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The Politics of Intermediality: Late Modernist Circulations of the Event
(2022-03-03)This dissertation examines late modernist, intermedial representations of events, considering art as an event and how art depicts and circulates events. Through cross-media close readings and interdisciplinary theories and ... -
Framing Standard and Dialect in Black Women's Novels
(2022-03-03)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 ... -
The Rhetoric of Citizenship, Slavery, and Immigration: Fashioning a Language for Belonging in English Literature
(2022-03-03)With the rise of transnational migration, political factions ration the status of citizen against global diasporas, positioning citizenship as the primary space to assert opposition to hybrid forms of identity and ... -
"Alien and Critical": The Modernist Satiric Practices of Djuna Barnes, Wyndham Lewis, and Virginia Woolf
(2022-03-03)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. ... -
The Lost Futures of Simone Weil: Metaxu, Decreation, and the Spectres of Myth
(2022-03-03)This dissertation places literature and myth at the suture of two of Simone Weil's most important concepts: decreation and metaxu. Decreation, or the decanting of subjectivity to become one with God, has become a fixture ... -
The Theatre of Linda Griffiths
(2022-03-03)Linda Griffiths, actor and playwright, is a charismatic and vital presence on the Toronto theatre scene from the early 1970s until her untimely death in 2014. She travels across Canada and to Broadway, performing Maggie & ... -
"Disconnecting Something From Anything": Fetishized Objects, Alienated Subjects, and Literary Modernism
(2022-03-03)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 ... -
Climates of Mutation: Posthuman Orientations in Twenty-First Century Ecological Science Fiction
(2021-07-06)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 ... -
"Playing Jewish Geography": Diaspora, Home, Nation-State, and Zionism in Contemporary Canadian and American Jewish Fiction
(2021-07-06)This dissertation explores fiction by American and Canadian Jewish authors that has Israel/Palestine as its setting or subject matter, analyzing them through a lens of diaspora studies in order to demonstrate how diaspora ... -
Otherwise than Neoliberalism: The Aesthetics of Failure in Contemporary American Literature
(2021-03-08)This study focuses on failure in contemporary American literature. It reads literary texts that foreground failure as responses to the social and economic conditions of neoliberalism, proposing that these texts disclose ... -
The Scotiabank Giller Prize: How Canadian
(2020-08-11)In Canada, as elsewhere, major literary prizes certify the works they distinguish, spurring a more intensive engagement with them at the levels of criticism, pedagogy, and popular culture, and effecting a major shift in ... -
Reading Material: Literary, Picturing, and Representational Strategies in the work of Carol Laing, Sue Lloyd, Andy Fabo, Sharon Switzer, Jane Buyers, and Allyson Clay
(2020-05-13)To employ a critical process that draws upon the network of relations and associations between works of art and literature, that generates different ways of reading and viewing that are inclusive and meaningful, and that ... -
Religion and the Validation of Magic: Literary Magic in Middle English Literature
(2020-05-11)Much scholarship on magic in the literature of medieval England has tried to uncover how literary magic reflects actual cultural practices of magic in medieval society. This dissertation contends that the cultural practice ... -
The Plot and The Archive: Curation, Provisional Histories, and Novels
(2020-05-11)The Plot and the Archive applies museum studies and curatorial techniques to post-1960s novels dealing with history and outlines the importance of a figure called the character-as-curator within such spaces. This figure ... -
Language and Identity: Sky Lee's Disappearing Moon Caf and Wayson Choy's The Jade Peony
(2020-05-11)Many critics recognize Sky Lees "Disappearing Moon Cafe" and Wayson Choys "The Jade Peony" for breaking the silence over issues that Chinese Canadians faced in the 1990s such as racism and lack of representation. However, ... -
Failures to Self-Locate: Counterfactual Ontologies in Contemporary Theatre and Physics
(2020-05-11)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 ... -
Elasticity and Hegemony: A Brief History of Addiction Narrative in the Postwar United States
(2020-05-11)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, ... -
Colonialism and/as Catastrophe: Animals, Environment, and Ecological Catastrophe in the Contemporary Postcolonial Novel
(2019-11-22)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 ... -
Framing the Citizen: Constructing Citizenship in Early Twentieth-Century Anglo-American Literary and Social Discourse
(2019-11-22)The first decades of the twentieth century leading up to World War II were a time of profound demographic transformation in Great Britain and America, a time when many peoplewriters and artists includedbegan questioning ... -
Romanticism and the Temporality of Wander
(2019-11-22)This dissertation contextualizes and accounts for the proliferation of representations of wander that permeate British Romanticism. The prominence of wander in this writing is an articulation of the embodiment of a new ...