devices in their work, and how they have influenced and informed the writing of the creative manuscript. It also explores the power of the artist’s voice, both in image and text, and the importance of this voice in the recovery of hidden or silenced stories in order to attempt to answer the overarching questions outlined above. The use of my own personal story throughout each part of the exegesis further examines the links between life and artistic pursuit and its role in highlighting women’s gendered experience in order to question, and eventually counter, its negative experience on many women in contemporary society.

Using the interdisciplinary scope of the contemporary novel, the thesis explores religion, science and identity in a monastic context. The research is presented in two sections: a substantial work of narrative fiction titled Athos, and an essay in the form of a postscript.

Inheriting Exile is a creative-critical exploration into the Palestinian-Australian experience of trauma, exile, identity and belonging. Through the personal and generational lenses of two writers, father and daughter, it sets out to navigate various modes of transmission of trauma and memory, primarily building on and going beyond Edward Said’s conceptualisation of exile (2001) and Marianne Hirsch’s theorisation of postmemory (Hirsch, 2012). My thesis has two components. The first is the exegesis, in which I utilise an array of critical and autoethnographic strategies in order to engage with and interrogate Edward Said’s theorisation of the nourishment of the Palestinian identity in exile and Marianne Hirsch’s conceptual framework of postmemory - the transmission of trauma to second and third generation Holocaust survivors who may not have experienced it first-hand. Through bridging together Said and Hirsch’s works, I introduce the notion of ‘inhabitation’. I define inhabitation as a term that reflects the internalisation of both place and displacement, highlighting the myriad of ways in which Palestinians in exile, denied the right to return and to inhabit their homeland, might subsequently become imaginatively inhabited by both desire for the homeland and its denial. The second component is the creative project: a biographical novel with the working title Coffee with George, based on my father Abdul Karim Sabawi’s life in Palestine. My father is a celebrated Palestinian poet and novelist who was exiled from Gaza in the aftermath of the 1967 War and emigrated to Australia in 1980. In writing his story, I offer an intimate portrayal of the lived experience of first-generation displaced Palestinians: their past traditional way of life in the homeland, the social and cultural environment they were uprooted from and the traumatic memories they continue to carry with them. This research adds new knowledge to global understandings of what it means to be an exiled Palestinian, or a Palestinian born or raised in diaspora. It also contributes to the ‘trauma genre’ that has so far largely neglected the experience of al-Nakba and its impact on subsequent generations of Palestinians. Al-Nakba literally translates to ‘Catastrophe,’ and is used to refer to the 1948 systematic expulsion and ethnic cleansing of the Palestinian population and the establishment of the state of Israel on what was the territory of Palestine. The research also contributes to Australian literature through the creation of new literary work in the form of the biographical novel Coffee with George. Currently, very few creative works by Palestinian-Australians have been published or performed. Literature – theatre, fiction, film and poetry – by offering us insights into personal experience, can provide powerful vehicles to engage our diverse communities and to build cultural and artistic bridges between Australians of all ethnic backgrounds.

This arts-based, practice-led, qualitative theoretical work amplifies young people’s ethical opinions of what it means to be human both now and in the future through three cumulative technological lenses. These are artificial intelligence (AI), and the anticipated superintelligence which has already commenced (Andrews, 2017), which enables the third lens of posthumanism, defined by the Oxford dictionary as ‘The idea that humanity can be transformed, transcended, or eliminated either by technological advances or the evolutionary process; artistic, scientific, or philosophical practice which reflects this belief (Dictionary, 1970).' Posthumanism auspices Transhumanism, which is defined as using technology to further enhance the skills, abilities, and lifespans of human beings who ultimately become posthuman (H+). This research renders a superintelligent AI which might orchestrate the qualities that future humans / posthumans will have, considering eugenics, gene modification, and the ultimate designing of entities and/or sentient beings, has already happened and is expressed via art and narrative experience as research. Transcending our biology to coexist with future world(s), including inter-dimensionally, is suggested as being inevitable when technological acceleration is viewed not linearly, but exponentially, especially considering quantum superintelligence(s). This research examines both the ethical lives of young people (extrapolated from recorded interviews) and of the author (through retrospective art and memory). It splices across generational divides, as well as past analogue and current/ future digitisation, compares young people today and in years gone by, also splicing human or posthuman survival as framed by the Anthropocene, (‘Anthrop’ meaning human and ‘cene’ meaning a geological period of time, in simple language, ‘The Human Era’), stemming out of compassion for nature and the living world, while conversing with young people about global catastrophic risks. An unexpected existential creative artefact(s) emerges through the methodologies of A/r/ tography, Arts-Based Research, Narrative Inquiry, otherwise referred to throughout as Living inquiry. This metaphorically mirrors ‘The Event Horizon’ of the technological singularity discussed within the data collection section, in which outcomes are and were impossible to predict. The metaphor of me talking to students about events unknowable past a technological singularity, or event horizon, is precisely what happened as my memories and art revealed themselves with the help of healers, and detailed in the creative component ‘A Splice of My Life.’ I have since learned that this idea can be attributed to Deleuze.

This PhD via creative work comprises an exegesis (30%) and accompanying novel, Fan Fatale (70%), which seek to contribute a creative and considered representation of some women who are fans of elite male sports, Australian Rules football in particular. Fictional representations of Australian Rules football are rare. At the time of submission of this thesis, only three such works were found that are written by women aimed to an older readership. This project adds to this underrepresented space for women writing on, and contributing their experiences to, the culture of men’s football. The exegesis and novel creatively addresses the research question of how female fans relate to other women in the sports fan space through concepts of gender bias, performance, and social surveillance. Applying the lens of autoethnography as the primary methodology to examine these notions further allows a deeper, reflexive engagement with the research, to explore how damaging these performances can be for the relationships women can have to other women. In producing this exegesis and accompanying novel, this PhD thesis contributes a new and creative way to explore the gendered complications that surround the sports fan space for women. My novel, Fan Fatale, provides a narrative which raises questions about the complicit positions women can sometimes occupy in the name of fandom and conformity to expected gendered norms. The exegesis deploys the practice of autoethnographic, practice-led reflexive writing to grapple with academic and popular accounts of female sports fans that also engage with complications of these experiences. A particular focus is placed on how inherent gender bias and social surveillance influences how women are perceived in the sports fan space by not just men, but other women. This is additionally reinforced in literature and popular culture that is addressed in this work. The exegesis and novel provide an important contribution to the knowledge concerning female sports fans. It is only from representing the varied, intersectional complexities of this arena that women enter unequally, that we can learn how to make it a more even playing field. This work provides an approach to the research question that is nuanced and investigative and offers a way to open up conversations that bring women back into the few sports literature narratives that we have to work towards achieving this goal.