Humanities

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Open Access
Psychoanalytic Transference: Julia Kristeva’s Struggle for Maternal Identification
(2024-11-07) Malik, Sehrish Sarfaraz; Ingram, Susan
By examining Alice Jardine’s intellectual biography of Julia Kristeva’s life and work, this dissertation engages in intertextual, interpretative, and textually based research, bringing together Jardine’s biography with Kristeva’s psychoanalytic theories and later autobiographical reflections. Kristeva’s own learning to do away with maternal desire is represented unconsciously yet powerfully by Jardine, who, I establish, takes the position as her good-enough biographer. Chapters are structured around six personal moments in Kristeva’s life that I have chosen from Jardine’s text: the mother and grandmother, father and symbolic fathers, and son and son-substitutes. My dissertation highlights the importance of these moments since they are connected to motherhood and substitutes, creativity and loss, as Kristeva moves in and out of time to mark her own difference and authority between primary and symbolic relations. My understanding of Jardine’s narrative suggests that Kristeva is composed of her own textual theories and childhood stories. I argue that Kristeva has lived her life through her psychoanalytic concepts, rebuilding her transitional objects and defense mechanism of projective identification with the maternal while sublimating the loss of her primary relations in symbolic relationships. Since the unconscious fragments of the personal erupt into a poetic revolution, I read Jardine’s biography to understand Kristeva’s practice of writing what she is living at any given moment as representing the energy charges and the psychical marks of the unconscious rhythmic space. As a method, my goal is to play with dynamic approaches to psychoanalysis by weaving together a technique representing a wave of Kristeva’s personal experiences as part of her theoretical writing. This way of approaching life and work is critical for me to move from the description of events in Kristeva’s life toward psychoanalytical levels of reflection about her works through her theories to demonstrate how Kristeva manifested her own subjectivity. Refusing to distinguish between the personal and the textual, life and theory, my investigation reads for the entirety of Kristeva’s subjectivity, where living and loving take the risk of thinking, as part of distancing from primary relations.
Open Access
Pakistani Science Fiction: Glocalizing the Genre
(2024-11-07) Kiran, Sobia; Shea, Victor
The dissertation provides the first introductory survey of Pakistani science fiction (sf) in diverse media in Urdu and English from the 1980s to the present. Using the insights of Western and Indian sf scholars along with Pakistani literary scholarship, this study employs a comparative approach to provide an eclectic and interdisciplinary perspective mainly through a glocal lens in combination with historical, postcolonial, feminist, and eco-critical frameworks. This dissertation studies speculative works published, produced, and labelled as science fiction, with chapters on Tarzan as a model of glocalized proto sf in Urdu; religion as a subject and as an episteme; varied treatment of the alien figure; post 9/11 identity crisis; and futuristic and other visions. It uses a thematic organization for the chapters to structure the close reading of multiple works produced in diverse media, in two different languages, and from time periods spanning from 1980s to the present. The discussion analyzes films such as Shaani (dir. Saeed Rizvi 1989) and Sar Kata Insan (The Beheaded Man: dir. Rizvi 1994); sf stories in Tilism i Hosh Afza (The Enlightenment of the Senses 2013) by Ashfaq Ahmed; the cartoon series Burka Avenger presenting a female superhero (Haroon Rashid 2013-2016); the comic series Buraaq presenting a Muslim superhero (Adil Imtiaz and Kamil Imtiaz 2011- present); the animated bilingual cyberpunk films Shehre Tabassum (A City of Smiles 2020) and Swipe (2020) by Arafat Mazhar; and literary contributions to the field made by Usman T. Malik, Sidra Sheikh, Bina Shah, and Muhammad Omar Iftikhar, with works like Midnight Doorways: Fables from Pakistan (2021), The Light Blue Jumper (2017), Before She Sleeps (2018), and Divided Species (2020). These works incorporate Western and desi elements in their world- building to imagine Pakistan’s past, present, and future. Utilizing the glocalization theory by Roland Robertson, the dissertation argues that Pakistani sf reshapes the science fiction genre by not only borrowing from Western and Indian sf traditions but also incorporating the local and desi elements. Pakistani sf reflects attempts to reconfigure Pakistani identity in both national and international forums by including the gendered and religious others as well as by challenging the Western negative perception and representation of Muslims and Islam. It not only addresses the local issues of corruption, extremism, and class and gender discrimination but also highlights the problems generated by global capitalism and foreign interference. In addition, Pakistani sf works try to dissociate Pakistan’s and generally Islam’s association with fundamentalism, extremism, and terrorism in the glocal context of rising Islamophobia. By identifying the main motifs, and patterns in Pakistani sf, the dissertation introduces a new field in the global sf studies and opens a dialogic space for the future scholars to contribute to the emerging field. The study holds the potential to attract readers, scholars, and students interested in Pakistani Science Fiction, Pakistani Speculative Fiction, Western Science Fiction, Indian Science Fiction, South Asian Futurisms, and Global sf Studies.
