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Item 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, RobertThis 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.Item Healthy bodies : in picture books & children's talk : a thesis presented in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy (Psychology) at Massey University, Manawatū, New Zealand(Massey University, 2023) Pugmire, RiaThis thesis explores the health and body discourses in children’s picture books, and in their talk. In part one I begin with an overview of the constructions in a broad selection of picture books, before narrowing down on seven key books for a multimodal critical discourse analysis (MMCDA). Overall, the books offered diverse constructions of health, bodies, food and physical activity; in contrast, those key books that focused on health reproduced dominant healthist discourses, where health was constructed in relation to diet and doing deliberate exercise. However, while this kind of ‘healthy living’ was constructed as what you should do, it was simultaneously shown as boring and unpleasant. In terms of bodies, the stories reproduced an ‘or you’ll get fat’ discourse (reminiscent of widespread obesity discourses) where being fat was constructed as the negative consequence of failing to do ‘healthy living’ correctly; and was associated with being greedy, lazy, humorous and unable. While the stories also offer some critique of these assumptions about health and bodies, these messages were often ambiguous or contradicted within and between the stories, and it was unclear how children ‘read’ these. For part two then, I conducted discussion groups with children (aged 6-7 years), to explore how the children made sense of the picture books in this context, as well as the health and body discourses they drew on in their talk. Predominantly, participants interpreted the stories in line with widespread healthist and obesity discourses, displaying their knowledge of what you should and shouldn’t eat, and constructing the fat characters negatively as ‘too fat’, with advice about how to change this. Their responses were mixed in terms of how they engaged with the critical elements of the stories. However, they also drew on a discourse of ‘growing big and strong’ in relation to health, occasionally troubled the simplistic constructions of fatness, and through their talk and body language showed the importance of pleasure in relation to food and movement. This study adds to our understanding of how children negotiate healthy body discourses in their talk, and reinforces the need to continue to explore how to engage with children about health and media literacy in more critical ways, avoiding the pitfalls of fat stigma.Item Miniatures of reality : an inter-photo-textual investigation of ekphrasis of photographs : a thesis presented in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in Creative Writing at Massey University, Manawatū, New Zealand(Massey University, 2021) Moores, Margaret RuthThis creative thesis comprises a critical study of contemporary ekphrastic poems about photographs and a manuscript of original ekphrastic prose poems that focus on photography or are inspired by photographic technique. The balance of the thesis, approximately 60/40 in favour of the critical study, reflects how the creative manuscript was informed by my investigation of critical theories of ekphrasis and photography. Ekphrasis, commonly defined after James Heffernan as “the verbal representation of visual representation” (3), is a relationship traditionally cast as a struggle for dominance between image and word. However, this thesis is inspired by contemporary poet Cole Swensen’s challenge to this perspective in her essay “To Writewithize” (2011), in which she expands the term to cover works in which the encounter between poet and artwork is of “fellow travelers sharing a context” (70). In this mode of ekphrasis, art is no longer sequestered in a museum or gallery but has become an element of the poet’s world, providing them with “a model for formal construction” (71) for their work. In the critical portion of this thesis I argue that the visual turn of the twentieth century, and the invention of photography in particular, has contributed to developments in ekphrasis that Swensen identifies. Specifically, I argue that the context sharing that Swensen describes is particularly productive in prose poem ekphrasis of photographs, an intersection characterized by aesthetic and theoretical synergies. A sequence of lyric ekphrasis by Carol Snow, whom Swensen identifies as a “writewithist” poet, provides an introductory case study for my research, and provides a lens through which I consider Natasha Trethewey’s lyric ekphrasis of photographs in Bellocq’s Ophelia and a further sequence from Snow. These case studies provide a reference point for my exploration of the aesthetic intersection of prose poetry and photography via close readings of prose