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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.
Open Access
A Poetics of the Contemporary Black Canadian City: Charting the History of Black Urban Space in Fiction and Poetry by Black Canadian Writers
(2019-03-05) Ballantyne, Darcy Patrecia Ysuet; Sanders, Leslie
This study analyses literary depictions of the Canadian city in representative contemporary (twentieth- and twenty-first-century) English-Canadian short fiction and poetry by black Canadian writers Austin Clarke, Wayde Compton and Dionne Brand. Although their generic and aesthetic approaches as well as the specific historical contexts out of which they emerge vary considerably, the works in this study each exhibit what douard Glissant, in his eponymously titled book, calls a poetics of relation between the past and the present (42). Their work challenges our understanding of the contemporary city by drawing attention to and dismantling enduring hegemonic and homogeneous representations of the Canadian metropolis and by rearticulating the city through a black gaze and sensibility. Clarke's, Compton's and Brand's representations of black city spaces, places and peoples probe the entrenched historical and ideological systems and legacies that continue to influence black urban geographies and the ways they are portrayed in and by various media, institutions and the collective imagination. Their politically charged and socially relevant literary inquiries lead to complex, layered, hopeful and often contradictory, ambivalent and vexing visions of the contemporary Canadian city. Each depiction of the city confronts and complicates the ongoing material and theoretical erasure of black urban spaces and places in the nation and the national literary corpus that helps define it. Importantly, these idiosyncratic fictional and poetic portraits both invoke and dispel dominant notions of black city dwellers, black spaces and black places as socially and culturally monolithic harbingers of violence, disorder, disease and death and thus ask us to re-evaluate our own assumptions about contemporary Canadian metropolitan life. The present analysis approaches the topic of the contemporary black Canadian city in literature through a compelling theoretical perspective that argues for a direct, ongoing and contiguous relationship between the colonial plantation and the contemporary metropolis. Specifically, this project examines literary representations of the contemporary city under the rubric of plantation futuresa spatial-temporal conceptual device that reads contemporary black urban spaces through and against the history of the colonial plantation and the distorted logics that arose from the perverse culture of plantation slavery (McKittrick, Plantation Futures 2).
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.
Open Access
"Alien and Critical": The Modernist Satiric Practices of Djuna Barnes, Wyndham Lewis, and Virginia Woolf
(2022-03-03) Taylor, Benjamin Lee; Higgins, Lesley J.
This dissertation offers an extended analysis of the modernist satiric practices of authors Djuna Barnes, Wyndham Lewis, and Virginia Woolf in a selection of works spanning different genres published between 1913 and 1954. With these authors works as evidence, I suggest that satire undergoes a significant shift in the first half of the twentieth century as it departs from its premodern roots as a fixed genre or mode, instead becoming a diffuse element that intermittently shapes formal aspects and produces complex critiques. This shift partly results from new formulations of genderfrom altered understandings of masculinity and femininity to the emergence of what we now refer to as queer, nonbinary, and trans identitiesand the way in which what I call the instrumentality of satire enables a range of satiric attacks across different subject positions and a volatile political spectrum. Through a highly comparative approach, I draw upon formalist, feminist, and sociological theories to trace the different networks in which the texts of focus and their authors are embedded (networks of readers, artistic movements, political transformations, marketplaces, and discourses of gender and sexuality) to understand more thoroughly the satire that emerges from these texts. Each chapter pairs discrete investigations of works by each individual author, guided by an overarching topic (Chapter 1 explores networks of satire, Chapter 2 examines satiric method and the novel, and Chapter 3 considers satiric forms of life writing), and ends with a shorter section that compares the three authors works within a specific thematic framework (Chapter 1 with respect to the notion of authority, Chapter 2 through party scenes, and Chapter 3 concerning the portrait genre). My research reveals that the modernist satiric exchanges within these networks can be analyzed as, on the one hand, manifestations of the selected periods political dynamics and, on the other hand, cultural productions that altered how gender was discursively constructed within specific social environments of that period. In brief, the study illustrates how gender and its performance, aesthetics, and rhetoric become central to the production and function of satire in modernist art and literature.
