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Open Access
Nothing Wrong: Law and the Contemporary American Western
(2024-11-07) Clegg, Duncan Joseph; Redding, Arthur F.
This dissertation explores the representation and function of law in contemporary American Westerns of fiction and film, arguing that the Western revolves around a constitutive exception wherein the founding of law by the heroic, autonomous protagonist within the fantastic lawless space of the Frontier is possible only through—indeed, is nothing but—the exclusion of the racialized Other from law’s aegis. The first chapter examines Larry McMurtry’s Lonesome Dove tetralogy, focusing on how the eponymous novel’s thematic and diegetic use of law reflects McMurtry’s attempt to de-mythologize the Western—an attempt that paradoxically results in a Western par excellence. The Coen Brothers’ cinematic adaptation of True Grit is the subject of the second chapter, which avers that the film’s central premise of extralegal capital punishment reflects the use of drones in the ongoing War on Terror, and that its attempts to undermine representations of state and patriarchal authority are in fact direct expressions of that authority’s stability. The third chapter analyzes the Westerns of Cormac McCarthy, asserting that McCarthy achieves a critique of the Western by adhering precisely to its conventions and thereby exposing its limits: its ritualized depiction of law's founding depends on the projection of lawlessness into Native American space and onto the ideological figure of the Indian. The coda that closes this dissertation reads James Welch's Fools Crow as an inverted Western to consider the Native American literary response to the genre’s bifurcating effect upon indigenous cultures and identities. Slavoj Žižek’s critique of contemporary ideology and his analysis of the political dimension of enjoyment, along with Giorgio Agamben’s interrogation of the structure of political and legal authority, furnish this work with its theoretical foundation, which thereby addresses the Western from a combined sociopolitical and psychoanalytic perspective. This dissertation is the first scholarly consideration of the role law plays in Westerns, and it is one of few to examine the contemporary Western, thereby filling in two major gaps in the critical appreciation of one of the most significant yet understudied endemic American genres.
Open Access
Selecting Literature Texts for Kenyan High Schools, 1940 to 1998
(2024-11-07) Kieti, Mwikali E.; Olaogun, Modupe
An examination of the numbers, scope, and genres selected for Kenya’s English and literature high-school syllabi between 1940 and 1998 reveals four types of excluded literature: the 1950-1960 guerilla war for land and freedom; punitive/pacification expeditions; settler- and travel-literature, and orature. The gaps about the people’s resistance to imperialism were partly inspired by Kenyatta’s leitmotif to “forget the past”, which perpetuated the Mau Mau myth and triggered a state-inspired national amnesia about Kenya’s ignored—but not forgotten—independent war heroes. Abetted by pervasive lies, distortions, and omissions, this amnesia permeates Kenya’s media, public fora, and educational system. The dissertation contextualizes and documents Kenya’s historiography and nationalism expounded by Kenyatta’s government in “development” policies and educational goals. Evidence was gathered through conversations, interviews, and library research and includes orature, personal narratives, fiction, nonfiction, magazines, journals, teachers’ manuals, high-school syllabi, national exams, education and development plans and reports, government officials’ statements and speeches, administrative notes, reports, laws, and state acts. Accessing official documents—even lists of suggested texts or circulars convening meetings to select texts—was often complicated since many documents were “classified” as secret. The criteria for selecting texts were often haphazard and partisan, seemingly corresponding to the ideological and political exigencies of neo-colonial Kenya’s largely corrupt ruling elite and its imagination of the nation. For instance, a necessarily anonymous high-level educational officer revealed the existence of a 1980s secret committee—supervised by the Criminal Investigations Department and answerable directly to President—that vetted the final list of suggested texts. Evidence about Kenya’s high-school English and literature syllabi reveals three patterns: the genres studied were reduced slightly, the number of selected books and texts shrank significantly, and controversial topics were avoided or sanitized. Like the nation, the literature curriculum suffers historical amnesia and social, cultural, and political myopia. Moreover, the insipid recycling of texts decade after decade ignores much new material and many authors. Politically skewed, the pattern of selecting literary texts thus prompts questions about Kenya’s goals for education and their grave epistemological, political, and national implications.
