This project provides a coalitional reading of Chinese Canadian literature, film, and history based on an allegorical framework of Asian-Indigenous relationalities. It tracks how Chinese labour stories set during the period of Chinese exclusion can not only leverage national belonging for Chinese settlers but also be reread for a different sense of belonging that remains attentive to other exclusions made natural by settler colonial discourses and institutional structures, that is, the disavowal of Indigenous presence and claims to sovereignty and autochthony. It contributes to important discussions about the experiences of racism and oppression that typically privilege the relations and tensions of diasporic and Indigenous communities but hardly with each other. What is more, this study aligns with a recent surge of interest in investigating Asian-Indigenous relations in Asian Canadian, Asian American, and Asian diaspora studies. The political investments driving this project show a deep commitment to anti-racist and decolonial advocacy. By examining how Chinese cultural workers in Canada have tried to do justice to the Head Tax generation’s experiences of racial exclusion and intersectional oppressions in fiction, non-fiction, graphic non-fiction, and documentaries, it asks whether there are ways to ethically assert an excluded and marginalized Chinese presence in the context of the settler colonial state. By doing justice to the exclusion of Chinese settlers in the national imaginary, do Chinese cultural workers as a result perform an injustice to the originary presence of Indigenous peoples? This thesis re-examines the anti-racist imperative that frames Chinese labour stories set during the period of Chinese exclusion in Canada: by exploring whether social justice projects by racially marginalized communities can simultaneously re-assert an excluded racialized presence and honour their treaty rights and responsibilities, it works to apprehend the colonial positionality of the Chinese diaspora within the Canadian settler state.

Dissertation

Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

This project examines representations of Chinese labour and Asian-Indigenous relations in Chinese Canadian literature and film. By focusing on how Chinese Canadian writers and artists honour and remember the nation-building contributions and sacrifices of Chinese labourers in stories set in Canada during the period of anti-Chinese legislation policies such as the Chinese Head Tax and the 1923 Chinese Immigration Act, this thesis provides a critical look at the values and ideologies that these narratives may draw upon. It asks whether it is possible for writers and artists to commemorate Chinese labour stories without also extending the colonization of Indigenous peoples, forgetting the history of Asian-Indigenous relationships, or promoting work ethic values that may hinder community building with Indigenous peoples and respecting Indigenous ways of living and working off the land. This study explores questions of history,…

This project attempts to bridge conversations between the predominantly Western canon of animal studies and the frequently humanist approach to postcolonial African studies. Drawing on these sometimes incompatible fields, this thesis proposes two premises that emerge from close readings of African cultural texts. First, “Africa” as a discursive construct has long been associated with animals, animality, and the category of the nonhuman, evident in, to give some examples, the current touristic promotion across the globe of African wildlife as an essential part of its continental identity, local and global anxieties over zoonotic transmissions of disease, and the history of race science’s preoccupation with animalizing black and indigenous African bodies. My second premise suggests that in postcolonial and especially African contexts ostensibly “human” concerns are inextricably tied to both the categorical limitations imposed by imperial paradigms of animalization and the precarious existence of nonhuman animals themselves, concern for whom is often occluded in anthropocentric postcolonial discourse. In my dissertation, I examine the role that texts play in directing affective relations of concern locally and globally, reading fictional texts as well as news media, conservation literature, and tourist advertisements. Through these works I examine the complex and often cantankerous politics of cultivating interspecies concern in postcolonial contexts, ranging from the globalized commodification of African wildlife and the dubious international policies that ostensibly protect it, the geography of the North American safari park, the animalization of queer bodies by African state leaders, textual representations of interspecies intimacy, and accounts of the Rwandan genocide.

Dissertation

Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

This thesis responds to the question of how we show concern for animals in postcolonial, globalized, and postconflict worlds. Drawing on the example of multiple texts in African literature, film, and other media, it explores how Africa itself has long been construed in the global imagination as a zone associated with animality. This association appears in texts produced within the West and Africa whose accounts of the continent imagine it to be outside the realm of human ethical concern. Demonstrating how exclusive human ethical concern is for African lives, both human and animal, this thesis argues for an ethics of concern that does not revolve around exclusively the human in postcolonial African studies.

Two of Wilkie Collins’ sensation novels, The Woman in White (189-60) and Heart and Science (1882-83), represent women and non-human animals as occupying comparable cultural positions of vulnerability in Victorian society. This alignment between women and animals became particularly apparent in the emerging debates over the scientific practice of vivisection in the mid-to-late nineteenth century. The first chapter of this thesis examines the antivivisection movement which protested strongly against the practice of vivisection on animals and came to beled primarily by women. This chapter’s focus is on the reasons behind women’s passionate identification with non-human animals subject to cruel and painful experiment and how this reflected both groups’ vulnerable and subordinate position in society. The second chapter analyzes Collins’ own contribution to the antivivisection campaign in his polemic Heart and Science. This novel demonstrates the cruelty of the vivisector in Collins’ villain, Dr. Benjulia, but also, the strength and value of instinct and emotion as forms of knowledge which are typically feminized and devalued. Collins ultimately recommends a type of medical care that is attentive to both the body and the mind rather than separating them into binary structures. Lastly, the third chapter examines The Woman in White, which was published before the vivisection controversy yet still demonstrates women’s alignment with animals particularly in their relationships with the two different male villains Count Fosco and Sir Percival. This novel represents women resisting these men’s attempts to treat them like inferior animals and instead asserting their own authority as capable beings. By doing so, Collins reveals not only the constructed ideals of superiority and inferiority in society but also the extreme vulnerability of those labeled ‘inferior’ beings.

Thesis

Master of Arts (MA)

Literature for children does more than simply entertain, or create fantastical spaces for children to occupy—children’s literature is instructive. I argue that didacticism in literary tales for children works according to the two main ideologies of childhood, which Marina Warner refers to as “myths” in her essay Little Angles, Little Monsters: Keeping Childhood Innocent (1995). This study analyzes the two main nineteenth-century attitudes regarding childhood and their presence in literary tales—childhood innocence and inherent naughtiness. I argue that these ideologies reveal the struggle to accurately and collectively define childhood. In particular, I discuss naughty children in selections from Heinrich Hoffmann’s Struwwelpeter (1845), and innocent/good children in Hans Christian Andersen’s fairy tales, including The Emperor’s New Clothes (1837), The Snow Queen (1844), Dance, Dolly, Dance (1871), etc... In addition, I argue that these attitudes from the Victorian era are still present in today’s discourse surrounding childhood and in the literature of today, which I demonstrate through Neil Gaiman’s The Graveyard Book (2008) and Alvin Schwartz’ In a Dark, Dark Room and Other Scary Stories (1984).

