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Abstract
This thesis comprises two components. The Quiet Noise is a historical novel
set in post-WWII Sydney. It draws upon a 1946 unsolved murder of a young
girl and the accompanying local legend to stage an imaginative recuperation
of the dead and their impact on the living by working from archive and
diminishing living memory for historical verisimilitude. The story follows a
community of outsiders embroiled in sly grog and sex catering to thousands
of returned servicemen displaced in the mercurial city recovering from war.
Whilst violence, speculation, and vendetta frame the narrative, through the
arc of the adolescent character Templeton Luckett, the novel is also a
bildungsroman of queer desire which attempts to speak to the lacuna of queer
Australian historical fiction through an affective engagement with occluded
histories.
The dissertation, Quicken, Shine, Fold: Jouissance Émue and the Erotics of
Reading Queerly , contends that the emotional dimension of jouissance -
jouissance émue - provides a new way of considering the affective encounter
with the text that intervenes in contemporary debates about queer
relationality. It argues that by dislodging jouissance from its phallic model, a
dialogue on erotics outside of a heteronormative paradigm can be
reinvigorated. Jouissance émue provides an opening into intransigent debates
on queer sociality and a potential line of flight from a paranoid reading
position. The first chapter charts Jane Gallop s Precocious Jouissance essay
and takes her findings on émue to a rereading of Roland Barthes s own
jouissance and an inquiry into the place of the phallus in economies of
pleasure. The second chapter examines the antisocial thesis of queer theory
and the possibility of a relational jouissance involving connection rather than
self-shattering. It explores the queer relationships with negativity, abjection,
and the death drive, and asserts the possibility of feeling, through the text, the
uncanny erotic presence of the dead author, posing the aesthetic concept of
duende as an analogue. The final chapter situates an erotics of reading within
the greater affective turn in literary studies and braids the lesbian-feminist
erotic tradition into understandings of future possibilities for reading queerly.