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
Literary Friction: poetics at the operational level of war
(2024-11-07) Jones, Oliver Richard; Redding, Arthur F.
This dissertation explores an intersection between literary studies and war studies, approaching literature as a critical medium that can enhance the conceptualization of war as an organizational process directed towards political and strategic ends. This work of scholarship argues that literature provides unique terms for examining war as a complex interpretive structure, and enumerates historical examples of literary practice as a medium for ideational and transformative activity in military domains. Through this lens, the dissertation explicates the literary aspects of the philosophy of BGen. (ret) Shimon Naveh as it is articulated in his writings on “Systemic Operational Design” (SOD) and operational art. It explores Naveh’s influence on professional military education (PME) in the Israel Defense Force and the legacy of his thinking through the writings of the “Naveh school”, which includes Dr. Ofra Graicer and BGen. (ret) Gal Hirsch, alongside a few others. It highlights how the Naveh school engaged with advanced literary and philosophical texts drawn from a broad corpus of modernist and postmodern literary and philosophical production, including TE Lawrence, John Boyd, Paul Virilio, Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, Hayden White and Bernard Tschumi. By mapping some intellectual spaces where literature has been enlisted in sophisticating military knowledge and activity, this dissertation seeks to broaden the conceptual repertoire of military and security-focused scholarship, offering insights into the ways literary practice has been incorporated in the conceptualization of warfare and strategy in defence organizations and parallel fields of research which support defence organizations. Ultimately, this work seeks to understand the interplay between literary forms and the logics of warfare, pushing the boundaries of how literature is conceptualized within military-academic spaces, while challenging the terms on which war is conceptualized in humanities scholarship.
Open Access
World Literature of Internal Exiles: Strangers at Home
(2024-11-07) Ali, Zaynab Fatima; Cho, Lily
This dissertation explores three spaces and times of destruction since World War II: India/Pakistan under Partition, Palestine/Israel post-1948, and Afghanistan under Soviet invasion. These crises are not isolated events but multiple transhistorical products of global politics and war. As an ethical response to the incessant spiral of violence that causes suffering and alienation, this dissertation is not an analysis of world literature texts as “windows to the world” (Damrosch), for such a perspective implies a passive relationship between the reader and the text. I focus on an active dialogue centred on ethics as a praxis, principle, and process. While scholars focus on the macro-geopolitical levels to consider transnational tensions, I call for a new mode of world literature that recognizes how, in their singularities, communal violence, occupation, and invasion are reproductions of the same transhistorical forces: ethnic nationalisms spurred by bio-and necropolitics. Scholarship accounts for those who can/want to leave, I argue that an alternative conceptualization is required for those at home: the internal exile, an individual ostracized in their homeland as a consequence of being marked through race, religion, or politics. The oxymoron of ‘internal exile’ destabilizes the political and semantic meaning of each term, opening a transhistorical space of persecution. This project redeploys Bakhtinian concepts of discursive identities to delineate the chronotope of the internal exile in order to examine the lived experiences of those whose bodies are the effect of power. Through discursive analysis, I trace the chronotope of the internal exile in nine parrhesiastic novels: Two (Gulzar 2017), A Promised Land (Khadija Mastur 2019), Daughters of Partition (Fozia Raja 2020), Mornings in Jenin (Susan Abulhawa 2010), Minor Detail (Adania Shibli 2020), Track Changes (Sayed Kashua 2020), The Pearl That Broke Its Shell (Nadia Hashimi 2015), Earth and Ashes and The Patience Stone (Atiq Rahimi 2002, 2009). I triangulate three forms of destruction in three spaces with three modes of individual and communal response (memory, identity, language) to dismantle a homogeneous understanding of ethnic nationalism. Each text produces the reader in exile to decolonize and alter knowledge of and engagement with internal exiles beyond ethnic-national ties.