Open Access
The Inside and Outside are One and the Same: Field Recording, Vibration, and Disaster in Northeastern Japan after 3.11
(2024-11-07) Trichilo, Joshua Gordon; Goossen, Ted
This dissertation maps a politics of listening through the field recording practices of sound artists, archivists and composers directly affected by the earthquake, tsunami, and radiation releases impacting the eastern coastal areas of Tohoku, Japan on and since 2011. The megathrust earthquake on March 11, 2011, set off a series of events—now referred to as the 3.11 Triple Disasters—that not only impacted already struggling, subjugated cities and towns, it also disturbed the ideologies and networks that drive that subjugation under the capital-nation-state. While the individuals discussed here are directly affected and directly respond, their activities are marginalized by the dominant positions taken in the popular 3.11 debates. These latter positions debate Tohoku’s entrepreneur “recovery,” the nation’s role in “recovering” a unified identity, and the state’s failures or victories in effectively distributing “recovery” insights and reparations—shoring up the antinomies of the capital-nation-state hegemony. These dominant understandings reify the disasters. Those affected oscillate between “survivors” and “victims” depending on how they serve the debate. The individuals discusses here, however, alternative ways of living in vibrating places. I focus on three individuals, K, Sato Nami, and Nagahata Koji. They take up sound-based cultural activities that dynamically and critically intervene in their local post-disaster situations. Each individual centralizes field recording, mobilizing the performativities, meanings, and attunements that such an auditory practice might afford. A blogger and theatre director who lives and works in “the most devasted city” records hours of waves on a wall along the coast; a musician whose town was destroyed and never rebuilt records events in the now open area with members of her community; a professor goes to hot spots within and around Fukushima city and records “radioactive silence”…. The field recording practices are interpreted as various politics of listening, that is, transductions of processes of attention and intensity that rework the patterns in the field of relations imparted to the subject. The dissertation argues that, against the objectification of the vibrations of the disasters, the vibrational disruptions and energies of the events are injected into the practices as sonic demands that emerge in the affected places.
Open Access
Transhumanism: A Religion Without Religion
(2024-07-18) Sherbert, Michael Gilbert; Cauchi, Mark
This project seeks to dispel the belief that transhumanism (a movement advocating for human-enhancement through technology) is diametrically opposed to religion. Transhumanism, rather than being a non-religious or secular movement, is instead a survival of Christian religious ideology shorn of its explicit religious character and transformed into a less religiously-apparent secular-scientific guise, retaining both beneficial and dangerous religious structures that continue to persist in transhumanist discourse. Many of the foundational religious structures that are largely unrecognized by transhumanists that I discuss include: the elimination of death, the sacredness of human life, the imposition of human-exceptionalism by understanding humanity as God-like, and finally, an unwavering faith in predetermined and unalterable messianic future events. Regardless of their presentation in a secular-scientific idiom, transhumanism’s retention of religious structures appropriates and continues the history of religious ideas deeply ingrained in Western culture, in what I call, following Jacques Derrida, transhumanism’s “religion without religion.” My argument employs a deconstructive logic of the X without X, or in this case, a “religion without religion,” to examine some of the ways religion may be extended by non-religious means, such as through the secular-scientific discourse of transhumanism. The value of thinking of transhumanism as a religion without religion, an approach lacking in current scholarship, is its ability to recognize the discursive histories of transhumanism’s religious past, while also recognizing the new, religious and non-religious possibilities of transhumanism’s future. My deconstructive perspective highlights the religious structures within transhumanism, showing how transhumanism unwittingly perpetuates dogmatic formulations of religious structures, like a determinate messianism, that may inflict incalculable harm to humanity and nonhuman beings alike. Recognizing these religious structures reveals how transhumanism can draw strength from the religious structures they too often ignore by being more self-critical and acknowledging the need for the non-knowledge of faith even in scientific pursuits, while also avoiding the dangers of religion, such as the over-confidence in technology to solve the problem of death. This project uncovers some of the harmful effects of the religious structures that survive in transhumanist discourse in the hopes that these dangers may be mitigated or avoided in the future.