poetry ekphrasis in Mary Jo Bang’s A Doll for Throwing and prose poem selections from Kathleen Fraser’s Discrete Categories Forced into Coupling. The creative component, Miniatures of Reality, is a collection of prose poems that presents the life experiences of an implied speaker via ekphrasis of photographs. In writing these poems, I set out to creatively explore the questions raised in my critical component by producing “writewithist” ekphrasis in which the poems demonstrate aspects of the aesthetics and theory of photography in both form and emotional content. The poems, largely presented in linked sequences, consider aspects of the speaker’s life story as memories transformed by a “camera vision” which shapes the way these experiences are recounted. An underlying subtext to all the sequences is the notion of “hidden motherhood” inspired by Victorian “Hidden Mother” photographs. Notions of hidden motherhood occur throughout, e.g. in poems about the speaker’s grandmother who died when the speaker’s mother was a child or in poems suggesting the speaker’s ambivalence about motherhood and mothering. A further creative imperative is represented by my use of the prose poem as a form to represent what Fraser describes as the “the average female’s habituated availability to interruption” (Fraser, “Hogue Interview” 9). This notion of gendered experience contributes to both the internal structure of the poems and to the structure of the collection as a whole as the speaker revisits events from her life through the medium of photography and often retells them from differing perspectives.Item Asserting and locating value in contemporary elliptical-style poetry : a thesis presented in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in Creative Writing at Massey University, Manawatū, New Zealand(Massey University, 2021) Aitchison, JohannaThis thesis has both critical and creative components. The critical study examines the strategies that contemporary poets—which I am characterising as elliptical-style for their interests in postmodernist gestures and traditional affective responses—use to write about subjects that are difficult due to individual or collective trauma. It is based on close readings of the poetry of U.S. writers Terrance Hayes, Solmaz Sharif, and Dora Malech. The study analyses how the poets use found terms, erasure, anagram, and persona speakers, including alter egos, to assert and locate value in poetry that can at times be elusive or elliptical. Such poetry is characterised by evasive speakers, associative logic, and gamesmanship. Found poetry uses pre-existing material in poems, erasure selectively deletes text, while anagram remixes existing words to make new lines. Persona speakers are narrators of poems who are identified as distinct from the implied poet. This study examines Hayes’ use of alter egos in his 2010 volume of poetry Lighthead to examine issues of race, Sharif’s use of persona speakers and found poetry techniques to critique American imperialism in her 2016 collection Look, and Malech’s application of anagram in her 2018 volume Stet to write on confessional topics. I argue that these poets assert value by using persona speakers, found techniques, associative strategies, and juxtaposition of unlikely discourses, to thematic effect, while simultaneously distancing the reader from the poem by creating narrative, thematic, or grammatical gaps in the poems. The relationship between reader and poet in these elliptical-style poems is that of co-creators of meaning, as the reader must import outside information to fill in the spaces. I argue that elliptical-style poets assert and locate value in their poems by providing a co-creative experience for the reader, using techniques that are carefully chosen to both contribute to the themes of each poem, while also resisting closure and fixity, thus requiring an active reader-poem relationship that is experiential rather than linear. The creative portion of this thesis is a manuscript of original poetry. It uses found terms, erasure, and persona speakers to engage with material concerning Covid-19, the Christchurch massacre, travels in the U.S, and reflections on writing and depression. The pandemic section reimagines and reframes the civil emergency discourse of the lockdown to suggest an alternative, imaginative response for the poem’s speakers. Other sections use techniques to create elusive, dynamic lyric wholes, in which the reader is asked to contribute to the poems’ themes and narrative.Item Unforgettably in love : uses of the amnesia trope in contemporary romance : a dissertation presented in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in Creative Writing at Massey University, Palmerston North, New Zealand. EMBARGOED until further notice.