Open Access
Reimagining Subject-Other Relations: Embracing the other Without and Within
(2024-10-28) Melo-Thaiss, Janet Dasilva; Redding, Arthur F.
This study analyses literary depictions of subject-other relations through representative post-World War II Western literature. Such relations have been negatively impacted by a “hermeneutics of suspicion,” a phrase coined by French Philosopher Paul Ricœur to refer to thinkers Sigmund Freud, Karl Marx, and Friedrich Nietzsche who, he argued, were shaped by “suspicion[s] concerning the illusions of consciousness” (34). Contextualized within a larger body of theoretical work (Patrick O’Donnell, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Teresa Brennan, Joanna Zylinkska), the project explores both the symptoms as well as the “epidemic nature of contemporary paranoia” as represented in George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, E.L. Doctorow’s The Book of Daniel, and Dione Brand’s Inventory (O’Donnell vii). While the literary and generic structures, aesthetic approaches, and historical contexts for the texts chosen are varied, they each trace the “cultural epidemiology” of paranoia over the last seven decades, weighing the consequences of paranoia’s transformation into a prescription (O’Donnell vii-viii). In so doing, they highlight how paranoia has been normalized as a response “for us, as national, corporate, historical subjects in” time periods “beset by questions about their cohesion and continuance” (O’Donnell 16). Whether through satire, parody, or hyperbole, these texts confront readers with the consequences of the internalization of and complicity with said fear and paranoia as responses to an unknown other, highlighting the need for more ethical subject-other relations. Through their political, cultural, and historical “inventories,” these writers illustrate how the subject has been interpolated into a patriarchal system that keeps them locked into a cycle of fear and hatred that, if allowed to continue, will only lead to ongoing violence. Instead, this study imagines subject-other relations based on care, trust, and love. Such relations are life-affirming – mindful of the fragile connections that hold humans together in kinship. By imagining such possibilities for a non-colonizing relation between self and other, this project explores imagined spaces that do not “will another empire,” but instead show how to take “history’s pulse / measured with another hand” (Brand 11).
Open Access
The Sublime Actor and the Poetics of Emotions: Agency, Affect, and the Theatrical Sublime
(2024-03-16) Marcinkowski, Adam John; Valihora, Karen
This dissertation traces the history of the theatrical sublime from classical, neoclassical, and British eighteenth-century texts and performances to identify the emergence of the sublime actor, a figure who demonstrates a crucial tension in affect theory and in understanding the individual subject. To theorize this figure, I develop what I call the poetics of emotions—an original approach to understanding affect and its representation, one that borrows from Aristotle’s theory of drama to argue that through the power of representation, attempts to delineate emotions necessarily flip into depictions and demonstrations of agency. If affect is the seat of our interiority, it is also universal, objective, and predictable, an effect, apropos Aristotle, of plot. In cognizing, representing, or performing them, our feelings can be summoned, manipulated, and contained. The sublime actor masters this process, turning helplessness into agency, and the emotional labour of this transformation models the ideal subject of emotional capitalism. I render this sublime actor visible by bringing theories from Aristotle, Longinus, Adam Smith, Denis Diderot, and Sir Henry Irving to bear on performances by Marie Champmeslé, Sarah Siddons, and John Kemble, in plays that focus on the myth of Phaedra by Euripides, Jean Racine, Joanna Baillie, and Eugene O’Neill. These plays are of significance not just because of their thematic interest in powerful emotions and their expression, but because they express these themes through a shared formal device, which I call the scene of inquiry. These scenes, I argue, create a space in the theatre to stage the sublime drama of the mind such that a poetics of emotions can readily emerge. By following the intertextual history of these scenes, this dissertation observes how the fiscal pressures of the commercial theatre twist the theatrical sublime into becoming an aesthetic of economic success and celebrity, one that culminates in the theatrical innovations of Baillie and the social and theatrical performances of Siddons.
Open Access
Multi Consciousness: Simultaneity, Splintering, and Structures of Feeling in Contemporary American Fictions of Displacement
(2023-12-08) Jaksic, Yasmina; Boon, Marcus B.