Open Access
Autotheory as Contemporary Feminist Practice: Performing Theory in Post-1960s Feminist Art, Literature, and Criticism
(2019-11-22) Fournier, Lauren Gabrielle; Boon, Marcus B
Autotheory is a term that has emerged in the zeitgeist of contemporary feminist cultural production to describe works of literature, art, and criticism that integrate autobiography and other explicitly subjective modes with philosophy and theory in experimental ways. While an emergent term, autotheorya merging of the autobiographical with the philosophical or theoreticalcan be traced through earlier feminist art, literature, theory, and activism. In this dissertation, I take up autotheory in relation to a selection of post-1960s textschoosing works that engage a practice of autotheory in particularly performative waysto consider the politics, aesthetics, and ethics of this feminist practice across media. Moving between the disciplines of English literature, Art History, Curatorial Studies, and Performance Studies and grounding my transdisciplinary methodology in Mieke Bals notion of concept-based practices for interdisciplinary research, I historicize and theorize autotheory through close readings of three primary texts: Adrian Pipers Food for the Spirit (1971), Chris Krauss I Love Dick (1997), and Maggie Nelsons The Argonauts (2015). As I conduct extended readings of these three works, I gesture to related texts by other artists and writers to read the given work in relation to a larger movement or community of autotheoretical feminist and queer feminist impulses. My inquiry into autotheory involves reading works that have been described as autotheoretical (like The Argonauts) and recasting older works in light of this new term (like Food). I contextualize autotheory in a larger history of conceptualism, body art, performance, and art writing practices, and I focus on the period between the late 1960s and the present (late 2010s) as a pivotal time for thinking through autotheory as an aesthetic mode. I conclude that, for feminist artists and writers working in the wake of modernism, autotheory becomes a ripe mode of practice for processing, metabolizing, embodying, enacting, wracking, wrestling with, and reiterating or performing philosophy and theory from embodied, autobiographical, and otherwise subjectivized positionings; this is often done in ways that resonate with a politics of intersectionality and the move toward integrating art, life, theory, and practice.
Open Access
Biotech Animals, Ethics, and Care Approaches in Contemporary Science Fiction
(2024-11-07) Sousa, Monica; Weiss, Allan
Biotech Animals, Ethics, and Care Approaches in Contemporary Science Fiction contributes to the growing body of works focused on animal studies and science fiction by exploring its connections with biotechnological practices and an animal ethics of care theoretical framework. With a focus on what I choose to call “biotech animals” (which may include animals genetically engineered/modified or animal cyborgs with robotic/cybernetic bodily attachments or enhancements), I explore how contemporary science fiction represents the ethical treatment of these altered animals, particularly after their creation. By tracing out these discussions, I examine how my contemporary focal texts reveal the capacities of the reader/audience to question what caring relations between humans and biotech animals could look like if humans acknowledged both their responsibility and their obligation towards their creations. The analytical chapters of my dissertation examine Margaret Atwood’s MaddAddam trilogy (2003-2013), Bong Joon-ho’s Okja (2017), Kirstin’s Bakis’s Lives of the Monster Dogs (1997), Grant Morrison and Frank Quitely’s We3 (2004), Pat Murphy’s “Rachel in Love” (1987), Emma Geen’s The Many Selves of Katherine North (2016), Dean Koontz’s Watchers (1987), and Jeff Vandermeer’s Borne (2017). There are key questions that shape my analysis. What does care look like when applied to biotech animals? How do these texts depict, in various ways, processes that do not suggest a caring framework? In what scenarios are they complicated? Additionally, my dissertation explores the influential role of science fiction in demonstrating that the way we relate to caring relations are often easily affected by biocapitalism and other similar forms of human control. In doing so, my dissertation also draws attention to how these fictional works can draw attention to alternate ways of relating to biotech animals that subvert anthropocentrism while still holding on to core care values, suggesting a need to consider a philosophical posthumanism mindset that removes the human from the center of all ethical consideration.
