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Item Open Access Goth Rhizomes: Queer Differences in Minor Gothic Literature(2014-07-09) Holmes, Trevor Michael; Michasiw, Kim IanThis project identifies three minor authors in three historical periods, applying deconstructive and queer theory to their writings and to their biographies. The resulting analysis traces gothic effects through other, more familiar texts and figures in order to bring about re-readings that disrupt certain monolithic understandings of literary and sexual identity over time. With a focus on gender transitivity and sexual dissidence, and the insights afforded by queer readings in which queer is framed as a verb, the analysis opens up ways of reading genre through the experimental theories of Deleuze and Guattari. Going beyond identifying major and minor gothic literature, I propose that we understand the literary gothic as a writing machine that produces goth-identified subjects. Tracing concepts like Minor Literature, Rhizome, Becoming-other, the Refrain, and the Body without Organs through fictional and life narratives from Charlotte Dacre, Percy Shelley, Count Eric Stenbock, and Poppy Z. Brite (Billy Martin), I suggest ways in which my reading of minor figures and their works has implications for how we might re-read works by major authors Jane Austen (Northanger Abbey) and Henry James (“The Jolly Corner”), and works by popular author Anne Rice (with a particular focus on the character Lestat and the later novel Tale of the Body Thief). Similar to the Foucauldian notion of the subject as simultaneously an effect of and a producer of discourse, the turn to Deleuze and Guattari requires a more explicit addressing of agency on the part of authors and readers. A micropolitics of the self through prose narrative is derived, as against a grand narrative of influence, filiation, and static sexual definition.Item Open Access Murder! But How Foul? Determination, Existentialism and Rationalization in Twentieth-Century American Novels with Transgressive Protagonists(2014-07-28) Dale, John Frederick; Redding, Arthur F.Humans tend to blunt the horror of transgressive violence by "containing" it in a potentially explicatory system. This thesis investigates whether a range of transgressive protagonists from canonical twentieth-century American novels are "contained" in this way by reference to philosophical or sociological systems powerful at the time of writing, and further whether the systems involved track the roughly mid-century switch of emphasis from determinism to philosophies valorizing individual autonomy (such as existentialism). These propositions were found to be broadly justified, but there were significant nuances. For example, Humbert Humbert, the protagonist of Vladimir Nabokov's Lolita, at first rejoices in his autonomy from normative ethical standards, but comes to realize that such autonomy can exist only as long as he confines himself to the world of the imagination. On the other hand, Clyde Griffiths, the socially and economically determined protagonist of Theodore Dreiser's American Tragedy, achieves a kind of proto-existential isolation in his quest for an understanding of his "criminal" responsibility. Richard Wright, from mid-century, created both determinist and existential transgressive protagonists, but his work is most obviously characterized by a third element--a half-unexplained volcanic rage. In many of the novels examined it was found that horror at the crime of the transgressive protagonist was further derailed by narratological ploys, including the manipulation of the reader's engagement with, or sympathy for, the protagonist--sometimes by the use of humour. Other cross-currents were apparent; the achievement of self-transcendence in some of the protagonists (e.g. Humbert Humbert and Clyde Griffiths), and the foregrounding of performativity in others (e.g. Tom Ripley in Patricia Highsmith's Ripleiad). Most remarkably, all of the novels investigated demonstrate a tacit belief in the need to recuperate the protagonist, who is not only a transgressor, but also a humanist subject who is intrinsically of at least potential value. There is an almost unquestioned impulse to somehow address the protagonist's fall from grace. It is further clear that this concern disappears from "anti-humanist" novels featuring transgressive protagonists from the end of the century, such as Bret Easton Ellis's American Psycho.Item Open Access Conventions Were Outraged: Country, House, Fiction(2015-01-26) Ames, Kristen Kelly; Higgins, Lesley J.The dissertation traces intersections among subjectivity, gender, desire, and nation in English country house novels from 1921 to 1949. Inter-war and wartime fiction by Daphne du Maurier, Virginia Woolf, Nancy Mitford, P. G. Wodehouse, Elizabeth Bowen, and Evelyn Waugh performs and critiques conventional domestic ideals and, by extension, interrupts the discourses of power that underpin militaristic political certainties. I consider country house novels to be campy endorsements of the English home, in which characters can reimagine, but not escape, their roles within mythologized domestic and national spaces. The Introduction correlates theoretical critiques of nationalism, class, and gender to illuminate continuities among the naïve patriotism of the country house novel and its ironic figurations of rigid class and gender categories. Chapter 1 provides generic and critical contexts through a study of du Maurier’s Rebecca, in which the narrator’s subversion of social hierarchies relies upon the persistence, however ironic, of patriarchal nationalism. That queer desire is the necessary center around which oppressive norms operate only partially mitigates their force. Chapter 2 examines figures of absence in “A Haunted House,” To the Lighthouse, and Orlando. Woolf’s queering of the country house novel relies upon her