Multi consciousness is a cross-cultural and cross-temporal affective structure which poses questions regarding how different modes of displacement (enforced relocation, immigration), erasure (social and political), and violence affect formations of consciousness, and how representations of subjecthood or lack thereof alter perceptions of self. I unpack the metaphor of the multiplied, fragmented and split as it is repurposed in contemporary American fictional works of displacement to understand how multiplicity resonates more destructively with displaced and marginalized individuals. Multi consciousness accounts for and contains double, triple, and mestiza consciousness, and furthermore articulates the complexities of marginalized subjecthood in the contemporary moment—in the moment of ever-present technology where everything is instantaneous and multiplied, in the moment continued and ongoing racial and identity politics. I will discuss multi consciousness as a shared structure of feeling, as a practice of assimilation and mourning, and the various metaphors of multi consciousness that contemporary American fictional works of displacement engage in. The dissertation works through Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye (1970), Danzy Senna’s Caucasia (1998), and Brit Bennett’s The Vanishing Half (2020), Eric Nguyen’s Things We Lost to the Water (2021), Charles Yu’s Interior Chinatown (2020), Viet Thanh Nguyen’s The Sympathizer (2015), James Welch’s Winter in the Blood (1974), Leslie Marmon Silko’s Ceremony (1977), Tommy Orange’s There There (2018), Ted Chiang’s “Story of Your Life” (1998), Arrival (2016), and Everything, Everywhere, All at Once (2021). I look to these works to outline the condition of multi consciousness: mourning, the sense of being haunted, displacement and diaspora, multiple competing ways of inhabiting the body/being in the world, the sense of inhabiting multiple timelines/worlds, the presence of whiteness as consciousness, seeking/creating a double of the self, and disassociation. Through this varied bibliography, I argue that multi consciousness surfaces as an evident cross-cultural, cross-generational, shared structure of feeling within contemporary American fictions of displacement.
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
The Apocalyptic Visions of J.G. Ballard: Surrealism, World War II, and Modern Technology
(2023-12-08) Sparrow-Downes, Robert Joseph; Cain, Stephen
This dissertation examines how, throughout the four major phases of his literary career, J.G. Ballard’s engagement with, and synthesis of, various twentieth century artistic and intellectual movements assisted Ballard in deciphering the twentieth century, while also enabling him to prophetically speculate on the future of the human condition. Ballard incorporated major symbols of the twentieth century into his work—television, cars, nuclear weapons, gated communities—as a means of decoding them, and he thus worked to uncover the latent patterns and effects of the modern technological landscape, envisioning various extreme end points for humanity and warning about the various psychopathologies that may arise as a result of our interactions with modern technology and architecture. After a brief opening chapter provides important context on Ballard’s childhood and internment during the Second World War, the second chapter explores the intersection of Surrealism and psychoanalysis in Ballard’s first tetralogy—The Wind from Nowhere (1962), The Drowned World (1962), The Drought (1965), and The Crystal World (1966)—and will explain how these movements informed Ballard’s reimagining of the science fiction genre. Though Surrealism and “inner space” remained strong components of Ballard’s work, when Ballard shifted to deciphering the symbols and patterns of the modern world in The Atrocity Exhibition (1970), Crash (1973), Concrete Island (1974), and High-Rise (1975), I argue that he began a literary conversation with Marshall McLuhan, who, like Ballard, warned about technology’s ability to inflict pain and anxiety. Ballard’s final tetralogy—Cocaine Nights (1996), Super- Cannes (2000), Millennium People (2003), and Kingdom Come (2006)—also appears largely indebted to McLuhan, investigating how technological environments can unknowingly shape behaviour and render the individual somnambulistic and docile. It is also in his exploration of the nefarious uses of technology that Ballard predicted the rise in far-right politics that has gripped the first quarter of the twenty-first century. The final chapter, on Ballard’s semi-autobiographical novels—Empire of the Sun (1984) and The Kindness of Women (1991)—will return to exploring Ballard’s Surrealist impulse, elucidating how most, if not all, of the major themes and ideas in his novels are rooted in his wartime experiences.