Open Access
Free Speech & its Limits: A Study of the Rippling Effects of Hate Speech Laws in Canada
(2023-12-08) Mohammadi, Monireh; Shea, Victor
This dissertation critically examines the loopholes in Canada’s hate speech legislation and its adjudication processes within courts and tribunals. It argues that Canadian hate speech laws are founded on expansive notions of harm, creating a slippery slope where protected expressions can also face restrictions. This dissertation argues that the current hate speech legal framework in Canada overlooks speech as an exceptional social phenomenon that is inextricable from human creativity, which is inherently polysemous, versatile, and interpretive, especially concerning sociopolitical, ideological, and cultural viewpoints. The core argument of this dissertation is that given the characteristics and complexities of speech and the lack of evidence that can link an alleged hate speech to its harm, hate speech cases are adjudicated through a common sense or deference to legislative judgment approach, and not through deductive and evidence-based reasoning. By closely analyzing hate speech cases, this dissertation demonstrates that in Canada the adjudication of hate speech cases is excessively subjective and inconsistent. This dissertation examines the rippling effects of Canada’s hate speech legal regime by uncovering the intertwining of hate speech laws with politics, leading to the rise of a phenomenon termed ‘speech scare’ that imposes societal and cultural pressures on free expression, especially on controversial topics. Finally, the dissertation examines the discourse of online hate speech, revealing how excessive pressure for online communication moderation can have more detrimental effects on the right to freedom of expression and the right to privacy.
Open Access
From the Physical to the Digital Playground: Child Folklore in the COVID Era
(2023-03-28) Santyr, Jenna Leigh; Cowdy, Cheryl
In the fall of 2019, the places of childhood in North America became increasingly prohibited to the very populations they served. In response, children migrated more purposely to the digital playground. In this dissertation, I argue that children’s social interactions and cultural production have changed in appearance and organization within the virtual space but remain fundamentally rooted in the same folkloric traditions originally seen in the physical world. I base my argument on the premise that children’s technological practices do not occur outside of, nor are they separated from the cultural practices that occur on the physical playground, but that children’s social and cultural lives are transmediated (Terrell, 2015). Very little research has endeavoured to explore the evolution of folklore in an increasingly digital age. This dissertation attempts to ignite a re-examination of the intimate relationship between technology and folklore and shine a light on the often-overlooked digital participation of children. Using transmediated sociality theories, I argue that children’s play traditions and folklore harmoniously interact with popular culture and technology, while their online practices act as an extension of this playground folk tradition. Michel Foucault’s (1986) concept of heterotopia informs the analysis of children’s folklore from the physical to the digital playground and is the impetus for the concept of heterotopic transmediated play. The term considers the playground to be a discursive space that upsets and transforms the various spaces that converge within its boundaries, producing a form of play that is simultaneously fluid and placeless yet also stable and grounded. Folklore, as explored through the case studies of play, fandom, YouTube parodies, and TikTok dances, functions as the symbolic ‘glue’ for appropriating popular culture into play practices and children’s navigation of the digital space.
Open Access
Art routes: Locating second-generation black Caribbean Canadian women's perspectives
(2022-12-14) Brown, Shaunasea Elaine; Davis, Andrea A.
Using visual and performance art, music and photography, Art Routes: Locating Second-Generation Black Caribbean Canadian Women’s Perspectives centers a specifically second-generation discourse using the artwork and lived experiences of second-generation Black women artists—Kamilah Apong, Sandra Brewster, Shaunasea Brown, Anique Jordan, Brianna Roye, Camille Turner and Shi Wisdom. By attending to the contours of Black life in the complex geographies of Toronto and beyond, Art Routes acknowledges and articulates how Black women artists provide blueprints for how Black people can create their own kinds of freedom. Through the nuanced position of second-generation be(long)ing, Art Routes captures the struggle of second-generation Black women artists to engage in new forms of world-making that reevaluate ideas about gender, sexuality, and citizenship, posit new radical strategies of care, and re/define how Black people live within and despite contexts of death and dying. With the understanding that the ability to create is a matter of life and death for Black people, Art Routes offers creative ways to think about Black being in Canada while identifying how Black Canadian women artists imagine and construct more inhabitable environments for themselves and their communities.