Gothic figuration of Englishness, in which characters are only included within nationalist spaces by virtue of their exclusion. In Chapter 3, continuities between Orlando and Between the Acts test Woolf’s call to “indifference” to war in Three Guineas. The country house reifies the nostalgic crisis of Woolf’s feminist pacifism: political agency must occupy the borderland between nostalgic idealism and cynical self-abnegation. Chapter 4 examines popular country house novels by Wodehouse, Mitford, Bowen, and Waugh that explicitly engage, with various degrees of seriousness, with political conflicts of the 1930s and ’40s. Exposing disavowed affinities among the country house ethos, English patriotism, and fascist nostalgia provides opportunities to negotiate, if not resolve, ethical quandaries of wartime neutrality, irony, and indifference. By forcing readers to confront their own circumscription by nationalist and gendered expectations, these country house novels ultimately foreclose the possibility of escaping them – but they also demand readers’ renewed commitment to figures of difference and narratives of failure.Item Open Access Experiments in Decentralization: Suburban Spaces in the Writings of Early Twentieth-Century British Female Novelists(2015-01-26) Pikula, Tanya; Higgins, Lesley J.My dissertation examines how Virginia Woolf, Dorothy Richardson, Vita Sackville-West, and Elizabeth Bowen utilize imagery of suburbia to formulate critiques of patriarchal gender norms. As lower-middle and working-class families relocated to suburbia in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, they colonized a way of life that was specific to the affluent bourgeoisie. That such shifts in urban geography and demographics threatened the bourgeois identity is perhaps best observed through an analysis of the literary texts of the period, which featured suburbs as Gothic spaces of otherness, or as feminized lands of monotonous domesticity. John Carey and Andreas Huyssen argue that various male modernists’ artistic projects were partly a reaction to the perceived femininity and vulgarity of mass culture, which was repeatedly associated with suburban spaces. My project explores the relationship between these misogynistic discursive practices and the innovative representations of urban decentralization in the writings of the British female authors. My first chapter concerns a largely ignored fin-de-siècle literary interest in suburban masculinity, especially in detective Gothic stories by Arthur Conan Doyle and Arthur Machen. My other three chapters, which focus, respectively, on the works of Richardson and Woolf, Sackville-West, and Bowen, show how these authors subvert negative stereotypes of suburbia and traditional concepts of subjectivity and gender by portraying specific suburban spaces or the phenomenon of suburban growth as occasioning opportunities for women’s development of self-empowering personal privacy. While Michel Foucault’s ideas of the governmental management of space and deployment of sexuality enable me to study the links between suburban growth and gender, I also utilize Mikhail Bakhtin’s notion of the chronotope or literary space-time; Henri Lefebvre’s differentiation between multiple modes of spatiality; Foucault’s idea of heterotopia; and Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari’s concepts of “smooth” and “striated” spaces and “becomings” to identify various degrees and combinations of destabilizing and rigidifying energies that exist in selected literary representations of suburbia. My project emphasizes the subversive energies galvanized by urban decentralization; analyzes the mutually productive relationship among spaces, gendered bodies, and class identities; and extracts a range of semantic possibilities from the history of suburbia.Item Open Access (Generic Pronoun) Creates: Anarchism, Authorship, Experiment(2015-08-28) Spinosa, Danielle Marie; Weaver, AndrewMy work develops a postanarchist literary theory that repositions the reading and writing of experimental texts as activist practice. Following the most recent trends in anarchist theory and political philosophy, postanarchist literary theory merges the primary concerns of classical anarchism with shifts in the conceptions of power and the State born out of poststructuralism. Focusing specifically on the ways that the experimental text complicates the traditional relationship between author and reader, my project emphasizes how these experimental texts make manifest the role of language in a radical conception of the common. The concept of language as a part of the common is one shared, implicitly, by all the poets in my project, in some form or another, and to account for both the aesthetic and political anarchism of their experimental approach to authorship and readership, my dissertation takes on an experimental form. As both an insurrectionary tactic and a means of navigating the potential limitations of a more traditional dissertation form, my project was first produced as a series of short single-author chapters linked through hypertext, and these were distributed via an open-access blog that invited reader contribution. My project sees a theory of alternative and experimentation in action in experimental poetic texts that are concerned with an anarchist activist practice on the level of the disruption of the author-function. We can see the intersection of postanarchism and poetry in the way John Cage reappropriates source texts in “62 Mesostics re Merce Cunningham” (1973), or the way Jackson Mac Low writes to and rewrites Gertrude Stein in The Stein Poems (2003). This intersection is represented differently in Denise Levertov’s call for reader responsibility in The Jacob’s Ladder (1961), or in Robert Duncan’s call for reader community in his Passages sequence (in Bending the Bow [1968] and Ground Work [1984,1987]). It becomes radically