Massey Documents by Type

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Start date: 2020Subject: search.filters.subject.Criticism and interpretation

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    Not to exact a full look at the worst : (mis)representations of state-sanctioned violence in New Zealand poetry : a thesis presented in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in English at Massey University, Manawatu, New Zealand
    (Massey University, 2025-11-26) McLean, Robert
    This thesis examines how local poetry written between the First World War and the early twenty-first century has represented state-sanctioned violence done in Aotearoa New Zealand and on the state’s behalf overseas. Although this period is marked by the emergence and consolidation of a distinct New Zealand literature and the New Zealand state’s deliberate involvement in major overseas conflicts, surprisingly few poems directly represent such violence. This thesis identifies and analyses poems written in English by Māori, Pacific, and Pākehā poets that do represent state-sanctioned violence: Donald H. Lea’s “Gold Stripe” from Stand Down! (1917); Allen Curnow’s Island and Time (1941); Kendrick Smithyman’s “Vignettes of the Māori Wars” from Flying to Palmerston (1968); Māori Battalion: A Poetic Sequence (2001) by Alistair Te Ariki Campbell; and Captain Cook in the Underworld (2002) by Robert Sullivan. I use a form of mimetic close reading to examine their sources, spatial and temporal renderings, attribution of agency, prosody and modes of representation, construal of legitimacy, and violence’s uses and effects. I determine how poetry’s conventions, licenses, limitations, and omissions have helped or hindered naming, understanding, and owning Aotearoa New Zealand’s state-sanctioned violence in these five poetic works. The evidence from this poetic archive testifies to a radical disjunction between state-sanctioned violence’s historical realities and how these examples of New Zealand poetry have represented of it. They have largely failed to give voice to what poet Geoffrey Hill called “the world’s real cries” by refusing to address directly the social, political, and legal sources of state-sanctioned violence’s meaningfulness and legitimisation.
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    Resistance, healing and empowerment through autobiographical therapeutic performance–– 愛，媽媽 (Love, Mum) : a solo matrilineal memoir and autoethnographic inquiry on Chinese womanhood and ‘The good woman’ ideal : a thesis presented in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in Creative Writing at Massey University, New Zealand. EMBARGOED until 30 July 2027.
    (Massey University, 2024) Lam, Cynthia Hiu Ying
    My research is an autoethnographic inquiry that employs creative and critical methodologies to examine the question: How does the process of writing and performing one’s life experiences and trauma act as a form of resistance to the dominant ‘good woman’ narrative, leading to personal healing, empowerment and transformation? Through the creation of my one-woman show, 愛，媽媽 (Love, Mum), a matrilineal memoir about three generations of Chinese women, I investigate how the creative process involving the writing, rehearsing and performance of my play can become a form of resistance and counter-storying against the dominant ‘good woman’ narrative, leading to personal healing and empowerment. I begin by discussing the historical context of the virtuous Chinese woman, and present research by scholars who demonstrate that depression in women contains a gendered lens, resulting from the socio-cultural pressures of living up to the ‘good woman’ ideal. My analysis uses the methodological framework of autobiographical/autoethnographic therapeutic performance (ATP). This is a method that focuses on the working through of personal traumatic material through writing and performance. My research utilises a transdisciplinary praxis, combining both arts-based and psychoanalytic theories and practice related to trauma recovery and the healing processes of ATP. My investigation is autoethnographic and deeply personal as my own life experience and creative process is used to answer my research question, as well as shining a light on the socio-cultural structures we live in. Employing a mixture of creative practice, personal reflection, theoretical examination, and a close reading of my play script and performance, I demonstrate how the creative process I went through has led to a form of personal healing and transformation, with the potential to impact and engage with the wider community.
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    Painting from the Holocaust's barbaric periphery : a personal journey : an exegesis submitted in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Fine Arts Massey University, Wellington, New Zealand
    (Massey University, 2021) Forster, Michelanne
    This exegesis examines my personal response to the Holocaust through the medium of expressionist painting. I identify myself as the daughter of a Holocaust survivor, and an immigrant to New Zealand. I discuss the concepts of “post-memory”, “vicarious past” and “intergenerational trauma” and question the moral right to make art out of other people's suffering. I discuss the tensions inherent in living and working in New Zealand, a country at a far geographical and cultural remove from the Holocaust, and reflect on how this affects my work in terms of memory, imagination, and style. I demonstrate the way Jewish artists Chaim Soutine, Marc Chagall, Charlotte Solomon, Abraham Rattner, and Hyman Bloom influenced my search for a personal painting language. I link my practice to other Jewish immigrant artists who fled Europe during the Nazi regime, and site myself in what Sidra DeKovan Ezrahi calls the “barbaric periphery” of the Shoah (Ezrahi qtd. in Katz-Freidman 119).
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    The world inverted : Chuck Palahniuk's fiction as a challenge to neoliberal capitalism : a thesis presented in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in English at Massey University, Albany, New Zealand
    (Massey University, 2020) Berry, Louisa
    In 2019, neoliberal capitalism and its practices appear to be so well-established in Anglo-American countries as to be almost incontestable. Much academic discourse has focused on delineating the features of neoliberal capitalism and diagnosing the effect it has on its human subjects, with many theorists arguing that it produces subjects who are individualistic, competitive and isolated. This thesis aims to determine what role, if any, fiction can play in the wider project of challenging neoliberal capitalist subjectivities. More specifically, it asks: To what extent can the work of one contemporary writer, American author Chuck Palahniuk, challenge his reader’s understanding of their own society and even prompt a transformational impulse within them? This thesis analyses nine of Palahniuk’s novels through the lenses of Marxist theory and contemporary theories of neoliberal capitalism in order to consider how fiction can alter a reader’s understanding of their society. Looking beyond representational content alone, I argue that Palahniuk’s use of stylistic features such as hyperbole, metaphor, symbolism and satire work to unveil and exaggerate aspects of neoliberal capitalism to the reader that have become so normalised that they are often viewed as inevitable or ‘common sense.’ At the same time, inbuilt moments of existential crisis and ambiguous endings work to break through the reader’s routine assumptions as to what is inevitable or important and create moments of uncertainty and doubt about neoliberal capitalism. The thesis thus argues that any transformational impulse ignited in the reader by Palahniuk’s fiction is best understood as a result of the dialectic work of content and form in tandem.