Thesis

Master of Arts (MA)

This project explores ways of engaging with "impossible moments" that unsettle our reading practices.

This project arose out of restlessness, on my part, regarding how to read and engage with elements in Indigenous literatures written in Canada, which I could hitherto label as supernatural occurrences. Indeed, my Euro-Western literary education has been unable to provide appropriate tools for profoundly exploring the supernatural occurrences that I was encountering in the literature—a limitation that is made clear by scholars like Vine Deloria Jr. (Sioux), whose work calls for considering origin stories as literally possible. Through this thesis, I re-conceptualize these “supernatural” occurrences as “impossible moments”—a term that I use to avoid the connotations of Euro-Western rationalist nomenclature while also remaining aware that I read from an outsider position. My literary archive consists of Richard Wagamese’s (Anishinaabe) novel Keeper ’n Me (1994), his autobiographical book For Joshua (2002), Lee Maracle’s (Stó:lō) novel Ravensong (1993), and its sequel Celia’s Song (2014). Through the project, I establish two ethical, self-reflexive reading practices: one considers my active participation as a reader within the narratives and the other attends to my role as a reader in the “real” world. These reading practices are established both within the body of the thesis, as well as in extensive meditations within the footnotes. As an outsider, I employ my reading practices with the intention of bringing awareness to the limitations of Western literary reading practices, while at the same time not assuming an authoritative voice. Particularly important for my explorations of impossible moments is Daniel Heath Justice’s (Cherokee) principles of “kinship,” a term that identifies relational responsibilities between all living things. Utilizing the principles of kinship throughout this project allows me to demonstrate that impossible moments occur through narrations of the relational engagements that exist between all living things and the characters’ spiritual practices.

Thesis

Master of Arts (MA)

This project presents close readings of what are conceptualized as “impossible moments” in four literary works : Richard Wagamese’s (Anishinaabe) books Keeper ’n Me (1994) and For Joshua (2002), as well as author Lee Maracle’s (Stó:lō) novels Ravensong (1994) and its sequel Celia’s Song (2014). The term “impossible moments” may be understood as characterizing unsettling reading experiences, particularly those that leave the outside (i.e. non-local and, or non-Indigenous) reader on unfamiliar ground regarding how best to interpret the “impossibilities” that occur within a given narrative. The critical framework in this project demonstrates that “impossibilities” in Wagamese and Maracle’s works are expressions of kinship between all living things (i.e. humans, the land, the animals, and spirits) as well as expressions of spiritual traditions and ceremonies. Indeed, this project demonstrates the need to reassess our…

Taking up Henry Giroux’s call for an “enobling [sic], imaginative vision” and a “language of possibility” with which to generate hope and a plan for improving education in North America, this thesis presents Lev Grossman’s fantasy series – the Magicians trilogy, consisting of The Magicians (2009), The Magician King (2011), and The Magician’s Land (2014) – as providing this ‘vision’ and ‘language’ through its representations of education. Using a close reading practice alongside the method of thematic criticism outlined by Farah Mendlesohn, key passages in the series are analysed to explicate an “imaginative vision” of an ideal, alternative education and present this vision – alongside a plan for achieving it – to educators. I argue that the series can be a pedagogical tool to serve educators in recognising the issues inherent in the current North American education system and the need for reform, in facilitating and motivating the implementation of an ideal alternative in their classrooms – an autonomous education practice based on the theories of Paulo Freire and John Holt – and in aiding with explicit instruction on the concept of agency to foster student success within the new classroom practice. Through a process of literary analysis, the Magicians series is presented to educators to help them understand and implement theories such as liberating and dominating praxis, banking education, and autonomous education. Rather than waiting for institutional-level or school-level reforms, this thesis helps educators reform their classrooms immediately, improving education outcomes for students and demonstrating the possibilities and benefits of adopting an autonomous education practice. In addition to presenting the Magicians series as a pedagogical tool to address the issues in education, this thesis also posits fantasy fiction as a valuable body of literature for seeking solutions to real world problems by demonstrating the applicability of fantastic representations of education to solving real world issues.

Thesis

Master of Arts (MA)

This thesis presents Lev Grossman’s Magicians trilogy as a tool for teachers, scholars, and students to use in addressing the problems in education in North America today. Starting with Henry Giroux’s research and writings on the problems with North American education, the Magicians is presented as the “imaginative vision” Giroux says must be located in order to inspire hope and present a plan for addressing these issues and modifying education to improve the outcomes for every student. Combining the theories of educators Paulo Freire and John Holt with the practice of literary analysis, this thesis examines the Magicians and argues that a critical reading of this fantasy series can serve educators by identifying the current problems and the need for reform, by introducing a new autonomous education practice that can be used in individual classrooms, and by supporting students in this new system through teaching the concept of agency directly.

In my dissertation, I bring together the fields of comics theory, biopolitics, and queer theory in order to read contemporary coming-of-age graphic novels that represent characters (and sometimes lives) at the margins. Coming-of-age graphic novels in this category often depict complex engagements with trauma and history, and couple those depictions with the loss of attachments: the subjects represented in these texts usually do not belong. I make a case for productive spaces inside of the unbelonging represented in my chosen texts. In Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home, Alison finds multiple nodes of attachment with her deceased father through the process of writing his history. Importantly, none of those attachments require that she forgive him for past violences, or that she overwrite his life in order to shift focus onto the positive. Jillian and Mariko Tamaki’s Skim features a protagonist, Skim, who is rendered an outcast because of her body, her hobbies, and eventually her process of mourning. Skim carves out a life that is survivable for her, and resists the compulsion to perform happiness while she does it. Charles Burns’s Black Hole depicts a group of teens who are excommunicated from their suburb after contracting a disfiguring, sexually transmitted disease, and who take to the woods in order to build a miniature, ad-hoc society for themselves. I concentrate on the question of precarity, and notice that safety and stability have a strong correlation with gender and sexuality: women and queers are overrepresented at the margins.