feminist in the experiments with authorship seen in the revisionist appropriations of Susan Howe (Eikon Basilike, 1993), the indeterminacy of Erin Mouré (Pillage Laud, 1999), the racialized Language work of Harryette Mullen (Sleeping with the Dictionary, 2002), and communal politics of Juliana Spahr (Response, 2000).Item Open Access The Twenty-Frist Century Pantagruel: The Function of Grotesque Aesthetics in the Contemporary World(2015-08-28) Protic, Nemanja; Boon, Marcus B.This dissertation examines whether the grotesque, an aesthetic form associated with the carnivalesque literary mode and commonly seen as aesthetically and politically subversive, can resume its function within the contemporary context in which carnivalisation of everyday life is a frequently noted aspect of capitalist culture. Locating as its primary image the human body in the process of often-violent deformation, this study explores this problem by theorising the grotesque as Janus-faced: existing on the boundary between the Symbolic and the Real. As such, I argue that the grotesque is: a) deeply related to cultural attempts to challenge hegemonic structures, even as these challenges become themselves implicated in the power structures they oppose (Chapters 1, 2, and 3); and b) a concept that reveals the realm of the Real as independent of human consciousness while also being of profound interest for this consciousness and the subjectivity which it underpins (Chapters 3 and 4). In outlining this argument, this study deploys the theories of Gilles Deleuze, Slavoj Žižek, and Alain Badiou, as well as the work of Jacques Rancière, Henri Lefebvre, Thomas Metzinger, Catherine Malabou, Quentin Meillassoux, and Ray Brassier. It, furthermore, works its way backwards from the Anglo-American cultural scene of the late 1990s and early 2000s (Sarah Kane’s Cleansed and Quentin Tarantino’s Inglourious Basterds), through elaborations of punk anti-Thatcherite London(s) of the late 1970s/early 1980s (Peter Ackroyd’s Hawksmoor, Alan Moore and Eddie Campbell’s From Hell, and Iain Sinclair White Chappell, Scarlet Tracings), to post-1968 attempts to reinvigorate a progressive vision of the USA and write it (back) into existence through Gonzo autobiography and journalism (Oscar Zeta Acosta’s The Revolt of the Cockroach People and The Autobiography of a Brown Buffalo, and Hunter S. Thompson’s Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas). In this way, the argument of this work tries to find a path – through a deformed human body in works of literature, film, and comics – toward a non-human world that can be deployed in the service of a progressive political vision, even while the autonomy of this non-human world is recognised.Item Open Access Interconnections and Uneasy Alliances Between the Black and South Asian Diasporas: A Study of Hip Hop Videos, Film and Literature(2015-08-28) Gandhi, Visha; Mukherjee, Arun P.This dissertation challenges the belief that racialized communities do immediately support and identify with each other; my research on the Black and South Asian diasporas unearths the Orientalist thoughts and anti-Black racisms that exist in each respective community. Using the work of Edward Said in his text, Orientalism, and research on racial triangulation by Asian Americanist Claire Jean Kim, my work attempts to clarify the often-conflicted relations and dynamics between South Asians, Blacks, and whites. Chapter two of this dissertation looks at romantic and sexual involvement between different racial communities; I specifically look at the films Mississippi Masala and Bhaji on the Beach to delve into the cultural rarity that is the Black-South Asian romance. Chapter three discusses Black Orientalism in American hip hop videos by such artists as Truth Hurts, and Timbaland and Magoo. Finally, chapter four looks at gendered dynamics and longings for blackness in the texts Consensual Genocide, by Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha, and Londonstani, by Gautam Malkani.Item Open Access Parched: The Queer Alcoholic on the Modern American Stage, 1940-1970(2015-12-16) McQuinn, Thomas William Bryce; Gobert, R. Darren"Parched" mines the rich correlation between queerness and alcoholism on the modern American stage. It explores the peculiar seductions of the queer alcoholic via readings of six plays from American dramatic literature: Eugene O’Neill’s "The Iceman Cometh" (1946) and "Long Day’s Journey Into Night" (composed 1941-42; premiered 1956); Tennessee Williams’s "A Streetcar Named Desire" (1947) and "Cat on a Hot Tin Roof" (1955); Edward Albee’s "Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?" (1962); and Mart Crowley’s "The Boys in the Band" (1968). I argue that the construction and medicalization of alcoholism in early twentieth-century American ran parallel to that of “sex perversions” (e.g. male homosexuality, lesbianism, transvestitism, transgender sexuality, voyeurism, and sadomasochism). Unsurprisingly, both excessive drinking and queer sexual conduct came to be similarly pathologized as compulsive behaviours that caused both bodily and psychic disintegration. "Parched" analyzes how American playwrights have linked the inherent performativity of queerness and alcoholism, while representing the contagious dissipation that such performances have been feared to cause. My readings of specific celebrated productions of my primary texts—alongside reviewer responses to them—demonstrate that historically spectators have been enticed into a fascination with the figure via a process I deem "dis/identification." Audience members must simultaneously identify with, and dis-identify against, the queer alcoholic. The dissertation therefore builds upon and enriches the complex histories and theories of addiction and deviance—indispensable work in an era marked by what Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick has deemed the