Open Access
The Measure of a Medieval Man: the Emotional Community of Military Men in the Fourteenth Century
(2022-12-14) Wilk, Sarah; Cohen, Thomas V.
What went through a medieval knight’s mind when he saw fellow soldiers turn and flee a battlefield? How did he feel in the aftermath, when it was time to identify and grieve for fallen friends and comrades? These questions are difficult to answer, because candid war writing was not widespread until the First World War. What has survived is plentiful writing that includes depictions of emotions such as fear, shame, and cowardice by military men, texts that intended to influence other men’s behaviour. My dissertation explores this writing and these questions, focusing on the major land battles in the first half of the Hundred Years War (1337-1453). This period saw decisive English victories at the Battles of Crécy (1346) and Poitiers (1356), and a Pyrrhic victory at Nájera (1367). The lengthy conflict saw increased democratization of warfare, where a former farmer from Wales could kill with a longbow as effectively as could a French duke on horseback. Part of the problem of studying medieval emotions is that the culture was still largely oral. As Andrew Taylor wrote in his 1999 article, boys learned how to behave both in battle and with their comrades from conversation with older men. There are, however, chronicles and epic poems that have survived from the period. While none of these are candid diaries, they illuminate the kinds of fear that were acceptable, what qualified as cowardice, and how men avoided shame. All this writing both stems from and supports what I am calling the ‘emotional community of military men’, with an eye to Barbara Rosenwein’s work on emotional communities. I rely largely on a careful reading of the above sources to get as close as possible to the emotions associated with the fluctuating boundaries of the community of military men and with the active renegotiation of class masculinities. This dissertation therefore stands at the intersection of history, literary studies, the history of emotions, and the history of masculinities. It has two main parts. The first establishes how the emotional community of military men affected the way knights could expect to be depicted. It explores how the history of emotions provides a way to define the community and shows how writers reinforced the communities’ boundaries. The second part offers close readings of writing concerned with the three major land battles that occurred between 1346 and 1367, showing what emotions were permitted to military characters, and how the authors intended their writing to instruct other men.
Open Access
Locating the Indian Gendered Subaltern on Digital Platforms: Digital Activism in #section377 and #metooindia
(2022-08-08) Nanditha, Narayanamoorthy; Reisenleitner, Markus
This work examines the relationship between technology and activism in India, and the role that digital infrastructures play in the development of gendered digital protest. Through a combination of textual discourse and visual analysis, and critical digital humanities, feminist and queer frameworks, I study the digital queer movement around #Section377, and the feminist movement around #MeTooIndia on Twitter and Instagram in India. Through this research, I demonstrate how social media platforms such as Twitter and Instagram shape discourse surrounding digital activism, and how digital technologies both enable and disrupt subaltern voices, narratives and bodies in Indian cyberspaces. The comparative study of digital gender movements uncovers how digital platforms empower subaltern gendered voices, enable the construction of digital identities, and facilitate the formation of affective networks of empathy and subaltern counterpublics of resistance through the use of protest hashtags in Indian and Indian diasporic communities in Canada. Simultaneously, however, this study illustrates that digital technologies also hinder the amplification of marginalized voices, and create barriers in participation, representation, and inclusion online. Despite the construction of safe spaces and subaltern counterpublics on Twitter and Instagram, both digital queer and the feminist movements in India are exclusive, and lack individual representation and voluntary participation of women and LGBTQIA+ groups online. This research traces the histories of gendered exclusion that emerge through far-right nationalist, homophobic, and misogynist discourse, and work to actively decenter marginalized voices online in English and regional Indian languages such as Hindi that occur both in the form of textual and visual rhetoric. Ultimately, this research disrupts and troubles the traditional notions of technological determinism, particularly in the Global South, and focuses on questions of digital access, participation, and representation of vulnerable communities.
