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  • ItemOpen 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.
  • ItemOpen 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.
  • ItemOpen 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.
  • ItemOpen 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.
  • ItemOpen 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.
  • ItemOpen 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.
  • ItemOpen 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.
  • ItemOpen 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.
  • ItemOpen 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.”
  • ItemOpen 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.
  • ItemOpen 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.
  • ItemOpen 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.
  • ItemOpen 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.
  • ItemOpen Access
    Cold War Therapeutic Formations: Reconfiguring Political Subjectivity in American Literature
    (2022-08-08) McIntyre, Christopher Michael; Redding, Arthur F.
    This dissertation considers how American fiction from the years of 1947-1967 that engages with psychiatric treatment responds to the expanding cultural authority of psychiatry and its place in constituting Cold War political and economic relations. Moreover, it examines how fiction from this period considers the possibilities for political agency that psychiatric knowledge and treatment enable. By examining novels by Mickey Spillane, Charles Willeford, Ralph Ellison, Norman Mailer, and Kurt Vonnegut, this project identifies how multiple psychiatric approaches, in particular military psychiatry, social psychiatry, and anti-psychiatry, and their place in fiction, theorize political, economic, and sexual alternatives to Cold War liberalism. Reading fiction along with the works of influential figures including sociologist Gunnar Myrdal and psychiatrists including Harry Stack Sullivan, Fredric Wertham, Wilhelm Reich, R.D. Laing, and Thomas Szasz, demonstrates how psychiatry became a prominent terrain for post-World War II writers to debate the prevailing etiological factors of mental illness and theorize new political formations through therapeutic approaches. The primary texts considered in this dissertation share a skepticism and ambivalence towards biological explanations of mental illness and draw on psychiatric knowledge and treatment methods to disrupt Fordist economic relations and reformulate relations of production and reproduction. These texts, this dissertation argues, consider how pathologized forms of affect can be rechanneled into alternatives to Cold War liberalism and Fordist production in the 1950s as well as the challenges posed to such political alternatives in the midst of the faltering of consensus culture and the transition to post-Fordism that was emerging in the late 1960s.
  • ItemOpen Access
    Writing in the Long Whig Opposition: The Work of John Wilkes, Edmund Burke, and Richard Brinsley Sheridan, Whig Contributors to the Expansion of the Public Sphere 17621800
    (2022-08-08) Zapotochny, Jack; Michasiw, Kim Ian
    In this dissertation, I identify a period in British political history as the "Long Whig Opposition," during which the Whigs served primarily in opposition to Tory governments in the House of Commons. This period begins in the early 1760s and continues until the end of the 18th century. The Long Whig Opposition succeeds the "Long Opposition" which Jrgen Habermas identifies in The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere (1962) during which the Tories formed a lasting opposition to the Whig government of Robert Walpole, Britains longest-serving Prime Minister. I examine the literature of the Long Whig Opposition as an extension of political discourse into the public sphere which subverted the democratic regressions of the 18th century which repressed parliamentary debate and journalism, and decreased the size of the electorate in the United Kingdom. I argue that literary works by Whig Members of Parliament disseminated reformist discourse into the public sphere, appealing to the support of a larger section of the public (including the unfranchised) because of the limitations of parliamentary opposition. These publications, comprising genres such as journalism, poetry, philosophy, and drama, contributed to the expansion of the public sphere in the 18th century which Habermas has observed in the increasing political awareness and public involvement of the middle class. My dissertation focuses on the writings of three Whig MPs: John Wilkes, Edmund Burke, and Richard Brinsley Sheridan. The three parts examine different forms of rhetorical intervention in the public sphere by Whig MPs. In the part on John Wilkes, I analyze Wilkes's use of obscenity as a provocative rhetorical device in anonymous political journalism. The part on Edmund Burke examines the publication of a reformist ideology which challenges the Tory establishment by evoking the values of individual civic responsibility and stewardship of the British Empire. The final part on Richard Brinsley Sheridan examines the work of a Whig politician who made a significant contribution to English drama. I analyze the expression of political opposition in Sheridan's plays, particularly during the divisive phenomena of the American Revolution and the trial of Warren Hastings.
  • ItemOpen Access
    Portraits of the Artist as a Mother: Feminist Reconfigurations of the Maternal in Modern and Contemporary Canadian Literature
    (2022-08-08) Getz, Kristina Maria; Warwick, Susan J.