Dissertation

Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

In my dissertation, I bring together the fields of comics theory, biopolitics, and queer theory in order to read contemporary coming-of-age graphic novels that represent characters (and sometimes lives) at the margins. I focus, especially, on the way that people who are marginalized come to be that way, and I come to the conclusion that marginalized people suffer losses are that tied to different kinds of trauma. Sometimes those traumas are historical: like slavery, or internment. Sometimes they are personal, like ostracization from one’s community. And, finally, sometimes trauma comes from social systems: some subjects are pushed to the margins of society by the same forces that bring others into it. In the case of all of those types of trauma, I find a possibility for community: if people are sometimes marginalized, they are often resilient. The bulk of my dissertation tries to find where exclusions end, and make-shift communities begin.

This thesis establishes the concept of Rust Belt aesthetics, a term for the artistic and cultural narratives that define, analyze, critique, or otherwise describe the deindustrialized U.S. Midwest, a region commonly referred to as the Rust Belt. This thesis explores how aesthetic projects re-present the experience of deindustrialization. The locus of this analysis is the region, and the thesis argues that the region operates as a discursive device that can mediate between and through other spatial “levels,” like the local or the global. Rust Belt aesthetics emerge from a moment of regional, national, and global transformations, and these aesthetics can construct the region to various political ends. The thesis analyzes aesthetics projects like advertisements, literature, and visual art in order to provide insight into the shifting economic, cultural, and social forces at play in the region and beyond. The goal of my analysis is not to arrive at a static definition of Rust Belt aesthetics. Instead, I hope to understand how aesthetic projects from and about the region communicate specific narratives about the Rust Belt, often through the lens of critical regionalism and the everyday life of the working class.

Thesis

Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

Live action role-playing (larp) is a form of narrative play that engages participants in fictional words within the dialectic of experience (unorganized time) and narrative (organized time). In this thesis I explore the complexities of the fictional worlds created by larps and how the participation in larps constructs requires a different engagement with traditional thoughts about narrative. Discussing fictional worlds theory, Aristotle, Frye, and Ricoeur along side concepts from game studies, such as the magic circle and the frames of exogeny, endogeny, and diegesis, I propose an alternative approach to understanding narrative within larps that looks at the larp worlds and plot as being driven by a process of affirming the identities constructed to participate within the fictional worlds through the mimetic process.

Thesis

Master of Arts (MA)

Listening to music has the capacity to connect us with others. In a society structured by the stultifying logic of heteronormativity, patriarchy, white supremacy, and neoliberalism —ideals that usher all of us into normative and limiting modes of relations—musical listening serves as a bastion of collective queer potential. Music can enhance queer collectivity particularly when it offers us experiences of non-normative temporality. In this dissertation, I argue for a form of music participation that I call listening backward: the act of listening closely and collectively to past musical moments in which alternative worlds were once possible. This form of listening, I argue, encourages resistance to normative signifiers of progressive linear temporality and interrogates notions of progress in both musical sound and society more broadly. Listening backward is important for building queer collectives—in the present and for the future—that can develop and sustain coalitions and resist homonormative impulses and neoliberal claims of individuality and competition. In this dissertation I analyze a variety of music performances that vary in their genre markers, the historical moments from which they come, and the forms of participation they encourage. These disparate performances are bound together by the ways that they that render audible a collective participatory ethos and challenge musical and broader social notions of progress and normative temporality. Listening backward is informed by a history of popular music participation in the late twentieth century and encourages an ear toward liberatory and revolutionary politics—it is attuned to hope in the face of limiting and conservative politics of the present. Past musical moments remain rife for the potential for collective experience—we just need to listen backward.

Thesis

Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

In this thesis, I use nonlinear understandings of the palimpsest in two distinct ways in order to explore both how Shelley constructs a palimpsestic relationship between Falkner and Frankenstein, and the ways in which this palimpsestic relationship is thematized through the interactions and identities of Falkner’s characters. In Chapter One, I use the figure of the palimpsest to uncover the untapped affective and philosophic potentiality of Frankenstein and Falkner, a potentiality that reveals itself only by considering each text as being in an intimate, unabating dance with the other. Chapter Two then ingests the figure of the palimpsest and investigates the ways that Falkner engages with what I call the embodied palimpsest of the nineteenth-century woman, whose identity constructs itself through simultaneous acts of effacement and reanimation. Through this kind of reparative reading, I aim to reclaim Falkner from its moneyspinner status and to show its layered complexities of storytelling, theme, and philosophical inquiry.

Thesis

Master of Arts (MA)

Following the literary criticism of Zadie Smith’s NW by critics such as Lynn Wells and Wendy Knepper, this thesis seeks to engage with the social scripts and spatial dynamics of Smith’s fourth novel. I argue that NW is concerned with the neoliberalization of both real and virtual spaces, emphasizing the consequent effects of neoliberalism on agency and subjectivity and highlighting the neoliberal advancement of hyperindividualism and securitization over social responsibility and solidarity. Much detail is given to NW’s exploration of race, class and social mobility at the tail-end of the global financial crisis of 2007-08. NW’s fragmented four-part narrative channels a perspectival approach to space and place by delineating its structure through the four separate subjectivities of the main characters. I contextualize my thesis alongside Paul Gilroy’s cultural criticism of contemporary British multiculturalism, conviviality and melancholia, while also anchoring NW’s spatial concerns to Jeff Malpas’s spatial philosophy and Emily Cuming’s explication of British council estates in various forms of contemporary literature. As well, this thesis incorporates the philosophical frameworks of Søren Kierkegaard, Martin Heidegger and Maurice Merleau-Ponty as a guide for recognizing some of NW’s interest in the subjective experience of people and spaces, and to reorient the act of ‘seeing’ as a radical form of agency and mediation in itself. Ultimately, this phenomenological and epistemological approach to interpreting Smith’s fiction creates the potential for meaning to be co-constructed between author and reader, forming a new social vision for the novel as artform.  