Open Access
Black Nerds Pleasure Reading Choices: Race, Representation and Prosocial Skills
(2022-08-08) Seow, Janet Rosemarie; Sanders, Leslie; Chakarborty, Kabita
Not much is known about what African Canadian Black youth read for pleasure. The subject of this study is a group of young people who belong to the Black nerd subculture (aka Blerds) of urban Toronto. The participants are between 16 and 25 years of age and identify as predominantly working class. Research conducted with this group reveals that graphic novels, fan fiction, traditional comics and webcomics are their main reading choices. Participatory research is used to understand how these texts are read and their implications for race, representation and prosocial skills and values. Although there are common threads among all Blerds, this study adopts and adapts youth subcultural theory and intersectional theory to understand the unique interest, sense of belonging, morals and values of Blerds in the specific location of urban Toronto. Since research on the Blerd subculture is limited, the study's findings provide insights into the Blerd culture and Black youth's perspectives about living in multiracial, multicultural Toronto.
Open Access
Tel Aviv-Jaffa, One City, Two Worlds: An Investigation into the History, Culture, Language, Identity, Race, Economy, and Heritage of a Global Centre
(2022-03-03) Elharar, Shoshana; Reisenleitner, Markus
This dissertation concentrates on one urban site, Tel Aviv-Jaffa, in Israel. The hyphen between the two names, Tel Aviv and Jaffa, alludes to their separated past, present, and maybe future. In the past they were two cities: Tel Aviv the younger was established in 1909, while Jaffa is thousands of years old. The focus of this dissertation is the last century. During this significant historical period, as modernity gave way to the postmodern period, we find the erection of Tel Aviv suburb next to the old city of Jaffa, a small Jewish site that grew in time to become the countrys leading city. Each of these two cities was independent until 1950 when international and local circumstances led to their unification into one city, carrying both names: Tel Aviv-Jaffa, with a hyphen added between the two names. Drawing on thousands of archival documents, primary and secondary sources, guided tours in both parts of the city, and interviews, this dissertation charts the changing relations of these two sites. Exploration of both cities jointly is quite rare. This dissertation analyses both parts: before their unification, (and why the new Jewish immigrants to Jaffa separated themselves physically from the Arabs spirit), continuing with the unification of the two cities into one, and ending with the contemporary state of both sides of this one hyphenated city. It concludes with the question is it better considered as one or two, as just moving from one side to the other reveals the feeling of crossing from one world to another.
Open Access
Incorporating Children's Picturebooks on Mindfulness in Bibliotherapy
(2022-03-03) Danilewitz, Debra Anne; Orr, Deborah
Abstract Picturebooks are powerful forms of stories because the illustrations work in concert with text. In this dissertation, I explore how picturebooks are used in bibliotherapy to enhance and teach the concepts of mindfulness. I discuss bibliotherapy from a developmental and clinical perspective. Bibliotherapy is a medium that encourages school-aged children to express emotions to develop empathy and coping strategies for emotional wellness. This dissertation aims to examine the picturebooks used in bibliotherapy in educational and therapeutic contexts. Picturebooks, can often facilitate children's ability to deal with their emotional concerns and prepare children for life events. Incorporating children's picturebooks, teaching mindfulness, and promoting empathy development in children is crucial for emotional well-being and needs to be situated in the literature circle. In this dissertation, I explore how picturebooks can be used for therapeutic purposes and incorporated into educational and therapeutic contexts. The main objectives of bibliotherapy are to promote empathy development and emotional wellness in children. Through stories, children can learn about empathic responses to situations and, over time, grow in their empathy. Adults need to listen to childrens voices. Once adults have created a space to listen to children, they can use various picturebooks to access childrens emotional realm. Scholarly research has just begun to examine the literature on mindfulness as a window into childrens educational and therapeutic worlds. There is a growing body of literature on the effectiveness of mindfulness for children. My research will illuminate ways regarding teaching mindfulness to children. Picturebooks can help children develop the capacity to learn mindfulness strategies. It is widely acknowledged that children cannot practice mindfulness in the same way that adults do because their executive functioning is not fully developed. The Present, an interactive colouring book on mindfulness that I have written, focuses on allowing children to participate mindfully within a contemplative and performative capacity and will be discussed in this dissertation. Academic writing must tell a story. Even the most specialized academic writing, such as research reports, must tell a story. This dissertation tells a story of the therapeutic benefits of picture-books for children and childrens responses to these stories.