Open Access
Climates of Mutation: Posthuman Orientations in Twenty-First Century Ecological Science Fiction
(2021-07-06) Wall, Clare Elisabeth; Weiss, Allan
Climates of Mutation contributes to the growing body of works focused on climate fiction by exploring the entangled aspects of biopolitics, posthumanism, and eco-assemblage in twenty-first-century science fiction. By tracing out each of those themes, I examine how my contemporary focal texts present a posthuman politics that offers to orient the reader away from a position of anthropocentric privilege and nature-culture divisions towards an ecologically situated understanding of the environment as an assemblage. The thematic chapters of my thesis perform an analysis of Peter Wattss Rifters Trilogy, Larissa Lais Salt Fish Girl, Paolo Bacigalupis The Windup Girl, and Margaret Atwoods MaddAddam Trilogy. Doing so, it investigates how the assemblage relations between people, genetic technologies, and the environment are intersecting in these posthuman works and what new ways of being in the world they challenge readers to imagine. This approach also seeks to highlight how these works reflect a genre response to the increasing anxieties around biogenetics and climate change through a critical posthuman approach that alienates readers from traditional anthropocentric narrative meanings, thus creating a space for an embedded form of ecological and technoscientific awareness. My project makes a case for the benefits of approaching climate fiction through a posthuman perspective to facilitate an environmentally situated understanding. By mapping the aspects of bare life, posthuman becomings, multispecies community, and environmental agency that situate these texts within their climate-focused twenty-first-century contexts, my dissertation models its own series of entanglements. It also reveals areas of concern that include infectious agencies, subversions of biopolitical containment, and the co-constitutive transformative powers of the environment and nonhuman life. Climates of Mutation addresses the ways that these contemporary science fiction narratives have responded to cultural and scientific developments to invite critical engagement from readersespecially in terms of embracing concepts of environmental assemblage and imagining potential multispecies futures. By taking an assemblage approach to these works of posthuman ecological science fiction, my project draws attention to how they critically subvert anthropocentrism by privileging nonhuman and environmental agencies in which humans are an entangled part of biopolitical forces, multispecies collectives, and ecological assemblages.
Open Access
Cold War Therapeutic Formations: Reconfiguring Political Subjectivity in American Literature
(2022-08-08) McIntyre, Christopher Michael; Redding, Arthur F.
This dissertation considers how American fiction from the years of 1947-1967 that engages with psychiatric treatment responds to the expanding cultural authority of psychiatry and its place in constituting Cold War political and economic relations. Moreover, it examines how fiction from this period considers the possibilities for political agency that psychiatric knowledge and treatment enable. By examining novels by Mickey Spillane, Charles Willeford, Ralph Ellison, Norman Mailer, and Kurt Vonnegut, this project identifies how multiple psychiatric approaches, in particular military psychiatry, social psychiatry, and anti-psychiatry, and their place in fiction, theorize political, economic, and sexual alternatives to Cold War liberalism. Reading fiction along with the works of influential figures including sociologist Gunnar Myrdal and psychiatrists including Harry Stack Sullivan, Fredric Wertham, Wilhelm Reich, R.D. Laing, and Thomas Szasz, demonstrates how psychiatry became a prominent terrain for post-World War II writers to debate the prevailing etiological factors of mental illness and theorize new political formations through therapeutic approaches. The primary texts considered in this dissertation share a skepticism and ambivalence towards biological explanations of mental illness and draw on psychiatric knowledge and treatment methods to disrupt Fordist economic relations and reformulate relations of production and reproduction. These texts, this dissertation argues, consider how pathologized forms of affect can be rechanneled into alternatives to Cold War liberalism and Fordist production in the 1950s as well as the challenges posed to such political alternatives in the midst of the faltering of consensus culture and the transition to post-Fordism that was emerging in the late 1960s.