Thesis

Master of Arts (MA)

This dissertation draws upon Western literature in critical theory, aesthetics, art theory, and art history to explore how lying can foster aesthetic experience and the sociopolitical effects of this experience. It nominates the idea of pseudology—lying as an art—and outlines its distinguishing features from the dawn of postmodernism to contemporary practices. This study demonstrates an analysis of lying premised on an understanding of aesthetics as caught up in the wider issues of public pedagogy and everyday politics. Taking as case studies specific works of Marcel Duchamp, Robert Rauschenberg, VALIE EXPORT, and Carol Duncan, this dissertation argues for the narrative framing of artwork as paramount for its reception. As well, by examining the artistic mystifications of Mierle Laderman Ukeles, Guillermo Gómez-Peña, Coco Fusco, Joshua Schwebel, and Iris Häussler, this dissertation analyzes the use of pseudology in institutional critique. The study finds that perfidious practices can point to the importance of the relational boundary between what is real/unreal, highlight the social construction of this boundary’s aesthetic aspects, and reveal the ways in which each of us are active in the construction of a shared reality. Ultimately, our active framing of everyday life and the affective nature of our construction of a shared reality has been problematized by a contemporary prevalence of lying in the realms of public culture and politics. Pseudology reveals the power of narrative framing. The pseudological artworks discussed here expose, as models for the political aesthetic of lying, the need to debate the very tenets of reality constantly and continually—an essential civic action in the ethical, communal relationships of a democracy.

Thesis

Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

An analysis of the use of lying as an artistic technique.

This thesis aims to bring the notion of slightness to bear on a reading of domestic space in the films of the American-born, British film-maker Joseph Losey. By drawing on psychoanalysis, queer theory and cultural materialist frameworks, I examine the material traces, patterns, and forms of house and home, which cannot be folded into logics of identity. Rather than parsing a form of domesticity that is queer because of the nature of the intimacy or sexuality that it houses, I argue that the queerness of domesticity can be found in the forms, patterns and details of home which are too subtle to rise to the discursive level at which home becomes a disciplinary category. Although the theoretical frame of this project is largely informed by psychoanalytic and specifically Lacanian-orientated queer theory, its focus on slightness marks a departure from the emphasis on negativity that has qualified this branch of the field. Examining in detail the Losey’s films The Servant (1963), Eve (1962), Secret Ceremony (1968), and The Go-Between (1971), and drawing on materialist, semiotic and architectural points of reference, I explore the ambiguities of desire that inhere in the forms and detail of domestic space. I interpret these not as a deficit or withholding that either stands to be corrected or that insists on its own lack, but rather as a texture or quality already realized in its insignificance. In this way, the thesis offers a way to reframe the negativity associated with Lacanian psychoanalytic queer theory and to think of the queerness of domesticity as a kind of slightness that can be read in the forms domesticity takes.

Thesis

Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

The thesis comprises an introduction and annotations to Collected Poems of Richard Outram, Volume One (1957–1988), a planned critical edition of the poems of Richard Outram (1930-2005), Canadian poet and printer. It tells the story of Outram’s published oeuvre, beginning in 1957, when he published his first work in collaboration with his wife, the artist Barbara Howard (1926–2002), up through 1988, when Outram and Howard published the last of their hand-printed, letterpress collaborations. Jernigan asserts that Outram’s oeuvre is characterized by a reiterative poetics, in which the poet “reads” individual poems into the public record of his work on multiple occasions, allowing the poems’ meanings to be shaped by the changing context of an unfolding oeuvre, as well as by changes in material context and addressed readership — an assertion reflected in the structure of her edition. At the same time, she speaks to the collaborative context of Outram’s published work, all of which was made in explicit or implicit conversation with his wife, the artist Barbara Howard (1926 – 2002), while also being shaped by the sorts of communal forces famously noted by D.M. Mackenzie. Both the introduction and the annotations demonstrate the close link between composition and publication for Outram, poet-printer. In her introduction, Jernigan considers how this link complicates the traditional dichotomy between genetic and bibliographic approaches to textual criticism. Throughout, Jernigan establishes an updated bibliographical and biographical context for Outram’s work, enlarging upon the seminal scholarship of Peter Sanger, and contributes to the existing scholarship on Outram’s personal and publishing life with new archival research in the Gauntlet Press fonds at Library and Archives Canada, the Richard Outram papers at the Thomas Fisher Rare Book Library, the Allan and Nancy Fleming fonds at York University, and the Macmillan and Key Porter fonds at McMaster University.

Thesis

Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

The thesis comprises an introduction and annotations to Collected Poems of Richard Outram, Volume One (1957–1988), a planned critical edition of the poems of Richard Outram (1930-2005), Canadian poet and printer. It tells the story of Outram’s published oeuvre, beginning in 1957, when he published his first work in collaboration with his wife, the artist Barbara Howard (1926–2002), up through 1988, when Outram and Howard published the last of their hand-printed, letterpress collaborations. Both the introduction and the annotations demonstrate the close link between composition and publication, for Outram, and show the deep effect on Outram’s poetics of his longterm collaboration with his wife. The annotations map the interaction, through three decades, of Outram’s commercial- and private-publishing practices, and cast new light on his lifelong practice of reiteration: his habit of reading his own, older poems into the record of his unfolding work again, in new contexts, linking old work to new, and enriching the meanings of…

This sandwich thesis of works published from 2010 – 2017 takes up the discursive articulation of “social media” as a mobilizing concept in relation to a variety of other concerns: authorship and popular fiction, writing and publishing, archives and everyday life, celebrity and the opaque morality of media promotion. The project addresses social networking platforms (primarily Twitter and Facebook) and those who serve and critique their interests (authors, readers, academics, “everyday people,” national archives, celebrities and filmmakers), often focusing on the “meta” of the media they take as their focus: extratexts, reviews and interviews, tweets about books and books about tweets, critical reception, etc. It considers “social media” as an idea or, more accurately, a system or constellation of ideas, a discourse or discourses beyond the mere technological. It examines the authority and impact of these discourses—not the use or usefulness of social media, but the ways these media are taken up, avoided, buttressed and manipulated in the most casual to the most politically contingent venues. In order to better comprehend and articulate the ideas, investments and ideological frameworks grounding social media discourse, this collective work traces and critically assesses the comparisons we make in an effort to render these media familiar and readable; the genealogies we construct in an effort to contextualize them and make their meanings legible; the stories we tell and the venues in which we tell them, to harness their creation and existence for other means, to authorize and deauthorize, to empower and disavow. By examining writing on and about social media, this work offers an alternative, context-specific approach to new media scholarship that, in its examination of things said and unsaid, will help inform our contemporary understanding of social media and, by extension, our social media experience.