binary of compulsion/voluntarity. Over a period of thirty years audiences came to ceaselessly thirst for these queer depictions, and mainstream theatre provided a suitable cover. This obsessive “drinking in” of the figure resulted in these texts becoming canonized in American theatre. Cyclical intoxication and queer sexual practices have been a constant throughout the history of dramatic literature (see, for example, the analysis of Euripides’s "The Bacchae" [405 BCE] in the dissertation’s epilogue), and shifting models of behaviours deemed “excessive” continue to affect their theatrical representations in a reciprocal relation.Item Open Access A Noble Mansion for All?: The Production of Difference in Selected Works By Mahesh Dattani and R. Raj Rao(2016-09-20) Hazra, Anindo; Mukherjee, Arun P.This dissertation reads selected works of two queer Indian writers, Mahesh Dattani and R. Raj Rao, as sites of the production of difference in contemporary, fin-de-millnaire India. The literary analysis in this project tracks the particular texture of the selected primary texts. It follows the particular weave of what stories are being told, and how they are being told, which creates unique patterns of difference, providing the means for critical readings of diversity and difference in contemporary India. Close readings of the primary texts reveal artful, significant interventions in two intersecting discursive fields: namely, nationalism and sexualities. Moreover, the art-work of the texts reveals how the idea of India as a model of unity-in-diversity is by no means politically or ideologically neutral; specifically, the texts show how it is conceptually inadequate for understanding, let alone accommodating, any radical approaches to difference, especially the kind manifested in queerness. While the ramifications of Indian national identity animate one line of enquiry, those of dissident sexualities and gender energize the other, drawing into both lines region-specific questions and enquiries into identity- and subject-formation at large. The queer India crystallizing in the works of Dattani and Rao comes to signal a heterogeneity, complicating stabilized notions of identity (the self-same) and difference (extraneous other/s), all the while interrogating the ground on which that same term rests. Both writers works defer stable assumptions of what it means to be queer and what it means to be Indian. This project examines these forms of deferral as productions of differences in which the irreducibility of, but also radical unsettled interconnections between, difference is theorized.Item Open Access The Holographic Self: Self-Representation and Logics of Digitality in Three Contemporary Narratives of Cosmopolitanism(2016-09-20) Alang, Navneet; Loebel, Thomas L.This dissertation is an examination of the holographic self in three contemporary novels of cosmopolitanism. The holographic self is a concept I present which expands upon the cyborg to suggest foreground a self that operates in relation to a holograma public-facing digital self-representationor operates in the logic of such. In this project, I deploy two models of the holographic self: one in which the hologram functions as an interface for fantasy to move toward an actualization of an ego-ideal; and another in which the amalgam of holograms or instantiations of self form a rhizomatic or constellational arrangement of subjectivity in which movement itself is prioritized. In each of the focal novelsGautam Malkani's Londonstani; Hari Kunzru's Transmission; Teju Cole's Open Citythe protagonist functions as a holographic self in a manner that expresses a desire for a post-positionality subjectivity, where traditional notions of bodily or singular identity itself are exceeded. In chapter one I argue that in Londonstani, protagonist Jas seeks to produce a culturally hybrid self in which the virtual is used as a tool of self-actualization, as it ultimately prioritizes the bodily self reconfigured by its holographic dimensions. I compare the novel to Wilde's Portrait of Dorian Gray to suggest that text has no similarly phenomenal ground for an outsourced self. In chapter two, I assert that in Transmission, Arjun also operates in relation to a hologram of self, but the text's desire for Arjun to exceed identity itself expresses a yearning for a non-bodily notion of selfhood that seeks to escape the policing of identity. I compare the novel to Bront's Jane Eyre to argue that Jane's trajectory functions to manifest a set of inescapable material socio-ideological constraints that demand a particular conclusion. In chapter three, I examine William Gibson's Pattern Recognition and its explosion of taxonomy and signification in relation to digitality, and then argue that Open City manifests such ideas through a holographic self that desires escape from not just identity but consequence. I conclude by suggesting a potential harmony between the concept of the holographic self, digitality, and narratives of cosmopolitanism.Item Open Access Counterpublic Histories, Radical Queer Negativity, and Creaturely Life: Exploring a Literary Archive of Queer Spaces in New York City(2016-09-20) Guenther, Faye Chisholm; Boon, Marcus BMy dissertation is a comparative study of David Wojnarowiczs Close to the Knives: A Memoir of Disintegration (1991), Samuel R. Delanys Times Square Red, Times Square Blue (1999), and Eileen Myless Inferno (A Poets Novel) (2010). I conceive of the memoirs as a literary archive of queer spaces situated in New York City in the last quarter of the 20th century. Crucially, the memoirs recall queer spaces as sites of counterpublic experience. The guiding questions for my dissertation are: how does this literary archive function, how are the different queer spaces represented, and why is this archive significant. The queer spaces described in the memoirs include physical environments, relational