    Since the advent of second-wave feminism, Canadian women writers have grappled with the multitude of personal and creative conflicts that emerge when they attempt to mother their children with the attention and intensity they desire, while simultaneously actualizing themselves creatively. My dissertation explores this paradoxical nexus of (pro)creativity through shifting lenses of impossibility, possibility, corporeality and subjectivity. The chapters that follow illuminate the modern and contemporary emergence of the mother-artist as a powerful creative presence in Canadian literature by women, a literary motif which evolves alongside and is informed by feminist theory. Furthermore, discourses of the mother-artist enact a feminist transformation of the mother from the traditionally silenced maternal figure of psychoanalytic paradigms to an empowered, active and creative agent in her own right. The mother-artist ultimately explodes the limitations of motherhood by insisting on artistic and creative space for her experiences of mothering, and likewise refuses Romantic and essentially masculinist notions of the artist as solitary, isolated and autonomous. Instead, the figure of the mother-artist reveals herself to be interrelated and intertwined with both her art and her children. In order to capture the breadth of cultural and literary discourse around feminism, maternity and artistry, the following chapters address fiction and poetry that feature a mother-artist as their central protagonist and capture the nexus of maternity and creativity. In exploring this intersection of motherhood and artistry, my analysis draws attention to both form and content, highlighting the similar ways in which the mother-artist is articulated in poetry and fictional narrative representation. The thematic continuity of the mother-artist throughout allows for a cohesive consideration of a variety of formal and generic expressions which capture texts across seventy years of Canadian literature, from the 1940s into the present. I conclude that while the myth of the impossibility of the mother-artist persists discursively and thematically, the mother-artist is ultimately a figure of radical potentiality and possibility. Rather than functioning as a hindrance to her work, the mother-artist's reproductivity adds richness and nuance to her life and, most importantly, to her literary creations.
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    The Politics of Intermediality: Late Modernist Circulations of the Event
    (2022-03-03) Jensen, Sarah Elizabeth; Higgins, Lesley J.
    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 methods derived from media studies, music and sound studies, intermedial theory, feminist theory, critical race theory, and literary theory, I study multimedia opera, civilian bombardments during the Spanish Civil War, the 1943 Harlem riot, and the atomic bombing of Japan in order to evaluate media practices from a range of cultural and historical contexts. Employing eventalization, my research illuminates intersections of media, gender, race, nation, and sexuality. Some of the artists I engage with include Gertrude Stein, Virgil Thomson, Virginia Woolf, Pablo Picasso, Dora Maar, Langston Hughes, Jacob Lawrence, Ann Petry, Mina Loy, John Hersey, Shda Shinoe, and Nagai Takashi. The four chapters comprising this project take up fluctuating interactions among sonic, verbal, and visual mediations that were produced between 1927 and 1949, juxtaposing various newer media (photojournalism, radio, and others) with works of art (poetry, fiction, and painting). Stein and Thomson's Four Saints in Three Acts, transposed first into a staged opera and then as a radio broadcast, highlights how its many remediations offer formal innovation while reinforcing historical inequities. Picasso and Woolf's collage-like responses to war in Spain demonstrate hypermediacy and immediacy—remediation's twinned impulses—with each artist treating public and private divisions (as materials and as politics) differently. In their depictions of state violence against Black Americans, Hughes, Lawrence, and Petry draw differently on sonic, visual, and verbal modes. Hughes and Petry's fictional rioters publicly express dissatisfaction and challenge the containment strategies used during the actual riot. My concluding chapter also considers how intermediality resists containment, tracing the disparate availability of media in North America and Japan. Simultaneously empty and excessive, these atomic media reveal the ways knowledge and power produce nuclear subjects. My findings reveal that late modernism offers a particularly resonant set of texts and contexts from which to evaluate literature as a medium. Moreover, literature's porous borders enable multiple movements and engagements. The eventalization of these circulations reveal the political stakes and uses of intermediality.