Thesis

Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

This sandwich thesis of works published from 2010 – 2017 considers how we talk and write about social media in relation to a variety of other concerns: authorship and popular fiction, writing and publishing, archives and everyday life, celebrity and the opaque morality of media promotion. The project addresses social networking platforms (primarily Twitter and Facebook) and those who serve and critique their interests (authors, readers, academics, “everyday people,” national archives, celebrities and filmmakers), often focusing on the “meta” of the media they take as their focus: “extratexts,” reviews and interviews, tweets about books and books about tweets, critical reception, etc. By examining writing on and about social media, this work offers an alternative, context-specific approach to new media scholarship that, in its examination of things said and unsaid, will help inform our contemporary understanding of social media and, by extension, our social media experience.

Ongoing scholarship on the impact of speculative fiction demonstrates how science fiction and fantasy are fundamentally concerned with interrogating the socio-political networks that define contemporary life, and in constructing alternative environments that both critique and offer solutions to present-day inequalities. This project contributes to this scholarship by focusing on the ways in which recent speculative fiction re-envisions space—including urban sites, new architectural forms, and natural landscapes—to theorize innovative forms of socio-political organization. This work draws from the spatial turn in cultural studies and critical theory that has gained popularity since the 1970s, and which takes on assumption that space and politics are always intertwined. Drawing predominantly from assemblage theory, assemblage urban theory, and new materialist theory, this project examines how human and nonhuman agents—including space itself—interact to create new spaces and relations that resist hegemonic neoliberal modes of spatial, political, and social organization. Chapter Two analyzes utopian assemblages and spaces in Bruce Sterling’s novel Distraction, deploying Noah De Lissovoy’s concept of “emergency time” and David M. Bell’s theories of place-based and affective utopias. Chapter Three examines place-making tactics in Lauren Beukes’ novel Zoo City through the lens of Abdou-Maliq Simone's concept of people as infrastructure, Deleuze and Guattari's theory of nomadology, and Jane Bennett's theory of “thing power.” Chapter Four uses the work of Bruno Latour and Jane Bennett to explore the thing power of the non-human and nature in China Mieville’s Kraken and Jeff Vandermeer’s Southern Reach trilogy. In sum, this work attempts to demonstrate how examining speculative spaces through the lens of assemblage theory can illuminate new paths for political resistance.

Thesis

Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

In this thesis, I argue that late-Romantic women writers Felicia Hemans and Letitia Elizabeth Landon were embedded in, and intent on discussing the intersection of gender, celebrity, and performance in their poetry. In Chapter One, I examine Hemans’s and Landon’s public personae to trace how they navigated the commercial society. Each poet crafted a persona which, as was the trend in this period, was often conflated with the characters depicted in their writings. This worked to their pecuniary advantage but had ambivalent social consequences as well. In Chapter Two, I establish how both Hemans and Landon reconfigured Germaine de Staël’s novel Corinne (1807) in their poetry to suit their poetic styles. This retelling of the Improvisatrice profession made room for feminine, public genius in print. It also rendered the character of Corinne more English and drew out the North-South binaries and tensions of the political moment. Through this kind of feminist cross-cultural reading, I conceptualize another way of reading late-Romantic sentimental poetry, and the “poetess” personae that often accompany it, ambivalently engaged in both Continental and colonial politics.

Thesis

Master of Arts (MA)

This dissertation responds to the notion that the economic success and social integration of one imaginary figure, the “model minority,” can explain the downward mobility of another, the “white working class” in post-Brexit Britain. Through intersectional readings of Black and Asian British fiction written during and after Margaret Thatcher’s prime ministership, I examine the model minority myth as providing a racist explanation for rising inequality, but also as a burdensome imperative of neoliberal aspiration to which racialized British subjects are increasingly subject. I trace the origins of this exclusionary account of racialized belonging to the account in Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses of the political possibilities resulting from the collapse of anti-racist solidarities under the sign of Black British identity in the 1980s. I show that the author’s non-fictional responses to the subsequent controversy known as the Rushdie Affair work to close off these possibilities, serving instead to justify Islamophobia one specific means by which racial neoliberalism functions as what David Theo Goldberg calls “racism without racism.” I develop this analysis of Islamophobia as form of racial neoliberalism by turning to two novels that depict coming of age for diasporic Muslim British women, contrasting Monica Ali’s Brick Lane as a normative narrative of feminist becoming through assimilation with Leila Aboulela’s Minaret, which complicates the agency assumed to be conferred on “Third World Women” who migrate to the Global North. In my third and final chapter, I trace the model minority trope across differences in Black and Asian British communities as evidence of the empty aspiration of “post-racial” Britain, contrasting the attempt in Gautam Malkani’s Londonstani to posit the figure of the “rudeboy” as an alternative “outsider” figure of aspiration, with Zadie Smith’s “insider” depiction of the social alienation that results from approaching the embodiment of this racialized ideal in NW.

Thesis

Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

This dissertation discusses the influence of neoliberalism—the idea that capitalism represents the ideal model of organization for every aspect of human life—on Black and Asian British writing from the 1980s to the present. In the context of mainstream analysis of the June 2016 Brexit vote as an expression of “white working class” disaffection with rising inequality, I focus on how coming-of-age narratives by Black and Asian writers complicate an unspoken implication of this popular explanation: that neoliberal reforms have unduly advantaged so-called “model” racial minorities. Through readings that emphasize how the Muslim and/as racialized protagonists of these texts experience the recoding of racism either in the covert guise of Islamophobia or through the aspirational idea that Britain is “post-racial,” I demonstrate the highly tenuous nature of what social and political belonging racialized subjects can find amid the increasing individualism of contemporary British society.