Open Access
Colonialism and/as Catastrophe: Animals, Environment, and Ecological Catastrophe in the Contemporary Postcolonial Novel
(2019-11-22) Poray-Wybranowska, Justyna Ewa; Cho, Lily M
This dissertation analyzes literary representations of ecological catastrophe in contemporary postcolonial fiction to study the relationship between colonialism and catastrophe and to reveal the critical role animals and the environment play in literary renditions of catastrophe. Its primary site of investigation are six novels that I use as case studies to examine how postcolonial texts render experiences of catastrophe and connect contemporary ecological vulnerability to colonial legacies. I focus on fictional texts that engage with ecological catastrophe and climate change, environmental instability and exploitation, and human-nonhuman relations in an era that some scholars refer to as the Anthropocene a time in which human activity has become a main driver of global environmental change. I limit my analysis to novels from South Asian and the South Pacific, because in addition to sharing a past as British colonies, these regions are consistently identified as at-risk for ecological catastrophes. I show that the formal properties of novels (their commitment to representing mundane and repeated events and their focus on detailed psychological portraits) make them productive sites for thinking through the way ecological vulnerability is experienced unequally across the globe. Highlighting that factors such as race, class, and indigeneity affect how individuals living in ecologically vulnerable regions experience catastrophe, I emphasize the way intersecting positionalities shape the narrative representation of catastrophe. I demonstrate that relationships with local animal species and the land help environmentally vulnerable populations cope with catastrophe, and that postcolonial texts use the nonhuman to work through violent environmental events. In this way, I foreground the potential contributions of literary fiction to transnational efforts to better understand how postcolonial subjects experience ecological catastrophe and massive-scale environmental change, and how they imagine possible recovery.
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.
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 B
My 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.
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, Deanne
Despite 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.
Open Access
Dialogic Interactions: Traumatic Narratives of Forced Removal Inscribed in Archives and Memoirs
(2023-12-08) Umolac, Catherine Anne; Creet, Julia
Dialogic Interactions: Traumatic Narratives of Forced Removal Inscribed in Archives and Memoirs explores the dialogic interaction that takes place between memoirs and archives during three distinct moments in Canadian history: Indian Residential Schools, Japanese Canadian internment and Jewish Canadian internment. This project pairs Edmund Metatawabin’s Up Ghost River: A Chief’s Journey Through the Turbulent Waters of Native History with the 1999 court transcript of Cree nun, Anna Wesley, Tom Sando’s Wild Daisies in the Sand with his Japanese diaries (which I commissioned to have translated into English) and Eric Koch’s Otto & Daria: A Wartime Journey Through No Man’s Land with letters from family and friends. Using Mikhail Bakhtin’s theory of the dialogic and heteroglossia as a foundation, this dissertation proposes a new theoretical framework for reading between memoirs and archives. This framework consists of dialogic citizenship, counternarratives, code switching and/or composition. While the chapters on Metatawabin and Sando engage with dialogic citizenship, counternarratives and code switching, the chapter on Koch introduces dialogic composition. This dissertation also engages with thinkers on national narratives such as Benedict Anderson, James Wertsch and Berber Bevernage. I argue that reading the memoirs and archives in tandem helps readers to challenge engrained national narratives, and also shows ideological shifts that would not be evident simply by engaging with one form. These close, historically and politically informed readings of the memoirs and the archives reveal the power of rejoinder and response. As this dissertation shows, response does not need to take place between two people, but can take place with one person (at different moments in one’s life). Furthermore, the difference in forms (court transcript, diaries, and letters) present vital discussions of memory, time, language, accessibility, citizenship and belonging in drastically different settings. By engaging with some of the dialogic threads that exist between memoirs and archives, I argue that a generative space exists between them for readers. This critically challenging space not only forces readers to look inward at preconceived biases but also to engage with material that they might be culturally outside.
Open Access
"Disconnecting Something From Anything": Fetishized Objects, Alienated Subjects, and Literary Modernism
(2022-03-03) Morden, Robert Maxwell; Higgins, Lesley J.