(Massey University, 2021) Kołodziej, GajaThis study examines and demonstrates ways in which contemporary romance employs the amnesia trope, focusing on its potential for both plot development and protagonists’ personal transformation. The amnesia trope allows authors to explore a variety of issues, such as matters of identity, the nature of human existence, deception and morality, as well as extreme vulnerability on the part of the heroine or hero due to lack of social context. The critical component of this thesis investigates the meaning and usages of amnesia in contemporary romance fiction, with a particular focus on medical amnesia resulting from external trauma. To analyse the trope, I briefly summarize how the genre has evolved over the last 70 years, highlighting its ability to impart guidance and its aptitude for flexibility and openness. While drawing connections between romance subgenres, particularly between contemporary romance and romantic suspense in which the protagonist experiences medical amnesia, I examine popular employments and implications of literary amnesia to demonstrate a spectrum of possibilities available to authors. Based on an in-depth analysis of six romance novels, I describe three frequently occurring approaches to the trope: amnesia as an ultimate proof that love conquers all; amnesia as an extreme vulnerability which transforms strangers into lovers; and amnesia as inner drive for reinvention, which heals emotional wounds and fosters the lovers’ personal development. The creative portion of the thesis, a full-length relationship-based novel titled Disremembered, applies many of the strategies discussed in the critical part to explore the richness of the amnesia trope within a cross-genre form that incorporates elements of romance, suspense, travelogue, and metafiction. The novel also gives narrative form to a personal endeavour to understand the character of ego, including elements of the nature versus nurture debate, popular understandings of dissociative identity disorder, and the theory of reincarnation.Item Wayfinding Pasifikafuturism : an indigenous science fiction vision of the ocean in space : a thesis presented in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in Creative Writing at Massey University, Manawatu, New Zealand(Massey University, 2020) Cole, GinaThis thesis examines science fiction space stories written by Indigenous writers and asks how these texts look to the past while commenting on the present and providing transformative imaginaries of our existence as Indigenous peoples in the future. It also investigates how these texts challenge the inherent colonialism of the science fiction genre and its norm of the white, male, heteronormative, cisgender point of view. This thesis comprises two sections, creative and critical. Twenty percent provides the critical analyses and eighty percent makes up the creative section. The critical component is in two parts. The first part defines the specific point of view adopted in this thesis, which is that of science fiction literature written by Māori and Pasifika authors as the Indigenous peoples of the Pacific. This point of view is captured within the term I have developed and called, “Pasifikafuturism”, a theoretical construct that situates Oceanic science fiction in the afterlife of colonisation and seeks to move beyond postcolonialism to create Pacific conceptions of the future. Pasifikafuturism is located alongside other Alternative Futurisms with which it has commonalities, including Afrofuturism, Indigenous Futurism, Queer Indigenous Futurism, Chicanafuturism, Latinofuturism, and Africanfuturism. Pasifikafuturism is identified within the context of the Pacific Ocean and the ancestral practices and methodologies of wayfinding and waka building. The second part of the critical study comprises a close reading of two science fiction space stories written by Indigenous authors. The first is Witi Ihimaera’s space novella Dead of Night, a story about six people travelling through space to the end of the universe, or Te Kore. The second is Nnedi Okorafor’s novella Binti in which the titular protagonist, a young Indigenous woman from the Himba tribe in Namib, is the first person in her community to travel into space to attend an intergalactic university. In the creative portion of this thesis, Pasifikafuturism is explored imaginatively in an original novel titled Na Viro, which is shaped and informed by my critical research. Na Viro is a work of science fiction set in interstellar space and the Pacific. Tia, the protagonist in Na Viro, is a young Fijian woman who travels into space to rescue her sister from a whirlpool. This thesis argues that science fiction, and specifically space stories, can be used as a lens through which to examine the histories and ancestral knowledge of Indigenous peoples adversely impacted by colonialism; and as a way of reclaiming and re-growing Indigenous knowledge that has survived. Furthermore, I use Pacific wayfinding as a methodological framework to enable the envisioning of transformative futures in science fiction stories where our knowledges are centralised, privileged, and respected.