This thesis is an interdisciplinary study that traces colloquial engagements with extinction in Victorian print culture (1859-1901). Extinction’s broad cultural life demonstrates the extent that scientific and cultural topics intricately entangled within Victorian print networks. Non-specialist Britons absorbed and transmitted evolutionary (particularly, Darwinian) knowledges within public discursive spaces instead of exclusively institutional settings. Class stratification did not bar non-specialists from absorbing and perpetuating cultural conversations about collapses, conservationism, and overconsumption. My project thus seeks to amend the critical discourse that assumes that Victorians passively accepted impending catastrophes or paid scant attention to extinction pressures. I recover multiple subjects formerly hidden in the vast Victorian archives: obscure non-specialists of the working and middle classes, obscurer animals cohabiting the Victorian’s everyday spaces, and the popular (and in some cases, underappreciated) literary texts demonstrating how Victorians circulated extinction discourses. Chapters One and Two explore the non-literary side of print culture, recovering widely disseminated but now largely unknown periodical artifacts (the domain of Punch, The Times, or Funny Folks). Chapter One focuses on cultural reactions to collapses of England’s domestic birds. Chapter Two traces the economized conservationism of the Brooke Brothers, popular game and meat traders. In both chapters, I determine how experienced evolutionary knowledges revealed the human-caused tenuousness of a trans-species milieu. Chapters Three and Four concentrate on scientific romances originally serialized in periodicals, including my key literary case studies, H.G. Wells’s The Time Machine (1895) and M.P. Shiel’s The Purple Cloud (1901). Musing on extinction led to a mindset that acknowledged entanglement with nonhuman others as an ethical imperative. However, some case studies demonstrate a profound ambivalence toward the human’s self-extinction, resulting in a complicated engagement with future forms that often re-privileges the human from within a radical ontology.

Thesis

Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

This study examines how Victorians absorbed and communicated ideas about extinction, especially as informed by evolutionary theory. Throughout Victorian newspapers, journals, and literature, extinction was adopted for disparate uses. A culturally, economically, and philosophically muddied topic, extinction provoked reconsiderations of the natural world and humankind’s place within it. I begin by examining advertisements, articles, and illustrations from popular newsprint and periodical sources that communicated fears about the extinction of common animals and concerns about controlling or maintaining bird and game populations in everyday Victorian life. When I turn my attention to my literary case studies, H.G. Wells’s The Time Machine and M.P. Shiel’s The Purple Cloud, I analyze the period’s preoccupation with the human’s…

This dissertation explores the life and works of eighteenth-century labouring-class poet Mary Leapor. Leapor’s ability to use everyday objects to write poetry that speaks to important social and cultural transformations of the period is one of the most remarkable and interesting aspects of her poetry, and it sets her apart from other labouring-class writers. Therefore, while this dissertation situates Leapor as a female laborer who writes poetry about the labour she performs, it is more interested in how she uses her poetry about the labour she performs—and particularly how she offers her own version of “thing theory”—in order to speak to a number of problems of which labour is just one. By spotlighting the complex role of objects in Leapor’s poetry, this dissertation shows how she uses those objects to articulate new conceptions of the labouring body’s relationship to authorship and authority, claim authorship as a form of useful labour, and legitimize her own gendered and class-inflected authority as a subject in literary and intellectual discourse. While acknowledging the context of material history, I focus on the ways Leapor uses particular things to rethink the possibilities of labouring-class life, identity, literary expression, and what it might have meant for her to imagine a new kind of human subjectivity that is itself inseparable from the concept of labour. Moreover, Leapor’s work shows that she identifies labouring individuals as part of a community whose experience is heavily organized socially around labour but argues that their lived experience has provided them with a particular identity and perspective. Ultimately, this dissertation works to decenter our own moment in the history of ideas by showing how Leapor was theorizing about forms of situated knowledge over two hundred years before it entered academic discourse in the 20th century through feminist theories of embodied ways of knowing. Leapor’s poetry is not just an object that should be studied through a theoretical lens; it should be understood as a theory of situated knowledge transmitting ideas from its own materially embedded position. Leapor’s poetry lives on as a labouring thing—changing, growing, and theorizing as living humans do—inviting its readers to contemplate the complex components of being an embodied thinker.

Thesis

Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

This dissertation focuses on the life and works of Mary Leapor (1722-1746) and builds upon recent interest in the cultural work of particular literary forms by examining the emergence of the labouring-class writer and the rise of a new poetic mode, the labour poem. Existing scholarship has begun to explore the many ways these texts represent class-based and gendered oppression, hardship, and work, and how these writers were able to combine several literary traditions to speak out against adverse conditions. By emphasising the material history of inanimate objects and nonhuman animals found within labouring-class writing, my project seeks to demonstrate how Leapor and other…

Over seventy years after the fallout of the Nazi genocide, depicting the Shoah continues to serve as a subject of widespread debate. Balancing the aesthetics of representation with historical accountability poses unique challenges to both readers and writers of Holocaust literature. In its extensive considerations of time and place, in its troubling of the conventional limitations of the Canadian novel, and in its suggestive possibilities both inside and outside of the ethnic mainstream, the genre is one of ample opportunity — a prospect that entails enormous responsibility. The difficulty of finding the appropriate language to represent the horrors of the Shoah is the central subject of this thesis, which focuses on interpretive responsibility in Mavis Gallant’s “The Pegnitz Junction” (1973). It situates the novella in both a theoretical and Canadian literary context, examines Gallant’s understanding of the ethics of aestheticizing the event, provides a full-length study of the story, and attempts to fill some of the gaps in critical scholarship by drawing attention to the multidimensionality of the text’s portrayal of a post-Auschwitz world. I look closely at how Gallant’s work prompts a suspension of logic and normalcy, and in turn reconceptualizes the novella insofar as its indirection causes her readership to contemplate whether Holocaust responsibility is, in the words of D.G. Myers, “to be shared by [readers], despite the fact that they are not to blame” (270). I suggest that the novella is a medium in which refusal to provide logical explanations for the Holocaust through aesthetic representation not only allows audiences to ponder the implications of humanity’s capacity to preserve and erase historical memory, but also causes them to consider how human beings ought to respond responsibly to the ramifications of historical trauma.

