Sons of shame : deconstructing white male subjectivity in Greater Western Sydney

Abstract

This thesis is composed of a creative component, a collection of short stories and monologues entitled An Elegant Young Man, which is a fictional evocation of twenty-first century life as seen by an awkward and uncertain young man from the provinces of Sydney's western suburbia; and an exegesis examining the role of shame in constructs of white male subjectivity through the literary theories of Bob Hodge and Vijay Mishra, and the writings of contemporary Australian author Brendan Cowell. An Elegant Young Man is set in and around Sydney's western suburbs, with particular emphasis on the area of south-west Sydney surrounding Liverpool. The narrator, a young man named Luke Francis Carman, is intended as an ambiguous configuration: bursting with ecstatic exuberance on the one hand, painfully self-conscious and shamefaced on the other - an introverted bookworm who dabbles in the theatre of professional wrestling. In this and other respects he might be seen as a reflection of the schizoid nature of Australian white male subjectivity set out in the literary theories of Hodge and Mishra in Dark Side of the Dream and explored in this exegesis. Contributing to this character portrayal is the influence of western Sydney itself, a place in which the incoherencies of the colonial past are intensified by its literary and cultural distance from the metropolitan centre. Another dimension of the narrator's character is his writing style and particular way of seeing things, which is a consequence of his reading life. Luke Francis Carman's explicit literary influences are largely American writers - Kerouac, Ginsberg, Whitman and Hemingway. These white male writers offer the narrator an idealised, bold, unabashed openness to the possibilities of a subjectivity that can incorporate even the mortification of shame - an affect which Luke feels is ever present in his own self-consciousness, and in his attempts at interacting with those around him. The exegetical component of this thesis argues that if Bob Hodge and Vijay Mishra were correct when they proposed that Australian culture should be seen as a schizophrenic psyche of repressed and explicit silences constructed against the guilt and rootlessness of colonial illegitimacy, then the writer Brendan Cowell is both the predictable and necessary result. Representing the cowed, tamed, domesticated, artistic counterpart of the 'Aussie' Australian - white, terse, vulgar, masculine, sexually potent - the figure of Cowell is a confessional one, offering pseudo-privileged access to the operations of shame and shamelessness in the mythical 'Aussie' male. The exegesis explores this complex in Cowell's work - with particular emphasis on his 2010 novel How It Feels - through the lens of shame as developed by affect studies and postcolonial theory, to argue that Hodge and Mishra's analysis still applies to a culture that has changed considerably since the publication of Dark Side of the Dream, and to offer a more nuanced understanding of the white male Australian subject as he stands in this young and uncertain century.

Date of Award	2016
Original language	English