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
'We fumbled with buttons, we slung down our guns': Queer Masculinity in South African War Literature
(2023-12-08) Hillman, Megan Carmen; Goldie, Terry
This dissertation focuses on war literature from South Africa from World War II to the end of apartheid (1939-1989). In World War II, volunteers were invited to “Join the Army of Sportsmen” and be part of the “team” fighting fascism abroad. The increasing paranoia of the apartheid regime, which came to power after the war, shifted the role of the soldier from volunteer to conscript, and it shifted the idea of war from an adventure abroad to a “total onslaught” with threats coming from inside the borders of the country as well as from without. In this dissertation, I consider the way discourses of masculinity and the military intersect and constitute whiteness and heterosexuality in South Africa. I argue that the presence of same-sex desires in the military transforms it into a site of contradiction and ambiguity, what Cynthia Enloe calls “patriarchal confusion.” I examine the incoherence of a white South African soldier desiring another soldier through three novels – Tatamkhulu Afrika's Bitter Eden, Mark Behr's The Smell of Apples, and Damon Galgut's The Beautiful Screaming of Pigs. I use Jack Halberstam's theory of queer forgetting and queer failure and José Esteban Muñoz's theory of queer time to consider the ways such soldiers, through their performance in the military, render the military strange. Against the backdrop of racist and homophobic legislation seeking to construct whiteness as heteronormative and moral, I argue that soldiers desiring soldiers queerly fail their gender, their race, and ultimately their nation.
Open Access
Insound, Outsound, Unsound: Re-Sounding Poetry, 1950s to 2010s
(2023-12-08) Smith, Kristen Adele; Weaver, Andrew
Examining the multifaceted presence of sound in varieties of visually-oriented texts written from the 1950s–2010s by transnational poets, my project considers how sound (both actual and metaphorical) affects readers’ expectations and experiences when performing and interpreting poetry. The dissertation probes the cognitive science of reading, the sonic interchanges made possible by texts, and the implications of this work for discussions of intermediality and the cultural inflections of gender and race. I begin by considering cognitive processes fundamental to reading: how Ignace J. Gelb, Walter J. Ong, S. J., and Donald Shankweiler demonstrate that sounding is foundational to the reading process. Building upon research by Charles Bernstein, derek beaulieu, Craig Dworkin, Johanna Drucker, Don Ihde, Brandon Labelle, Marjorie Perloff, and Jonathan Sterne, my project presents an innovative method of sound as an analytical tool. Chapter 1 defines and explains three original categorizations: insound, outsound, and unsound. I present the critical means for examining these distinct sonic forms along with visual representations of the methods. Subsequently, each application chapter examines the three sound types in a different form of visually-oriented poetry (concrete, erasure, and non-linguistic). The selected poets’ works share formal characteristics but are diverse in historical and cultural experiences and the gender expressions they constitute. Chapter 2 argues that using sound as an interpretive tool for Eugen Gomringer’s “silencio” and Steve McCaffery’s Carnival reanimates the temporality of these concrete works. Chapter 3 reveals the biases in sounding and the power inherent in wielding sound in two exceptional erasure poems, M. NourbeSe Philip’s Zong! and Jordan Abel’s The Place of Scraps. Chapter 4 examines how the seeming absence of sound in non-linguistic poetry stalls reading practices, using Mary Ellen Solt’s “Moonshot Sonnet,” Caroline Bergvall’s Drift, and Eric Schmaltz’s Surfaces. With the efficacy of Insound and Outsound approaches in question, this chapter suggests alternative processing methods and concludes that non-linguistic poems eschew any totalizing approach. Instead, they need to be considered individually to discover the works’ aesthetic and semantic complexity. The final Coda provides a preliminary exploration of the In / Out / Unsound method’s future, organized in terms of applications, transpositions, and extensions.