practices, and queer imaginaries. The memoirs bear witness to the ways that the AIDS epidemic dismantled queer spaces. They also document the destructive impact of gentrification as a material and social process. In doing so they address how contemporary queer culture in North America is shaped by the losses of queer spaces. Wojnarowicz, Delany, and Myles use personal narratives to convey the ways struggles over visibility and freedom register on their bodies and resonate in their emotional and intellectual experiences. They explore the meaning of queer spaces in terms of the material nature of historyhow history moves within the body and through spatial relations. I theorize the materialization of history in the memoirs as expressions of creaturely life and radical queer negativity. These modes of expression primarily emerge from the memoirs central thematic concerns of freedom and visibility in relation to queer spaces. In conveying the materialization of queer history within the body and through spatial relations, the three authors become pivoting subjects. They bear witness to their own counterpublic experiences in queer spaces in order to consider the possibilities of liberated queer futures.Item Open Access Insinuated Bodies, Corporeal Resignification and Disembodied Desire in Novels by Jeanette Winterson(2016-09-20) Kivinen, Hannele; Goldie, TerryMy dissertation examines the various ways in which the following novels written by Jeanette Winterson Written on the Body (1992), Gut Symmetries (1997), The.PowerBook (2000), and The Stone Gods (2007) interrogate and denaturalize preexisting power structures by disentangling the body from the discursively inscribed identity categories of gender and sex. Dominant conceptions concerning desire, commonly thought to be an innate byproduct of a wholly natural body, are likewise disrupted in the unraveling of gender and sex from corporeality. Desire is thus opened up to possibilities that exist beyond the limited purview of gendered, heterosexist ideologies. Much like the field of queer theory, this dissertation draws together different branches of knowledge poststructuralism and resignification, psychoanalysis, nomadism, posthumanism, cyborg narratives in order to closely analyze what Wintersons works do to bodies, to language, to gender, to sexuality. The novels studied here offer a way of re-insinuating bodies to desire in ways that are much more inclusive and much less prohibitive. Although my consideration of these novels critically engages with many theorists throughout, there are four key thinkers that helped to shape each chapter: Judith Butler, Elizabeth Grosz, Katherine N. Hayles and Donna Haraway. My first chapter examines the parallels between Butlers theory of the sex/gender/desire matrix and Written on the Body, assessing the novels twofold operation of resignification: the body is first extricated from its naturalization before becoming reformulated in ways that move outside of the framework of the current grand narratives on desire. My second chapter surveys the relationship between Grosz and the Deleuzian Bodies without Organs (BwOs) in Gut Symmetries, while my third chapter explores Hayless version of posthumanism alongside Haraways figure of the cyborg, in relation to The.PowerBook and The Stone Gods, respectively. These novels widen the cracks in the signifying system, shifting conceptions of materiality and desire elsewhere. If we are to acknowledge that desire does indeed come from outside rather than from within the subject, then sexuality can be dissociated from the subjects body subsequently endangering genders impact on how we conceive of our desire.Item Open Access Word-Things: Haptic Semiology in Contemporary Writing and Thought(2016-11-25) Braune, Sean Micheal Rudi M.; Boon, Marcus B.In the service of reconceptualizing twentieth-century philosophies of language (after recent developments in continental philosophy), this dissertation introduces a theoretical tool: the word-thing. The word-thing constitutes a reconfiguration of the sign through a dual operation: on the one hand, a word-thing conceives of the thinghood of words and, on the other hand, a word-thing encapsulates the linguistic entification of the Kantian thing-in-itself. Ever since Kant, the question of the relationality between word and object has been framed by post-German Idealism in which apparent phenomena stand in stark contrast to their noumenal basis (or the thing-in-itself), and twentieth-century philosophies of language have been largely a struggle to think words and language within Kantian categories. By contrast, Word-Things posits an inherent embodiment of the word and an innate linguistic and haptic quality to things. Drawing on work in speculative realism, object-oriented ontology, and non-philosophy, Word-Things advances a new theoretical approach to language called haptic semiology. Word-Things theorizes the relation of word and object as a form of touch, distinct from anthropocentric hapticity, in which the signifier presses against the referent, reformulating the substance of the sign itself. The dissertation considers the following issues: 1) an ontology of language, 2) the reconfigured relation of word and thing as being based on touch, and 3) an understanding of touch that is situated through a non-corporeal definition of flesh (combining the phenomenology of Maurice Merleau-Ponty with the work of Jean-Luc Nancy). Rather than offering one, delimiting definition of a word-thing, I offer a taxonomy of possible (re)definitions of the word/object relation. Each chapter may be thought of as a case study examining a different hypothesis of the word/object dyad. Chapter One inverts the relationship of signifier and referent by postulating the sign as being referent-based rather than signifier-based. The second chapter considers the possibility of flattening the word/object relation