Browsing by Author "Wilson, Annabel"

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From Aspiring to 'Paradise' : the South Island myth and its enemies : a critical and creative investigation into the deconstruction of Aotearoa's Lakes District : presented in fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Masters in Creative Writing at Massey University, Palmerston North, New Zealand
(Massey University, 2014) Wilson, Annabel
Poetry and film are artistic modes for representing, interpreting and evaluating our environment. Aotearoa’s poets have distilled the meanings we place on ‘places of the heart’ since the first oral histories and lyrics were composed. Kiwi filmmakers have also fixed their gaze on places layered with cultural significance, selecting Edens at various stages of the Fall as settings for their protagonists to mess about in. With New Zealand’s unique position as the last place on earth to be populated, the human response to this landscape is a significant aspect of the nation’s psyche, and the relationship between people and place remains an enduring motif in local writing and cinema. My research stems from an exploration of the poetic and on-screen representations of the Central Otago region as a cultural landscape generated by a variety of spectators. This paper takes an excursion into the high country of Te Wai Pounamu to see how two key places have been sighted in terms of the South Island myth. The first place to be framed is deep in the Matukituki valley. Here, the gaze of the nationalist era is epitomised by the ill-fated Aspiring film project masterminded by Brian Brake and scripted by James K. Baxter. The antithesis of their gaze can be seen in the ‘Paradise’ of Jane Campion’s post-feminist television mini-series Top of the Lake (2013). My interest is in the swing from Brake and Baxter’s romanticizing of Aotearoa’s ‘Lakes District’ to Campion’s brutalizing of it. How has the mythical South Island landscape been established and then fractured by these artists? These issues are also explored in my creative component, which draws upon my critical report in order to devise my own response to the South Island myth through a fictionalized journal / scrapbook entitled ‘Aspiring Daybook’.
A long time to get home : rejection of closure and the role of the reader in hybrid texts : Lost and Gone Away by Lynn Jenner & Nox by Anne Carson : a critical-creative thesis submitted in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy (Creative Writing) at Massey University, Albany, Aotearoa New Zealand. EMBARGOED until further notice.
(Massey University, 2023) Wilson, Annabel
A long time to get home is a critical-creative thesis that asks the research question: In what ways can the strategies and techniques of hybrid works articulate responses to loss? My thesis approaches this question from a writer’s perspective. Part One examines how two hybrid books about searches of different kinds, Lost and Gone Away (2015) by Lynn Jenner and Nox (2010) by Anne Carson, enact tensions between language and loss. This essay focuses on the genre-blurring strategies and techniques that make these case studies what Lyn Hejinian calls "open texts" (Language 43), which favour the “border” (“Two Talks”, “Continuing”). Drawing on Hejinian’s concept of “the rejection of closure” (Language 40), I look at how Lost and Gone Away and Nox invite the reader into an ongoing production of meaning. I show how they each reject closure, making the search for words to speak loss a continuous, communal activity. The critical investigation is the basis for my creative writing in Part Two. In conversation with the case studies and concepts addressed, the manuscript engages with my personal experience of, and process of writing around, loss. The manuscript comprises two separate pieces that are stylistically and thematically connected. Entitled Waiariki, the first is a collage of memories of a place and a person of significance to me. Its counter-piece, Where Were You?, is a fictionalised day in the life of an art gallery guide, set on March 15 2019. Within each work, I explore intersections of visual elements, prose, and poetry to build a hybrid text that circles themes of personal and public trauma and their repercussions and echoes. The weighting for this thesis is 40% critical and 60% creative. Due to the hybrid and fragmented nature of the creative component, its page count has greater relevance than the comparative word count.