- Title
- Time will tell a different story: Marion Mahony Griffin: the reconstitution of a reputation over time
- Creator
- Wells, Judy
- Relation
- University of Newcastle Research Higher Degree Thesis
- Resource Type
- thesis
- Date
- 2003
- Description
- Research Doctorate - Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)
- Description
- This thesis has explored a process of meaning-making to demonstrate the stages and contingencies of a highly textured discursive process to show how, and why, in the construction of a reputation, time will tell a different story. Over the past few decades, in Australia and the United States, Marion Mahony Griffin's reputation has been reviewed, debated and reconstituted. This thesis has examined the changes in telling Marion's personal and professional story in Australia over most of the twentieth century. I have taken a different approach from others who have considered the construction of celebrity and who have used a focus on the role of the media, public relations and professional publicists in creating a reputation. Instead I have considered how a reputation is negotiated when values within a culture change to such a degree that what was viewed negatively at one time, can be celebrated at another, as meaning and the resulting re-evaluation of a reputation shifts and takes effect. However, since the 1970s when a vigorous critique of the gendered nature of all professional practice began to reveal the many important contributions made by women in a range of professional fields, a qualitatively different kind of interest in Marion began to gather pace. Since that time Marion's professional and personal reputation has been steadily reconstituted because, as I have argued, the fragments of information that were in circulation began to coalesce within different discursive frames and thus began to attract the attention of a new and diverse audience which questioned the 'interested' nature of what was contained in the public record. in the late twentieth century, a widening range of voices began to ask the same questions that set me on the research for this thesis: "Why didn't we know about Marion?" New curiosity engaged a rich and diverse discursive enquiry from which new meanings could be shaped. But this along would not have produced the dramatic renegotiation of her reputation had Marion and her achievements not also tapped into important values and ideas circulating within the Australian culture by the end of the twentieth century. In this way Marion's story provides a useful case study that demonstrates how the discursive cogs of culture work and this thesis examines the role played by the contingent and generative effects of culture in the construction of a personal and professional reputation. The case of Marion Mahony Griffin offers insight into what I have called a "cascade of effects" which describes the preconditions, requirements and consequences as the reputation of a public figure is reconstituted.
- Subject
- Marion Mahony Griffin; architecture; architectural drawing; Prairie School
- Identifier
- http://hdl.handle.net/1959.13/1321588
- Identifier
- uon:24404
- Rights
- Copyright 2003 Judy Wells
- Language
- eng
- Hits: 1114
- Visitors: 1041
- Downloads: 0