Open Access
Natural Fiction and Artifice in Humes Treatise
(2021-11-15) Delaney, Brent C.; Tweyman, Stanley
David Humes early philosophy appeals to fiction and artifice to explain several important features in our cognitive and social activity. The exact meaning of these concepts, however, remains ambiguous because of the unsystematic way in which Hume employs them. In this dissertation, I develop a typology of Humean fictions and artifices to clarify and render his account consistent. In so doing, I identify a special class of fictions I divide into (a) natural fictions and (b) natural artifices. I argue that this special class of cognitive and social fictions represent a significant break with prior English-speaking philosophers, such as Francis Bacon and John Locke, in so far as these fictions and artifices of the imagination are recognized as natural, irresistible, and pragmatically useful in human cognition and social activity. That fictions and artifices are naturally generated by the imagination in epistemic and moral contexts, I argue, is a watershed discovery in the history of philosophy. Indeed, it is a philosophical conclusion that poses serious, perhaps fatal, problems for philosophers who espouse thoroughgoing realist positions. More broadly, Humes pursuit of applying the experimental method to the moral subject reveals that human nature is mightily governed by the imagination, and that fictions and artifices are ubiquitous across the domains of science, morality, theology, logic, mathematics, and philosophy. For that reason, I suggest Hume ought to be recognized as a central figure in the history of philosophical fictionalism. Specifically, via a comparative analysis of Hume and Hans Vaihinger, I make the case that Hume functions as a vital link between Hobbes, Berkeley, and Kant in the development of early modern fictionalism.
Open Access
The Extra-Ordinary Girl Under Neoliberalism, On and Off Screen: How Teen Girls in Toronto Negotiate Care, Connection, and Figurations of Girlhood
(2021-11-15) Benigno, Tina Belinda; Cowdy, Cheryl
This work examines the extra-ordinary girl as she exists under neoliberalismm today. The extra-ordinary girl in this dissertation refers to the girl with a public presence who has great physical, mental and/or social power. Through a combination of qualitative research group interviews with teen girls in Toronto, and textual and cultural analyses of figurations of girlhood in popular culture, I emphasize the importance of listening to real teen girls whose perspectives and values might not match those attributed to dominant cultural models of girlhood. I explore contemporary girl figures and figurations of girlhood, on and off screen, highlighting how girls who are not in the public eye negotiate standards of exceptionality in relation to their own experiences of social power, while also defining the importance of care and connection to their relationships and personal values. Katniss from The Hunger Games and Sabrina from Chilling Adventures of Sabrina are two case examples within contemporary YA speculative fiction film and TV of an extra-ordinary teen girl protagonist. These two cases of the extra-ordinary girl the warrior-activist and the witch share some common traits rooted in an ethic of care. Moreover, these two character types are compelling for the ways they reflect social practices that real girls also engage in: activism and alternative spirituality. The fictional representations of extra-ordinary girlhood have a dialogic relationship with cultural-historical practices of girls who are visible activists, and with those who are increasingly interested in alternative spirituality. Both figures not only wield their exceptional power to effect social change, but they also become models for popular media to co-opt and appropriate into an extra-ordinary girl figure. For the girls in my study, the extra-ordinariness of the characters, like the extraordinariness of the activist discussed in our sessions, is understood within the context of care and connection. While the girls I interviewed value relationships and community, their underlying feelings of needing to work on being braver and more confident reveal internalized neoliberal messages. In my analysis of coming of age and figurations of extra-ordinary girlhood, I illuminate the complexity of care under neoliberalism for the teen girl today.
Open Access
Justice Doers: The Vigilante as a Mythic Figure and its Role in Creating a More Violent Culture in America
(2021-07-06) Mortensen, Erik William; Redding, Arthur F.