This dissertation explores modernist attitudes toward the commodity and the process of commodification under late capitalism. Some modernists, notably those commonly referred to as the "men of 1914," lament a reversal of the presumed proper relationship between subject and object, in which people become passive as a result of the mechanical routines of the workplace, and objects gain perverse independence from their human creators. My dissertation suggests that there is a feminist alternative to this familiar, hegemonic modernist critique in the work of Gertrude Stein, Djuna Barnes, and Virginia Woolf. For Stein, Barnes, and Woolf, the problem with commodification is not passive subjects and animated objects, but, to the contrary, domineering subjects and a fungible object world. Stein, Barnes, and Woolf seek not to reclaim humanitys world-creating powers, but to re-enchant the world of things and discover modes of ethical passivity that enable a more receptive, hospitable relationship to alterity. In articulating this alternative critique, I distinguish my position from two strains of modernist scholarship, one that acknowledges only one critique of commodification—that of the "men of 1914"—and a wave of scholarship that considers itself as, in the words of Kathryn Simpson, "exploding the myth [...] of modernist writers' and artists' absolute disinterest, detachment and contempt for popular and consumer culture" (1). While I align myself with the latter contingent, I differentiate my position through a consideration of the ways in which certain modernists reformulate a critique of the commodity in less absolutist and naïve terms. I argue that Stein, Barnes, and Woolf advance immanent critiques that do not presume to stand outside the commodity industry but draw power from certain tensions within commodification. Specifically, their critique is animated by a paradox: by exaggerating the alienation and fetishism characteristic of commodification, they hope to combat the commodity's reifying logic.
Open Access
Diversity in “the Korean Way”: Transcultural Identities in Contemporary Diasporic Korean Literature and Media in North America
(2022-08-08) Park, Min Ah Ah; Cho, Lily M.
Literary and visual media representations of diasporic Koreans in Canada and the U.S. have noticeably grown in the twenty-first century, (re)shaping popular culture imaginations of South Korean and Asian subjectivities. From globalized sitcoms such as Kim’s Convenience to novels, memoirs, and animated cartoons, recent portrayals of “Koreans” by diasporic Koreans increasingly depict the multifariousness of “Korean,” “Korean Canadian,” and “Korean American” identities through various lenses and vehicles such as local and trans-national/trans-historical perspectives, transnational Korean adoption, and comedy/humour. To capture the significance of what I discuss as the transculturality of diasporic Korean identities, I suggest in this dissertation that new frames of comparison and examination beyond geographical, temporal, and disciplinary borders are required. By demonstrating shared and different geopolitical histories and their effects among diasporic Korean populations in North America in tandem with the diversity and politics of representation within literatures and media produced by diasporic Koreans, I unsettle the knowledge of “the Korean Way”—being or becoming “Korean”—and simplistic nationalist imaginations of hyphenated Asian identities, within histories of Western colonialism and exclusion and marginalization against racial minorities in North America. The first chapter broadly traces: 1) the history of Korean Canadian and Korean American literature and media, 2) the respective political contexts shaping such representations in Canada and the U.S., 3) the development of anti-Asian Racism, racialization, and stereotypes in North America, 4) the modernization and economic rise of (South) Korea since the early-twentieth century. These historical and theoretical frameworks of the first chapter inform the second and third chapters, respectively exploring women’s narratives and televisual comedies of diasporic Koreans in North America since the 2010s. Chapter Two comparatively analyzes two novels and a memoir by female diasporic Korean authors, Anne Y.K. Choi, Frances Cha, and Jenny Heijun Wills. In this chapter, I pay careful attention to how Korean-born women negotiate their sense of identity and sexuality within contexts of race relations and racism, racial and gender capitalism, and postcolonial histories of marginalization and oppression in settings in Canada, the U.S., and South Korea. Chapter Three examines different forms of televisual comedies, Kim’s Convenience, Dr. Ken, and Angry Asian Little Girl, to underscore the influence of humour as an emerging strategy for diasporic representation, and at the same time, how such new vehicles of inclusion are surrounded by conditions of White-centred and commercial logics as well as internalized racism.
Open Access
Elasticity and Hegemony: A Brief History of Addiction Narrative in the Postwar United States
(2020-05-11) Welch, Richard Roy; Boon, Marcus B.