Thesis

Master of Arts (MA)

This dissertation approaches both being and knowledge as functionally no different than storytelling, with stories themselves given life by the various theoretical and narrative frameworks and strategies through which they are shaped and made credible. Storytelling is the foundational methodology of this work, and the work itself takes imagination as central to complicating and disrupting the normative terms (i.e., the stories) of both being and knowledge. Its particular agenda is in making space for imagining futures without both war and the figure of the human, especially the human as Man, as a way through the interminable conflict characteristic of the contemporary historical moment. Situated in the field of human-animal studies, the analysis takes up military working dogs, which I argue are made to sustain the disimagination processes inherent to militarization. The innate dehumanization of war requires narratives that recover the human, and dogs, as companion species and creatures of the home, are especially well positioned for this task. Drawing on Black feminist thought, and anti-colonial insights from Indigenous thinkers, this work also shows how such dogs are used strategically within assemblages of whiteness to reify certain forms of sovereignty at the expense of both racialized people and dogs. Finally, I argue that imagining futures without conflict and war requires asking seemingly unimaginable questions, such as why sacrificing dogs in combat seems an unassailable truth given the alternatives. By asking such questions, I seek to engage a kind of radical imagination unconstrained by the limits of Man as the locus of ethics, especially during times of conflict, and to bring about an appreciation of dogs, whether in combat or otherwise, as beings for whom our responsibility to, and ethical relation with, runs far deeper than most humans willingly acknowledge.

Dissertation

Candidate in Philosophy

This project looks at weaponized and military working dogs within the context of war and conflict to examine the stories we tell about them, and what these stories do. I ask, how do these stories work and who are they for? To answer these questions, I traverse an expansive archive that includes, among other things, popular media representations, military memoir, mainstream journalism, and documentary film. I am especially interested in the ways stories about dogs inform how we understand war, militarization, and race, and how they impact the operation of power and sovereignty. I argue that dogs have been used to teach us who is and isn’t human, but that our obligation and responsibility to the gift that dogs bring is to undo the oppressive story of Man, which institutes untold amounts of suffering and oppression across species, and to tell new stories in its place.

The relationship between Indigenous peoples and Canadians is fraught with political and cultural divides. While Idle No More garnered some momentum to raise awareness of the need for political change, there has yet to be an approach that has popularly engaged and compelled response from Canadians. This thesis project navigates the political potential of artists, who can both accumulate cross-cultural audiences through entertainment and incite change through their vocalizations in performance. Offering a case-study approach to the Indigenous music group, A Tribe Called Red, this project considers their compelling Indigenous space-making work through their performance and celebrity. Drawing from this work, this project offers a navigation between the need for respectful cross-cultural dialogue between Indigenous peoples and Canadians and the actionable change that can occur through popular entertainment and its intimate connections.

Thesis

Master of Arts (MA)

The relationship between Indigenous peoples and Canadians is fraught with political and cultural divides. While Idle No More garnered some momentum to raise awareness of the need for political change, there has yet to be an approach that has popularly engaged and compelled response from Canadians. This thesis project navigates the political potential of artists, who can both accumulate cross-cultural audiences through entertainment and incite change through their vocalizations in performance. Offering a case-study approach to the Indigenous music group, A Tribe Called Red, this project considers their compelling Indigenous space-making work through their performance and celebrity. Drawing from this work, this project offers a navigation between the need for respectful cross-cultural dialogue between Indigenous peoples and Canadians and the actionable change that can occur through popular entertainment and its intimate connections.

This dissertation draws upon literary and cultural studies, hip-hop studies, and hip-hop feminism to explore Black women’s critical engagement with the boundaries of Black womanhood in the cultural productions of street literature and hip-hop music. The term “troublesome” motivates my analysis as I argue that the works of writers Teri Woods and Sister Souljah and of rapper Lil’ Kim create narratives that alternately highlight, reproduce, and challenge racist, classist, and sexist discourse on Black womanhood. Such narratives reveal hip-hop to be a site for critical reflection on Black womanhood and offer context-specific examples of the intersectionality of hip-hop generation women’s experiences. This project also incorporates ethnographic methods to document and validate the experiential knowledge of street literature readers. In the growing body of scholarship on street literature (sometimes called hip-hop fiction), there is limited work on the intertextuality of hip-hop music and street literature, and the dialogic nature of their listening and reading publics. This project offers an analysis of the discursive contributions of street literature texts, hip-hop music, and consumers and participants of hip-hop culture by reading the texts and sites of the culture as constitutive of a Black public sphere. By using the framework of hip-hop feminism to analyze street literature and hip-hop music, this dissertation argues that these women’s works demonstrate the possibilities in and through both popular mediums to trouble understandings of what Black feminism for the hip-hop generation is or can become.

Dissertation

Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

Although written in the late twentieth century, David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest takes place in the twenty-first century and is an extrapolation on social trends, namely the trend of ubiquitous technology and entertainment in American society. In this thesis, I explore, through a twenty-first century perspective, various topics in relation to the theme of technology in the novel. In order to show the all-encompassing influence of this theme, I divide my thesis into two main sections, by looking at the big picture (the structure of the novel) and the small picture (the individual characters and their relationships with one another). In the first chapter, I categorize Infinite Jest as a work of Menippean satire. In doing so, I suggest that the novel mimics the very culture it critiques, the fragmented culture of technology. In the second chapter, I look at the ways in which the characters communicate—or rather, don’t communicate—with one another. Through a discussion on the novel’s monologic quality, I then move into the third chapter, wherein I view the theme of solipsism as a product of the culture of technology. The fourth chapter is an examination of the role of the MacGuffin in the narrative. I argue that Wallace uses the MacGuffin and the novel’s lack of resolution as a metaphor for the search for meaning in a posthumanist world devoid of meaning and clarity. While each chapter contains a distinct discussion, ultimately the overarching goal of this thesis is to explore the effects, as depicted in Infinite Jest, of the posthumanist world on humanity. According to Wallace, good fiction shows the reader what it means to be a human being, yet in a technology and entertainment-driven world, wherein the line between reality and artificiality is blurred, the issue of what it means to be a human being is problematized.