Open Access
Nostalgia and the Victorian Varsity Novel
(2023-12-08) Stinson, Rachelle Jean; Choi, Tina Young
This dissertation begins by recognizing a certain tension between the Victorian knowledge industry and Victorian Oxbridge: a confrontation between the multidirectional industry of knowledge production, commodification, dissemination, and consumption that sought to expand knowledge and learning outward to the masses, and the nation’s most revered universities, Oxford and Cambridge, which had, for centuries, held knowledge for the privileged few. This dissertation situates its argument and its focussed texts at this juncture of confrontation. It argues that, through the discourse of university nostalgia—to which Matthew Arnold contributed most famously with his “dreaming spires” and “whispering” towers of Middle Age enchantment—Oxbridge participates, with strategic self-defensive reserve, in the knowledge industry and its various engines of progress. From a textual standpoint, it argues that Victorian varsity novels, a genre of youth fiction following the struggles and adventures of Oxbridge undergraduates, are important contributors to this strategic cultural discourse of university nostalgia, and, by extension, university power. This project is a study of five Victorian varsity novels—the Verdant Green series (1857), Tom Brown at Oxford (1861), Wilton of Cuthbert’s: A Tale of Undergraduate Life Thirty Years Ago (1878), A Sweet Girl Graduate (1891), and The Master of St. Benedict’s (1893)—plus two unconventional varsity novels—Jude the Obscure (1895) and Zuleika Dobson (1911)—each of which evokes nostalgic longing for the idea of a (traditional) university, for the idea of Oxbridge, within its pages. Each chapter focusses on a particular engine of the knowledge industry—university tourism, the civic college movement, the women’s college movement, and the extension movement—and identifies a particular variant of Oxbridge nostalgia strategically counter-positioned as both a force of resistance and participation. Each chapter demonstrates the ways in which Victorian varsity novels, alongside other relevant university texts (such as tourist guidebooks, periodical fiction, exposés, and visitor testimonials), contribute to these nostalgic variants. In so doing, these novels play an important part in fortifying the role of an “ancient” university in a modern knowledge market, by maintaining its currency as a space of longing in the Victorian cultural imagination.
Open Access
"Other languages, other landscapes, other stories": Reading Resurgence in the Contemporary Indigenous Novel
(2023-08-04) Evans, Vanessa Kimberley; Cho, Lily M.
As settler and postcolonial countries in North America, Oceania, and South Asia contend with the complexity of reconciliation, sovereignty movements, and the fallout from colonial schools, the relevance of Indigenous resurgence is rising on a global scale. This resurgence responds, in part, to the specific role literature can and has played in disconnecting Indigenous Peoples from their knowledges, communities, and selves. Accordingly, in this dissertation I make connections between seemingly disparate Indigenous novels in an effort at beginning to understand what representations of resurgence—the everyday practices and processes that seek to regenerate and rebuild Indigenous nations—reveal about how diverse Indigenous contexts are (re)imagining Indigenous worlds and what connections across those contexts might mean (Simpson 2017). To perform this investigation, I make a case for further cross-cultural comparative methods within Indigenous literary studies that can interpret resurgence across distinct literary contexts while maintaining a commitment to nation-specific worldviews imparted by relation with land. Mobilizing the theoretical work of Leanne Betasamosake Simpson (Michi Saagiig Nishnaabeg), Chadwick Allen, and Molly McGlennen (Anishinaabe), this project contributes a new comparative method called reading resurgence. Located at the intersection of global and nationalist approaches to Indigenous literary studies, this method interprets everyday acts of resurgence—specifically: storytelling, language learning, and relationship with land—trans-Indigenously across three respective literary constellations of coresistance that cluster novels from diverse Indigenous nations. The first constellation reads resurgence across David Treuer’s (Leech Lake Ojibwe) The Translation of Dr Apelles (2006), Patricia Grace’s (Māori) Potiki (1986), and Rejina Marandi’s (Santal) Becoming Me (2014). The second clusters Cherie Dimaline’s (Métis) The Marrow Thieves (2017), Sia Figiel’s (Samoan) Where We Once Belonged (1996), and Easterine Kire’s (Angami Naga) Don’t Run, My Love (2017). The third reads across Eden Robinson’s (Haisla & Heiltsuk) Monkey Beach (2000), Kiana Davenport’s (Kanaka Maoli) Shark Dialogues (1994), and Mamang Dai’s (Adi) The Black Hill (2014). Beyond its methodological contribution, this dissertation is also an effort to advance scholarly understandings of how contemporary Indigenous novels are (re)connecting Indigenous Peoples and nations with traditional ways of being and knowing.