within a flat ontology in order to read the avant-garde poetries of Francis Ponge, conceptual writing, L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poetry, Mark Laliberte, Natalie Czech, and Jaz Parkinson. Chapter Three expands on the flat ontological thesis while situating the world/object relation as an actor-network and also as a fractal; this argument is advanced through readings of the fiction of William S. Burroughs, Tony Burgess, Franz Kafka, and Alain Robbe-Grillet. In the fourth chapter, the word/object relation is considered both as a fuzzy monism and also as a fleshy fold; put differently, the slash that separates word and object is considered as a fleshy, combinant space. The chapter uncovers permutations of this fleshy fold in James Joyces love letters and the provocative fiction of Urs Allemann. Chapter Five further extends this flesh hypothesis to include the embodiment that occurs during theatrical performance (as seen in the plays of Caryl Churchill), within Hlne Cixouss theorization of *criture fminine*, and in the idiosyncratic poetics of Hannah Weiner. The final, concluding chapter asks a non-intuitive question: if words can be conceived as material objects, then how precisely can this materiality be understood? My response locates a word-things materiality within the Theory of Objects offered by Alexius Meinong alongside Martin Heideggers work on the thing, which theorizes essence on the basis of a structural void that holds objects. Heideggers own thinking is strongly informed by East Asian philosophy, so, by linking Meinong with Heidegger, I then conclude by looking at the Shinto theory of kotodama (or the spirit of the word). Therefore, the presence or essence of a word-thing depicts a paradox: the ontological ground of a word-thing is nothingness. However, this nothingness or void is a productive nothingness that permits the emergence of both linguistic meaning and non-meaning.Item Open Access Her Constellated Mind: Jay Macpherson's Modernism and the Canadian Mythopoeic Turn(2017-07-26) Dalgleish, Melissa Anne; Cho, LilyMythopoeic versewhich relies on biblical and Classical myth, and often works to create moments of heightened apocalyptic vision and revelationwas the dominant poetic mode in Canada from the late 1940s well into the 1960s, although its recognition as such is increasingly rare. The work of poet and scholar Jay Macpherson, who was once understood to be a driving force behind the mythopoeic turn, is likewise largely neglected, despite her 1957 collection The Boatman having long been recognized as the defining work of midcentury poetics in Canada. Given its rise alongside the work of archetypal theorist Northrop Frye, Canadian mythopoeic modernist verse is often falsely characterized as the work of the Frye School, but its true origins remain little understood. Given Macphersons long personal and professional relationship with Frye, understanding the highly individual development of her poetic career and distinctive brand of mythic poetics serves as a compelling case study of the varied personal, social, and historical factors leading to the establishment of a midcentury mythopoeic culture of letters in Canada. Employing a microhistorical method, which focuses closely on a single person at the margins of major trends or events in order to better understand those trends and events, and reframing literary influence as the creation of an identifiable culture of letters by likeminded writers, this dissertation traces the development of Jay Macphersons modernist mythopoetics over the first twenty or so years of her career. What it reveals is that Macphersons mythopoeic modernism, in its deployment of myth and archetype to create connections across national, temporal, and communicative barriers, emerged out of the ashes of the Second World War and the failed search for integritas that silenced the poets of the Montreal forties. From her earliest years, Macpherson sought out and supported other speakers of her mythic poetic language from across Canada and in Europe, and with them created an identifiable culture of letters of those who likewise believed in the communicative power of archetypal stories and in the transformative power of artistic vision. In doing so, this dissertation resituates Macpherson as a driving force behind the mythopoeic turn, places Frye within but not as the originator of this culture of letters, and invites a further exploration of the relationship between literary community, post-war culture, and poetic praxis in Canada at midcentury.Item Open Access Reading the Superhuman, Embodiments of Multiplicity in Marvel Comics(2017-07-27) Peppard, Anna Florence; Redding, ArtThe goal of this project is to identify, analyze and historicize the operation of embodied multiplicities within superhero comics from the postwar era using the example of comics produced by the Marvel group between 1961 and 2005. This project argues that the superheroes created during this era reflect major social and cultural upheavals that continue to reshape the postwar era; this includes the dawn of the Atomic Age as well as the rise of the Civil Rights movement, second-wave feminism, the sexual revolution, and liberal multiculturalism. This project furthermore argues that superhero comics are especially useful vehicles for exploring both the practice of polysemy in popular texts as well as the ongoing evolution of popular bodily desires and fantasies within postwar American society and culture. Reading superhero comics as a body genre, this project offers a formally and visually driven analysis focusing on evolving representations of gender, race, sexuality, and disability, and the fantasies and anxieties those representations reflect, resist, and negotiate. Ultimately, this project argues that superhero comics embodied multiplicities offer especially rich opportunities for subverting hegemonic