Abstracts Language, Literature, and Linguistic

‘Re-defining yourself in some other terms’: Reading/Weaving Self, Space and Art in the Oeuvre of Antigone Kefala

by Penelope Stavrou

This thesis provides the first comprehensive study of one of Australia’s most significant and innovative writers, Antigone Kefala. Arriving in Sydney in 1959, Kefala's writing from the subsequent decades is highly significant in both artistic and cultural terms as she hones her ability to write as both an Australian living at home and a displaced migrant of the European diaspora. In this way, her work reflects the duality of walking ‘by the roadside’ of national interiors whilst having to ‘re-define’ herself according to new languages and worlds. In this thesis, Kefala’s duality is explored in relation to her artistic practice and, specifically, the ways in which she presents ‘self’ and ‘world’ within a framework of negation and perpetual revision, or redefinition. In the existing scholarship, Kefala's cycle of negation, repetition and redefinition has only been partially explored across a handful of texts or poems at a time. Conversely, this thesis traverses Kefala's complete prose oeuvre—often detouring to the poems as well—to map these ambiguities as defining features of her innovative style and textual ‘redefinition’ by the ‘roadside.’ Specifically, the thesis deploys a methodology of intertextual analysis that weaves together psychoanalytic, modernist and feminist literary theories into a single, multilayered approach, modelled after the double-weave tapestry and duality of The Odyssey’s Penelope. In particular, just as Penelopean duality un-weaves textile in order to make narrative time (as faithful wife and wily trickster) so too Kefala’s is shown to produce two textual dimensions—the horizontal weft and vertical warp—that each reflects the contradictory ‘weavings’ of fiction/biography, the psychoanalytic functions of condensation/displacement, and the linguistic operations of metonymy/metaphor. The thesis locates points of self-referential ‘citation’ between texts that emerge from different axes of the tapestry, arguing that they coordinate Kefala’s ‘re-definition’ along a third, ‘binding’ weft that interweaves both axes. From here, it is argued that Kefala’s weavings model a modernist and Penelopean process of presenting and (re)presenting the artist’s lived experience in a way that blurs fact and fiction, such that life itself becomes an artistic act. From this perspective, Kefala’s artistic practice reflects a baseless, plural, and foreign interiority that is also quintessentially Australian in its discovery of a home that is several homes and ‘origins’ at once.