Thesis

Master of Arts (MA)

Our Hearts and Minds examines how the “figure of the refugee”—as an analytic—both illuminates and complicates conventional understandings of nationhood, citizenship, and belonging, and in doing so, imagines alternative ways to think about history as well as socio-political formations to come. Through analyses of literary and cultural productions, my interdisciplinary project reconceptualizes “refugee” as a condition of subjectivity, as opposed to a legal category, a political anomaly, or a historical experience empty of rights and values. Taking the context of the War in Viet Nam, and the Southeast Asian diasporas that have resulted from it, as my case study, I focus on three affective categories—gratitude, resentment, and resilience—to explore how refugees remember, represent, and embody forced migration and its afterlife. Affect, I suggest, is an important means of turning to the bodies that migrate—its contacts, attachments, intensities, potentialities—as well as the forms of relationality and sociality that enable the refugee’s positioning in the world. Reading a range of texts including novels, short fiction, memoir, poetry, activist performance, and art videos, my research develops a critical framework for understanding refugee passages through the lens of feeling and embodiment, emotion and collectivity. This focus on affect departs from, and challenges, a field of refugee studies that take refugees as “objects of investigation” as well as popular modes of representation that characterize them as pitiful, identity-less mass. I center the textures of subjectivity and embodied experience, suggesting that rather than being restrictive and/or constrictive of diasporic lives, identities, and epistemologies, the refugee designation, or a sense of refugeeness, is valuable in making sense of entangled processes of war, migration, and diaspora. I contend that gratitude, resentment, and resilience are not only inevitable affective structures of American militarism overseas, they also illuminate the conditions of possibility crucial for the work of survival and memory-work in its wake.

Dissertation

Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

This project considers the memoir as a space that offers multiple memories and histories, allowing the rethinking of a perceived meta-narrative of Canadian history. By reading marginalized voices and generational silences in Maria Campbell's Halfbreed and Joy Kogawa's Obasan as testimonies of alternate Canadian histories, this project challenges normative ideas of Canadian identity and history that privilege the colonial, Eurocentric subject. Further, I consider how including memoir in the pedagogical space combats normalized racism and "othering" in Canada. I argue that calling Canadian students to bear witness to memories deemed "forgettable" in a national context opens the possibility of rethinking notions of "Canadian" history and identity.

Thesis

Master of Arts (MA)

This study explores the latent operation of Western gender norms in popular female-centred Young Adult (YA) dystopian texts. By examining adolescent female protagonists and the nature of their social havoc-making, this study investigates how reconstructed and recalibrated definitions of femininity ultimately re-inscribe a patriarchal status quo. The five havoc-making heroines under consideration are: Katniss Everdeen of Suzanne Collins’ “Hunger Games” trilogy, Saba in Moira Young’s “Dustlands” trilogy, Deuce in Ann Aguirre’s “Razorland” trilogy, Tris Prior in Veronica Roth’s “Divergent” series, and finally, Cassie Sullivan in Rick Yancey’s THE 5TH WAVE. Although these YA havoc-making heroines rebel against oppressive governmental regimes, I recognize the implicit and explicit construction of their bodies and their behaviours through male-influence. Their male counterparts play a large role in shaping how these heroines look and behave—they perform and appear as masculinized warriors and as feminized delicate beauties in accordance with the political and personal desires of male characters. Through such constructions, these contemporary havoc-makers demonstrate a collision of heroisms: they look and act as conventional action heroines and romance heroines. Including theoretical texts from the 1990s and onward that feature feminist scholarly writing on the textual and filmic representations of women—such as Dawn Heinecken’s THE WARRIOR WOMEN OF TELEVISION and Sherrie A. Inness’ TOUGH GIRLS—I investigate how these young heroines are shaped as per the genres of Action/Adventure and Romance fiction.

Thesis

Master of Arts (MA)

This study looks at depictions of Young Adult heroines in popular YA dystopian fictions. Works under consideration: Collins' THE HUNGER GAMES trilogy, Young's "Dustlands" series, Aguirre's ENCLAVE, Roth's DIVERGENT and Yancey's THE 5TH WAVE.

My thesis explores the cultural and gender syncretic processes of Old English literature in three Anglo-Saxon poems: The Dream of the Rood, Elene, and Judith. Throughout my research I attempt to answer the question of syncretism as it is applied to Anglo-Saxon concepts of heroes and heroism in literature. While Old English scholars (including John M. Hill, Hugh Magennis, and Jane Chance) have developed this line of inquiry previously, my work pushes back on several assumptions that hinder their analyses. In particular, I resist the tendency of late 20th-century criticism to dichotomize the Germanic and Christian aspects of the texts, contending that since Latin Christianity was completely indigenized over a hundred years prior to the writing of these poems, it is impossible to discern a pre-Christian set of values and social norms. Instead, I discuss the converging influences of monastic and secular aspects of Anglo-Saxon in relation to the literary hero. I also examine the complex gender dynamics and performances that manifest in these three poems, arguing that the triumphant hero or heroine is able to succeed through a wide-ranging set of both masculine and feminine performances. Here I incorporate a subtle commentary of gender theory — especially Judith Butler’s theory of performativity — to complement my own textual criticism. As this sort of gender syncretism meets with the culturally syncretic writings of the Anglo-Saxon poets, a new and idealized type of hero emerges, one who accomplishes victory through both spiritual and secular, as well and masculine and feminine performances.

Thesis

Master of Arts (MA)

This thesis aims to discuss the process and purposes of “remaking” the Anglo-Saxon hero in three Anglo-Saxon poems: The Dream of the Rood, Elene, and Judith. I examine how the poets blend various monastic and secular influences within Christianized Anglo-Saxon culture in order to establish a new and ideal literary hero, one who often resembles spiritual archetypes such as Christ or the Virgin Mary. I also explore the complex gender dynamics that emerge in these poems, and in particular how the protagonist — the hero or heroine — navigates a diverse range of both masculine and feminine performances in order to succeed.