narratives that would devalue the meaning of bodily expression and the diversity of bodily experience. It also argues, however, that superhero comics possess especially sophisticated tools for negating such subversion, routinely mobilizing seeming resistances to hegemonic narratives in ways that in fact reassert those narratives in new, bright costumes and fantastical metaphors.Item Open Access Poetry and the Canadian Public Sphere: The Public Intellectual Engagement of Pauline Johnson, Dorothy Livesay, and Dionne Brand(2017-07-27) Lancit, Shauna Yael; Early, Leonard R.This dissertation examines the roles of Pauline Johnson, Dorothy Livesay, and Dionne Brand in the evolution of the public sphere in Canada, arguing that each of these writers has functioned as what we now call a public intellectual. Taking their careers as exemplary, I show that the Canadian context has been particularly conducive to the ability of women poets to fulfill this social function. In attending closely to the role of the public sphere in their poetry I offer a new lens through which to understand some of their significant poems. In situating these poets in their material and historical contexts I also offer an explanation of why Canadian women writers, and poets in particular, have been unexpectedly well situated to appear as public intellectuals. Beginning with a genealogy of the public intellectual, I show the significance of this figure in the Canadian context. I demonstrate that institutional responses to Canadas unique challenges in establishing and sustaining a public sphere have had wide-ranging effects on opportunities for artists and intellectuals to shape that sphere. These include the amplification of the voices of women poets relative to a purely market-based public sphere. I situate Johnson, Livesay, and Brand in their material and discursive contexts in order to make sense of the ways in which they figure the public sphere in their poetry, and the ways in which they use both their poetry and other forms of cultural production to encourage political and cultural change. Using an Arendtian view of the public, I argue that poetry has been an ideal site for building and maintaining a Canadian public sphere.Item Open Access "Only Connect"? Literary Interventions in a Time of Cruelty(2017-07-27) Borato, Meryl Leigh; Warwick, Susan J.My dissertation,Only Connect? Literary Interventions in a Time of Cruelty, investigates how fiction and drama of the early twenty-first century focus on the social problem of cruelty, mainly defined as ignorance of, indifference to, or weariness of the suffering caused by gross economic inequality. I contend that politically committed works of literature from the U.S., Britain, and Australia hone in on the suffering of others as the most urgent and widespread problem of our time, which can be summarized in bell hooks words as the fact of lovelessness in advanced capitalist societies. I read literary texts that delve into the political, aesthetic, and philosophical sides of this problem, including work by Caryl Churchill, Tony Kushner, Ian McEwan, Martin Crimp, Richard Flanagan, Pat Barker, Cormac McCarthy, J.M. Coetzee, and Karen Finley. My dissertation proposes that literature provides an affective realm wherein individuals can witness, discover, and reflect upon situations of others vastly different from their own, thereby allowing them to apply this understanding in real life and form more empathetic relationships in the world. My research brings together diverse voices in political science, theories of emotion, philosophy, and aesthetics and aims to provide a more capacious model of literary analysis beyond what Rita Felski has aptly called the limits of critique. As she reminds us, Works of art do not only subvert but also convert; they do not only inform but also transforma transformation that is not just a matter of intellectual readjustment but one of affective realignment as well. For this reason, I emphasize that my chosen literary texts and performances do not simply respond to but intervene in the problem of cruelty and help shape our experience of this lived reality. My research therefore participates in the interdisciplinary debate about how to justify literary scholarship to the wider academic community and proposes that the contemporary field, with its blending of genres and geographic reach, can lead the way.Item Open Access "A Sudden Inexplicable Onrush of Affectionate Feeling": Subjectivity Beyond Limit in Cather, Larsen, Fitzgerald, and Woolf(2017-07-27) Coodin, David; Warren, Jonathan A.A Sudden Inexplicable Onrush of Affectionate Feeling: Subjectivity Beyond Limit in Cather, Larsen, Fitzgerald, and Woolf explores reconceptualizations of subjectivity beyond the discursive limits of realism in Willa Cather, Nella Larsen, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and Virginia Woolf. Relying on Gilles Deleuzes concepts of virtuality and potential, this study examines disruptions to realist novels production of subjects: the self-centred Bildungsroman, the sexually normative marriage plot, and the reader that narrators call forth. From Henri Bergson to recent queer theory that links narrative linearity to narratives of social reproduction, these disruptions subvert conventional realist storytelling, a central function of modernist fiction. This dissertation reads eleven novels closely to find moments of queer potential, which often surface through characters encounters with same-sex desire. Chapter One considers Cathers O Pioneers!, My ntonia, and Death Comes for the Archbishop. The first two novels invent reading practices by staging nostalgia through ironic narrators. This tension gives way to transgressive sexuality in Deaths Latour and Vaillant, whose relationship valorizes impurity. Chapter Two examines Larsens Quicksand and Passing and the Harlem Renaissance debates about black