Open Access
The End of Postcolonialism: Dalits, Adivasis and the Rhetoric of "Antinationalism" in South Asian Literature
(2023-08-04) Guragain, Khem Prasad; Mukherjee, Arun P.
This dissertation argues that the literary representations by the Dalit (formerly known as Untouchables) and Adivasi (India’s aboriginal peoples) writers dismantle the colonizer-colonized binary of the postcolonial literary theory and show that the nature and shape of Dalit and Adivasi subalternity are quite different from those produced by colonial relations. These voices, marginalized on account of caste and indigeneity, necessitate a consciousness that interrogates the dominant high caste and class elitist discourse and its systematic colonization of the literary/cultural and social lives of the Dalit and Adivasi subaltern. Interrogating the centuries old Brahminist practices and discourses that negate the possibilities of social and political solidarity across caste and other marks of identity: Touchables and Untouchables, Adivasis, and non-Adivasis, I suggest that the emergence of Dalit and Adivasi literatures destabilizes the hegemony of the elitist discourse and transcends the analyses of postcolonial theorists and subaltern historians who fail to acknowledge the centrality of caste in Indian society and its contradictions, inconsistencies and injustices inflicted upon the marginalized. Dalit and Adivasi literatures show that caste is not only a major determinant of the cultural/political identities since the advent of the so-called Aryan invasion in South Asia but also an instrument of suppression, dispossession, and displacement. Through the examination of texts by Bama, Sharankumar Limbale, Hansda Sowvendra Shekhar, and Temsula Ao I argue that Dalit and Adivasi literary imaginary breaks the “cultural dictatorship” of the dominant discourses and transgresses the limitations of the mainstream literary aesthetics, which is replete with Hindutva ideology and is devoid of low caste identified voices. By evading caste’s permanent divisions and hereditary hierarchy the dominant discourses not only fail to understand caste as a major component in socio-political life of the people in South Asia but also deny its subterranean presence in postcolonial, nationalist, and feminist theoretical frameworks, problematically conflating it with the non-caste categories, such as, colonized, classed, and gendered subjects. It argues that Dalit and Adivasi literatures cannot be “engaged” within the current form of postcolonial literary theory. Instead, it suggests the emergence of Dalit and Adivasi literatures and theory marks “the end of postcolonialism.”
Open Access
The Horror and the Glory: Euripides Among the Victorians
(2023-08-04) Will, Julianna Katherine; Higgins, Lesley J.
This dissertation explores the literary and cultural impact of Euripides in the long nineteenth century. The project tests Victorian theories of translation and appropriation against a diverse array of media (including poetry, prose, drama, non-fiction, and Pre-Raphaelite art) in multiple European languages (primarily English and ancient Greek, but also Latin, German, Italian, and French). Emphasizing ancient texts in their original languages, I examine how a wide array of Victorians (including Matthew Arnold, J. M. Barrie, Charlotte Brontë, George Eliot, Jane Harrison, Walter Pater, Frederick Sandys, Bram Stoker, J. A. Symonds, R. Y. Tyrrell, A. W. Verrall, Augusta Webster, and Oscar Wilde) engage with Euripidean tragedy to express the perceived tribulations and monstrosities of their rapidly changing era. Three of Euripides’s most widely read tragedies form the centre of the analysis, Bacchae, Medea, and Hippolytus, all of which are underpinned by Euripides’s associations with the god Dionysus. Although Ernst Behler’s 1986 article persuasively claimed a “nineteenth century damnatio of Euripides,” I argue that Euripidean texts were nevertheless widely read, translated, and appropriated into Victorian literature as a vehicle through which writers expressed ideas about aspects of ancient Greece antithetical to Matthew Arnold’s more popular notions of its “sweetness and light.” Through a theoretical framework inspired by Bakhtin, Foucault, Burkert, and Sedgwick, I analyze ancient and Victorian discursive formations; the material conditions of Victorian life, which prompt identification with Euripidean drama; and the socio-political institutions which Euripidean-inflected Victorian texts critique.