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    Framing Standard and Dialect in Black Women's Novels
    (2022-03-03) Mercer-James, Eshe; Sanders, Leslie
    Framing Standard and Dialect in Black Women's Novels explores how Black women writers engage with their image in dominant Western discourse. Deliberately objectified, their discursive identities have been underwritten and overlooked. Using Sylvia Wynter's argument that the emergence of Black women writers presents a parallax view that reorients humanist discourse, my project argues that Black women novelists reorient Black women's images through heteroglossia. Mikhail Bakhtin reads the novel as an interaction between languages as socio-ideological bodies. Challenging a dominant hegemony, the novel dialogic underscores Black women's resistant writing; however, Bakhtin's fusion of language and body restricts the dynamic between the two, repeating the erasures of dominant discourse. Translanguage constructs Bakhtin's heteroglossic dialogic as a slippage between language and body that demonstrates diversity. Translanguaging proposes named languages as a posteriori group categorizations, while language use approaches language features without regard for these boundaries. In this reorientation of language, Bakhtin's heteroglossia becomes Edouard Glissant's creolization, a specifically racialized expression of movement and change. The translanguaging of Black women's novels plays with dominant discourses to rescript their images as complex and mutable. Reading four novels, I demonstrate how narrative historicizes, theorizes, diasporizes, and incorporates this strategy. Pauline E. Hopkins displays a daguerreotype that reflects the oppressive history of Black womanhood to project an expressive excess in Contending Forces (1900). Zora Neale Hurston performs her "Characteristics of Negro Expression" as a moving image in the discursive play between main character and community in Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937). With double exposure in Louisiana (1994), Erna Brodber uses Hurston as the inspiration for her fictional main character to ground her theories in the Black diaspora. Toni Morrison invests in Black women's discursive erasure as the material of reorientation, presenting a photonegative in Sula (1973). Raciolinguistics is explicitly anti-oppressive in its attention to power dynamics. The novelists' synaesthesic presentation of Black women's consciously embodied language use emphasizes the power of language on their material conditions but plays with the individual's power over language. These novels demonstrate the flexibility of the designations Black and woman, names that inform but do not fix expression, to destabilize hegemonies.
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    The Rhetoric of Citizenship, Slavery, and Immigration: Fashioning a Language for Belonging in English Literature
    (2022-03-03) Gauvin, Mitchell; Redding, Arthur F.
    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 multiculturalism. Simultaneously, however, contradictory ideals of inclusion compete using the same language, leading to confusions of citizenship rhetoric. This rhetoric—the vocabulary used to talk about citizenship, including in government legislation, in print and digital channels, and in everyday public life—obscures citizenship's deep normative divides, while exaggerating the nationalistic character of political membership. Located at the intersection of literary and citizenship studies, my dissertation constellates the literary text with issues of state governmentality and rhetorics of belonging in order to examine citizenship rhetoric from a literary perspective that is attentive to its affective and imaginary registers. Instead of citizenship as a form of rootedness, I foster a methodological approach that centres the role of movement—and in particular, the drive for authority over movement—in the imagining and practice of citizenship, in turn revealing the migratory and diasporic threads that underwrite modernity. While postcolonial and ethnicity studies have unravelled the complexity of national and ethnic belonging, my dissertation complements this existing scholarship by converging on citizenship rhetoric as a discursive formation shaped and altered by literature. I trace literature's role in configuring citizenship with sustained focus on Olaudah Equiano's The Interesting Narrative, Frances Burney's The Wanderer, Mary Shelley's travelogues and Frankenstein, Herman Melville's Benito Cereno, and Brian Friel's Translations. While historically rooted, this project is forward looking and considers how eighteenth and nineteenth century imaginings of the citizen still inform contemporary political practices.
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    "Alien and Critical": The Modernist Satiric Practices of Djuna Barnes, Wyndham Lewis, and Virginia Woolf
    (2022-03-03) Taylor, Benjamin Lee; Higgins, Lesley J.
    This dissertation offers an extended analysis of the modernist satiric practices of authors Djuna Barnes, Wyndham Lewis, and Virginia Woolf in a selection of works spanning different genres published between 1913 and 1954. With these authors works as evidence, I suggest that satire undergoes a significant shift in the first half of the twentieth century as it departs from its premodern roots as a fixed genre or mode, instead becoming a diffuse element that intermittently shapes formal aspects and produces complex critiques. This shift partly results from new formulations of genderfrom altered understandings of masculinity and femininity to the emergence of what we now refer to as queer, nonbinary, and trans identitiesand the way in which what I call the instrumentality of satire enables a range of satiric attacks across different subject positions and a volatile political spectrum. Through a highly comparative approach, I draw upon formalist, feminist, and sociological theories to trace the different networks in which the texts of focus and their authors are embedded (networks of readers, artistic movements, political transformations, marketplaces, and discourses of gender and sexuality) to understand more thoroughly the satire that emerges from these texts. Each chapter pairs discrete investigations of works by each individual author, guided by an overarching topic (Chapter 1 explores networks of satire, Chapter 2 examines satiric method and the novel, and Chapter 3 considers satiric forms of life writing), and ends with a shorter section that compares the three authors works within a specific thematic framework (Chapter 1 with respect to the notion of authority, Chapter 2 through party scenes, and Chapter 3 concerning the portrait genre). My research reveals that the modernist satiric exchanges within these networks can be analyzed as, on the one hand, manifestations of the selected periods political dynamics and, on the other hand, cultural productions that altered how gender was discursively constructed within specific social environments of that period. In brief, the study illustrates how gender and its performance, aesthetics, and rhetoric become central to the production and function of satire in modernist art and literature.