representation. The novels ambivalence about black middle-class aspirations links bourgeois propriety to the conventions of realist fiction. Passings Clare Kendry fails as a mimetic sign, becoming a resource for the African-American novel and a site of non-identitarian blackness. Chapter Three considers queer productions of subjectivity in three Fitzgerald novels. In This Side of Paradise, same-sex desire interrupts Amory Blaines heteronormative self-actualization. Similarly, in The Great Gatsby, Nick Carraways silences conceal an affective register of desire. To apprehend this register, Tender Is the Night proposes an affective discernment in Dick Divers decline, a movement away from realist charactericity. Finally, Chapter Four argues that Woolfs Mrs. Dalloway, To the Lighthouse, and The Waves present a model of subjectivity based on shared desire rather than discursive identification. The first two novels move away from treating characters as psychologically coherent subjects. The Waves conceives of womanly reading as the capacity to hold multiple perspectives simultaneously, forming the basis for new forms of community. The political consequences of such ideas emerge in the Conclusion as a latent anti-fascism.Item Open Access Terra (In)cognita: The Practice of Place in Postwar Poetics and Beyond(2017-07-27) Siklosi, Catherine Mary Beth; Weaver, AndrewIn response to the spatial turn in critical and scientific discourses, this dissertation examines the reassertion of space and place in the work of Black Mountain poets Charles Olson and Robert Duncan, Black Mountain affiliate Amiri Baraka, and Tish writers Fred Wah and Daphne Marlatt. The critical reassertion of space in the postwar period produced poetries that rigorously explore the transgressive potential of the spatial subject and the spatial community in place. The most significant poetic counterpart to come about in response to the spatial turn in North America is Olsons and Duncans fundamental poetic theory of composition by field, wherein the poem is conceived of and created as a kinetic field of interacting elements. The field poetic influenced a New American open verse form that was highly influential in the United States in the 1960s and produced a new generation of projective poets in Canada thereafter. Primarily, this project traces the foundation and development of, and significant challenges to, the projective open field poetic as a means of producing place both on and off the page. As a mode of (re)producing locality, the field poetic gave Olson and Duncan a sense of poetrys reflection of, and participation in, the dynamic surrounding environment both within the poem and in the world. By means of projective verse, poem and poet became imbricated in a responsive system whereby the processes of the poem and those of the local environment are co-constructive, forming a dynamic hermeneutic of the place from which the poet writes. Composing poetry in this way extends beyond an aesthetic form to become, using Joan Retallacks term, a poethica practice of living and creating in place. The field model as established by Olson and Duncanand adapted and extended by Baraka, Wah, and Marlattthus links experimental poetic process with social awareness through a practice of place, a concept I adopt from Michel de Certeau and develop poetically in the project to mean the act of reading, writing, and producing place against structures of spatial control such as the nation, the multicultural agenda of the State, and patriarchy.Item Open Access Cursed Companions: The Literary Representation of Jews in the Medieval and Early Modern Periods in England(2018-03-01) Wise, Sherri Lynn; Williams, DeanneDespite their expulsion from England in 1290, Jews continue to figure prominently in English literature. This dissertation explores how Jews are imagined in absentia in English literature between the late medieval and early modern periods. Implicitly engaging with periodization, I study several literary texts on either side of the Reformation divide. I examine England's absent Jews through two medieval objects: the writing desk (scrinaria) and the casket (archa) as a means of locating the Jews simultaneously within the literary imagination and historical events. While the New Testament's increasing demonization of Judas entrenched notions of treachery and extended them to all Jews, the Gospels's many contradictions also enabled writers to deploy Jews creatively to explore a host of Christian anxieties. I propose a revisionist reading of Shakespeare's The Merchant of Venice by connecting the play's caskets and bonds to medieval history and the economic system of the archae. I then move backward in time to explore the original Christian representations of Jews in the Gospels, through the character of Judas, whose contradictory stories make him the first protean Jew. I analyze several of Judas's medieval incarnations: in the Legenda aurea, the Medieval Ballad of Judas and the Corpus Christi plays. I argue that while Judas was fiction created to harmonize the disparate biblical narratives, he becomes implicated in subsequent blood libels. Yet, at the same time, the figure is also used to explore more universal concepts such as subjectivity and free-will. The last section of this dissertation examines how Jews figure in three utopian texts. I begin with Thomas More's Utopia and then move to its literary descendant, Francis Bacon's New Atlantis. By focussing on how Jewish figures appear in these texts, I am able to look at change and continuity on either side of the Reformation divide. I argue that despite the widespread belief that the Jews had a role to play in the millennium, a fundamental ambivalence about actual Jews remains. I conclude with Milton's Of Reformation, arguing that this most political of poets exemplifies the radical and persistent ambivalence of Christian writers towards absent Jews.