The 20th century has demonstrated a great diversity of thought when it comes to defining addiction: a phenomenon that has been supposed to be everything from a chronic brain disease to a moral failing. Given that range, literary studies of addiction are often led to define addiction in narrow ways rather than examine the dynamic character of addiction over time. While previous works offer insight into specific forms of addiction at specific times, there is currently no study in literary and cultural studies that addresses the ongoing history of addictions meaning(s) in detail. Building on the work of scholars from diverse fieldsincluding cultural studies, literary theory, Marxism, psychoanalysis, the social sciences, medical science and public policythe following dissertation proposes a novel methodology for examining addiction literature that is not limited to any single perspective. Its analysis proceeds by way of what I call addictive realism: a combination of social, historical, chemical, and aesthetic forces that work in tandem to produce plausible, compelling and engaging versions of addiction. Every narrative renders addiction according to certain conventionsplot, character, conflict, climax, conclusion, etc.and in so doing creates a stylized, edited, selected version of something real. Broadly, the work of this dissertation attempts to understand those styles historically, as they adapt and mutate given new ideological and aesthetic paradigms. Put simply, this dissertation attempts to understand the why of how America has told the story of addiction. It examines cultural works dating from roughly 1950, focusing largely on heroin memoirs and novels. Each chapter sets up a dynamic analysis between at least two literary texts, examining them in light of key political, social, and scientific paradigms relevant to their publication and reception. Ultimately, it elucidates several key dynamics that are common to literary productions of addiction in America, finding that literature has had a unique influence on the ongoing history of addictive thought. Due to narratives ability to capture and transmit the first-hand experience of users in a meaningful way, it has been, and continues to be, a valuable compliment and counterpoint to political, philosophical, and empirical theories of addiction.
Open Access
Enclosed Edens, Contested Waters & Failed Utopias: An Ecocritical Reading of Epistemic Land Claims in Okanagan Literature
(2023-12-08) Jackson-Harper, Renee Suzanne; Cho, Lily M.
This doctoral dissertation, Enclosed Edens, Contested Waters and Failed Utopias: an Ecocritical Reading of Epistemic Land Claims in Okanagan Literature, examines regionally specific literary sites of intersection, conflict and transformation. Focusing on the Okanagan region, which rests in the southern heart of British Columbia and remains the unceded territory of the Syilx Okanagan people, this dissertation observes literature from the region as an epistemological field. This dissertation primarily deploys an ecocritical and bioregional approach to literary analysis. This work also employs autotheory, a mode that seeks to lay bare some of the “entanglement of research and creation” and “reveals the tenuousness of maintaining illusory separations between art and life, theory and practice, work and the self, research and motivation” (Fournier 2; 2-3). Building on Frank Davey’s neologism “regionality” (15), this dissertation observes the region as an ideologically diverse space where many voices communicate what Laurence Buell terms “a terrain of consciousness,” through which humans may ponder their relationships with the region and the other-than-human (Buell 83). These “terrains of consciousness” function as what Lorraine Code terms “instituting imaginaries,” as they can disrupt and defamiliarize master narratives and initiate counter possibilities capable of interrogating and making new, established social structures (31). This dissertation offers a sustained examination of regionally born imaginaries through literary works by writers, including Susan Allison, Jeanette Armstrong, Jason Dewinetz, George Bowering, Nancy Holmes, Patrick Lane, John Lent, Alice Barrett Parke, Harold Rhenish, Laisha Rosnau and Dania Tomlinson. This dissertation aims to trace the contexts that inform the finding and making of home within the Okanagan by situating the study in the specifics of the habitats and inhabitants of the region. Each chapter focuses on a contested topographic feature, including orchards, lakes, and small cities. Through this examination, we might trace a common thread of seeking to reconcile one’s singular subjectivity within the “tangles and patterns” of a violent and vexed settler colonial history and within in a distinct geographic region (Harraway 1). As the ecological and emotional toll of the settler colonial project is felt acutely by the region’s residents, we might also discern an invitation to reassess after epistemic failure and to chart new ways of being within the bioregion.
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.