This dissertation builds off the work of Richard Slotkin in examining the relationship between myth-making and violence in American culture. The specific myth this dissertation focuses on is the myth of the vigilante hero and its role in creating a more violent culture in America. The vigilante is a unique American term and figure, and while the figure has been connected to the myth of the American frontier, it has not been recognized as a mythic figure in its own right. This dissertation defines, outlines, and demonstrates the origin of myth of the vigilante hero; it then proceeds to examine how the myth gained cultural power through replication and revisions. The dissertation argues that a vigilante cannot be understood outside of a narrative that the figure is placed within. It is the narrative pattern and formula for the vigilante that creates the myth of the vigilante hero. This narrative formula begins in historical and news narratives about vigilantes, but over time is widened into fictional narratives across diverse media forms. The narrative formula also allows for any political and cultural position, such as class, ethnicity, and gender, to be mapped into the myth. This will legitimate the vigilante figure as a hero, and in turn legitimate their extra-legal violent tactics. As a result, any violent actors pursuing their sense of justice can be made into heroes and have their violence legitimated once mapped into the myth. Therefore, this myth creates an unending cycle of violence in the culture so long as it is not being critically engaged, deconstructed, and exposed.
Open Access
Sounding Madness: The Ethics of Listening in Janet Frame's Faces in the Water
(2021-07-06) Foisy, Christina; Vanstone, Gail
Sounding Madness: The Ethics of Listening in Janet Frames Faces in the Water is a transdisciplinary sonic exploration of the historical, cultural, and theoretical concerns surrounding electroshocks (AKA electroconvulsive therapy or ECT) impact on memory, its controversial accusations of erasure and its current revival as a miracle (Peck 2) treatment for complex trauma (PTSD). My project employs sound as a verb (Voegelin 17) for voicing claims of memory erasure (Andre 6) by women ECT survivors that have been named groundless (Fink 17) by psychiatrists. To do so, I propose a sonic interpretation of Janet Frames 1961 novel Faces in the Water, a fictional account of her twelve-year stay in New Zealand mental institutions and 200 electroshock treatments in the late 1940s-1950s, because it depicts a rich sonic landscape of shock (treatment as trauma) and madness as a new kind of music (77). Since Frame prioritizes sound as a literary device, I weave her voice within a larger historical sonic context, dating back to Victorian medical electricity, the soundscape of the asylum and the sounds of contemporary Mad activism. Utilizing sound art as a Research-Creation method that employs and embodies diverse theories of listening (from psychoanalytic to phenomenological), I aim to create a sonic space for listening otherwise (Levinas, Lispari, Voegelin, Todd) towards Mad dialogical and epistemological justice.
Open Access
Monstrous Liminality; or the Uncanny Strangers of Secularized Modernity
(2021-07-06) Beghetto, Robert Gerald; Reisenleitner, Markus
As modernity began to rapidly change and influence European culture, many nineteenth and twentieth-century writers and intellectuals struggled to identify themselves with this modern paradoxical context. As a result, the modern stranger was conjured up out of the uncanny depths of secularized modernity. Although a subject whose makeup is continually shifting, the modern stranger still exists as a strong allegory for secularized modernity, particularly because of its unsolidified and liminal characteristics. Along with its doppelgnger the monster, the stranger reflects not only uncanny otherness but the horrors and anxiety of realizing the potential imperfections and weaknesses of the individual, society, and their utopian imaginings. My project investigates the paradoxical, utopian and negative-utopian makeup of the modern stranger as an outcome of secularizing and modernizing changes in what is typically regarded as Western, predominately European, Judeo-Christian culture and history, beginning with the advent of modernity. By examining the liminal sphere located between the secular and sacred that I argue has characterized modernity itself, the study showcases the transformation of the stranger from something external into a figure far more liminal, which is forced to traverse uncanny space in an attempt to find new meanings for an age.
