Date of Award
2005
Document Type
Thesis - ECU Access Only
Publisher
Edith Cowan University
Degree Name
Bachelor of Arts Honours
School
School of International, Cultural and Community Studies
Faculty
Faculty of Community Services, Education and Social Sciences
Abstract
The desperate hours is a long poem consisting of forty-eight sections of thirty lines each which produces itself out of an experimental poetics affirming risk and humour as inseparable from immanent principles of composition. The work is like a performance of thought as it is moved by sensation, a becoming of pre-personal affective states which expand and connect in unpredictable ways. It is about the pleasures of reading, writing and art, and the desperation in discovering that these can guarantee us nothing. At stake in The desperate hours is an essay in which a philosophical and artistic framework is discussed in relation to the poem, offering a view of creative processes as bound up in the problematics and tasks of an immanent ethics. The essay attempts to show how a work like The desperate hours can be experienced as engaging and affecting, at the same time as it embodies a new kind of freedom in which the unknown eludes reduction to or recuperation in the known.
Recommended Citation
Hallsworth, C. (2005). The Desperate Hours ; and, At Stake in The Desperate Hours. Edith Cowan University. https://ro.ecu.edu.au/theses_hons/1277