Open Access
Road Work: Destabilizing National Myth in North American Narratives of Mobility
(2023-03-28) Howe, Emily; Redding, Arthur F.
This dissertation examines the historical contexts of the American road narrative and the way that those contexts, as well as the genre more broadly, have been incorporated into Canadian road texts. Canadian road narratives often draw on the nation building that many American texts are invested in producing. Nation building, however, is not as central to those journeys undertaken by people of colour and Indigenous and Native American travellers. Accordingly, I will be making a conceptual distinction between the road narrative and what I call narratives of mobility. I make this distinction because often in these texts, Indigenous and Native American peoples as well as people of colour are forced to travel as a means of claiming space. Space, of course, conceptualized broadly and reaching beyond just the physical and inclusive of social and cultural as well. The claiming of space in these texts is also accompanied by a reckoning with constructions of nation and the traveller’s place within constructs of national identity. In examining these narratives, I will also be drawing on the emerging field of mobility studies to create a more nuanced discussion of the unique experience of movement in relation to the narrative myth of nation. Additionally, the narrative of mobility offers a fruitful genre through which to employ transnational study because it is tied to the process of nation-building, and yet the experiences presented within the texts often unsettle national narratives. I examine On the Road by Jack Kerouac and This is My Country Too by John A. Williams to situate the road narrative genre’s American influences. I then turn to Volkswagen Blues by Jacques Poulin to demonstrate the way that those American influences permeate borders and represent the cross-cultural exchange that is central to North American transnationalism. I also use The Motorcyclist by George Elliot Clarke and Days by Moonlight by André Alexis to further investigate the way that narratives of mobility are always engaged in the process of destabilizing national myth, particularly when the traveler is a person of colour. Finally, I examine Slash by Jeanette Armstrong, Green Grass Running Water by Thomas King, and Four Souls by Louise Erdrich which engage with questions of nation, sovereignty, and borders through mobility. I argue that these are narratives of mobility in which the traveller reflects on their identity and relationship to nation. As they move through the varied landscapes and encounter an array of people and experiences, they begin to disentangle and destabilize prescribed narratives about national history and identity.
Open Access
Posthuman Game and Play: The Migration of Cyberpunk from Prose Media into the Medium of the Tabletop Roleplaying Game
(2022-12-14) Milman, David; Weiss, Allan
Tabletop roleplaying games (or TRPGs in short form) have often been objects of analytical confusion. Scholars such as Andrew Ross have made conclusions about them on the basis of the same methodological techniques typically used to analyze prose media. These conclusions fail to account for the content of what Noah Wardrip-Fruin has called “expressive processes.” Ludologists following the discipline first developed by Espen J. Aarseth have created a series of tools that can be used to avoid the pitfalls of analysing such objects as if they were identical to other forms of prose media, but in the process, that discipline has often willfully discounted ludic objects as having any form of narrativity. As a result, the full breadth of philosophical context that accompanies a literary genre’s migration from prose media to the medium of the TRPG has often been rendered analytically invisible. This dissertation addresses the question of exactly what content migrates from prose media to the medium of the TRPG by applying multidisciplinary approaches developed across English literature programs and the discipline of ludology to a close analysis of a specific case study: the migration of the cyberpunk genre into the medium of Cyberpunk, the tabletop roleplaying game. I conclude that, on the basis of this case study, what migrates is not merely a surface aesthetic, but a selection of philosophical and ethical assemblages that must be rendered visible if a meaningful form of media literacy involving such objects is to exist.
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.