Open Access
Failures to Self-Locate: Counterfactual Ontologies in Contemporary Theatre and Physics
(2020-05-11) Gingrich, Derek Randall; Gobert, R. Darren
Failures to Self-Locate examines the overlooked influence of quantum mechanics on the development of contemporary theatre aesthetics. Physicists began openly grappling with the ramifications of quantum theory in 1926. The same year, Bertolt Brecht announced his theatre for a scientific age as an arena for atomic man. Unsatisfied with the metaphysical implications of the first formulation of quantum mechanics, known now as the Copenhagen interpretation, physicists and philosophers of science spent the twentieth century advocating, developing, and testing alternative interpretations of the atomic realm. Throughout that same period, the Western stage witnessed a resonant series of developments on Brechts aesthetic project. Placing the interpretations of quantum mechanics in dialogue with contemporary theatre from North America and Europe, this dissertation uncovers how, after an initial point of direct contact between Brecht and physicists, physics and theatre have developed similar ontological paradigms to interpret experiments and performances respectively. In physics, these paradigms fall into two distinct camps: those that salvage strict determinism at the expense of a singular world (collapse-free interpretations of quantum mechanics) and those that safeguard our worlds uniqueness by accepting fundamental stochasticity in reality (collapse interpretations of quantum mechanics). Experimental evidence supports both options, and so these groups must also explain the apparent validity of the other. Theatremakers actively investigated a similar ontological issue, exacerbated by Brechtian stage techniques and centred on the storied divide between reality and representation. Where the physicists navigated between determinism and locality, playwrights return to the ancient tension between fate and free will. Those crosscurrents may bring ruin to the classical protagonist, but the quantum protagonist experiences one framework (e.g., free will) while secretly being ruled by the other (e.g., determinism). So positioned, these protagonists fail to self-locate among their myriad possibilities. This dissertation maps the resonances between the scientific quest to reconcile determinism and stochasticity and the theatrical quest to reconcile free will and fate within the quantum theoretical paradigm, by analyzing the scientific and theatrical output through the lens of counterfactual analysis.
Open Access
Framing Standard and Dialect in Black Women's Novels
(2022-03-03) Mercer-James, Eshe; Sanders, Leslie
Framing Standard and Dialect in Black Women's Novels explores how Black women writers engage with their image in dominant Western discourse. Deliberately objectified, their discursive identities have been underwritten and overlooked. Using Sylvia Wynter's argument that the emergence of Black women writers presents a parallax view that reorients humanist discourse, my project argues that Black women novelists reorient Black women's images through heteroglossia. Mikhail Bakhtin reads the novel as an interaction between languages as socio-ideological bodies. Challenging a dominant hegemony, the novel dialogic underscores Black women's resistant writing; however, Bakhtin's fusion of language and body restricts the dynamic between the two, repeating the erasures of dominant discourse. Translanguage constructs Bakhtin's heteroglossic dialogic as a slippage between language and body that demonstrates diversity. Translanguaging proposes named languages as a posteriori group categorizations, while language use approaches language features without regard for these boundaries. In this reorientation of language, Bakhtin's heteroglossia becomes Edouard Glissant's creolization, a specifically racialized expression of movement and change. The translanguaging of Black women's novels plays with dominant discourses to rescript their images as complex and mutable. Reading four novels, I demonstrate how narrative historicizes, theorizes, diasporizes, and incorporates this strategy. Pauline E. Hopkins displays a daguerreotype that reflects the oppressive history of Black womanhood to project an expressive excess in Contending Forces (1900). Zora Neale Hurston performs her "Characteristics of Negro Expression" as a moving image in the discursive play between main character and community in Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937). With double exposure in Louisiana (1994), Erna Brodber uses Hurston as the inspiration for her fictional main character to ground her theories in the Black diaspora. Toni Morrison invests in Black women's discursive erasure as the material of reorientation, presenting a photonegative in Sula (1973). Raciolinguistics is explicitly anti-oppressive in its attention to power dynamics. The novelists' synaesthesic presentation of Black women's consciously embodied language use emphasizes the power of language on their material conditions but plays with the individual's power over language. These novels demonstrate the flexibility of the designations Black and woman, names that inform but do not fix expression, to destabilize hegemonies.