Open Access
Translating Mediation in Travel Writing: India in Pierre Sonnerat's Voyage aux Indes orientales et la Chine (1782)
(2021-03-08) Banerjee, Sanjukta; Guzman, Maria Constanza
In recent decades, a growing number of studies have focused on the parallels and interconnections between travel writing and translation to examine the ways in which both practices can be understood to represent the foreign, particularly in colonial contexts. Scholarship on non-Anglophone European accounts of India, however, has remained indifferent to this nexus. This dissertation addresses this gap through an exploration of the discursive strategies of representation at play in eighteenth-century French travel writing on India, a mostly neglected body of work in translation studies. Approaching early colonial India as a triangular colonial space and a site of pliable, competing colonialisms between France and Britain, I examine the plurality of mediations readable in a specific account, to underscore translation not only as an interlingual process but an entire problematic. To this end, I provide an annotated English translation of excerpts from French naturalist traveller Pierre Sonnerats "Voyage aux Indes orientales et la Chine" (1782), an example of interlingual travel notable for its ethnographic account of India. My focus is on the assumptions and mechanisms at play in translating difference into commensurability, particularly in relation to the travellers located understanding of language and its entwining with other categories of knowledge. Beginning with an exploration of the co-constitutive nature of Anglo-French relations in early colonial India and in the knowledge networks of the global eighteenth century, inflected and sustained by the local, I examine translation and travel (writing) as connected practices and concepts, their connections with the ethnographic and scientific, and the ethical implications of knowledge construction through travel and translation in contexts of empire. The annotated translation is based on an analytical apparatus bringing together science, religion, and languagegrounded in specific historiesto go beyond the perspective of the traveller and include the travellee, to consider both as socialized subjects linked to networks of other social agents.
Open Access
Glamour in the Good: Exhibiting Glamour's Expression in Toronto's Urban Imaginary
(2021-03-08) Franklin, Kathryn Ashley; Ingram, Susan
This dissertation examines the beguiling but illusory concept of glamour as a historical and aesthetic component of Torontos urban imaginary. In the years since William Howland, Torontos 25th mayor from 1886-87, coined the phrase Toronto the Good, Toronto has undeniably shed its good moniker and steadily positioned itself as a glamorous world-class city. This dissertation uses glamour as a prism to illustrate how the citys literature, art, fashion, music and film have contributed to Torontos emergence as a cosmopolitan global city. Alongside these art forms, this study uses a comparative analysis to examine how historical and cultural developments such as the construction of Casa Loma, the popularity of the 1926 Miss Toronto pageant, the 1960s counterculture of Yorkville, the celebrity of the Toronto International Film Festival, the aftermath of the 1990s recession and the rise in gentrification have helped to shape a unique expression of glamour for the city. Drawing upon archival materials, primary and secondary sources, and close readings, this dissertation charts a history of glamour in Toronto and demonstrates how Torontonians have continuously negotiated, courted, and challenged the expression of glamour in the city. This history reveals the role gender and sexual orientation have played in the rise of glamour in Toronto and the conditions that shape the way women, in particular, have accessed and experienced glamour in the city. Ultimately, these contexts shed light on the ways in which Torontonians have historically navigated the tensions between glamour and the good.
Open Access
The Book and its Discontents: Truth, Information, and the Deathing of the Book
(2021-03-08) Unwin, Peter Albert; McLaren, Scott Kenneth
Since the late 1980s, popular and academic writers, have engaged in a rhetorical phenomenon titled the death of the book or the book is dead. The repetition of these headlines indicate the anxieties brought about by the sudden imposition of a radically different communications technology and the effects it has imposed on the practice of every-day living. This study seeks to deepen this commonplace trope and examine the reasons behind its appearance and its prevalent use during digital times. It opens with an investigation of a similar nineteenth century discussion known as the end of the book, and historicizes a sustained and masculine dissatisfaction with the book that begins with Thomas Edison. The following chapters undertake an in depth history of the death of the book, interrogating the technologies that appeared following the 1870s, all of which sought to divorce the written word from the instantiations of ink and paper and to divert text into metal-based, often electrically-driven machines. Along with the trope of the death of the book, this dissertation maps the construction of a techno-positivist media narrative that seeks to unseat the book from its privileged position in the everyday life of Western societies. This narrative is coupled with the popular death of the book narrative to interrogate how both seek to domesticate and conceal the devastating consequences of the manufacture and disposal of electro-digital technologies. Consequently, the appearance of death of the book or the book is dead headlines are investigated as strategic tactics that cover up the death of computer technology, and the destabilizing effects that have followed in the wake of its imposition. Finally, this work locates the death of the book within a shift between truth with its epistemological freight and information which is understood to be free of such freight, and is routinely presented instead as objective, even raw. It explores how these conceptions contribute toward a repositioning of the book, not as a dead or superannuated technology, but as a guerilla technology, a tool of resistance and insubordination, capable of existing outside the power and surveillance capabilities of a digital empire.