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)

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 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)

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)

This thesis draws on the works of Will Fisher, Lucy Munro, Michael Shapiro, and other critics who have written on the boy actor on the early modem English stage. Focussing on city comedies performed by children's companies, it argues that the boy actor functions as a kind of "third gender" that exceeds gender binaries, and interrogates power hierarchies built on those gender binaries (including marriage). The boy actor is neither man nor woman, and does not have the confining social responsibilities of either. This thesis argues that the boy's voice, his behaviours, and his epicene body are signifiers of his joyous and unconfined social position. Reading the boy actor as a metaphor for the city itself, it originally argues that the boy's innocence enables him to participate in the games, merriment, and general celebration of carnival, while his ability to slip fluidly between genders, ages, and other social roles enables him to participate in and embody the productively disruptive carnival, parodic, and "epicene" spaces of the city itself. In these spaces, when gender and age expectations are temporarily overthrown, individual bodies can desire, dress, and perform however they want. In persistently recognising the boy actor's metabolic ability to metamorphose its gender according to his own, or the individual spectator's desire, and in so doing to explore alternative modes of living and structuring families and other social relationships in the city, Amends for Ladies, Epicoene, The Knight of the Burning Pestle, Eastward Hoi, Ram Alley, and Bartholomew Fair offer strategies by which individual bodies in the audience can pursue their own individual alternative modes of living in the city. I am extremely grateful to my supervisory committee, Doctors Helen Ostovich, Melinda Gough, and Gena Zuroski Jenkins, for their careful reading (and re-reading) of various drafts, and for the swift and thorough commentary that accompanied each reading. Without their assistance, this project would have far less focus, and far more errors. I am particularly thankful for Dr Ostovich's guidance in my consideration of performance practices and interpretation, and for Dr Gough's always helpful recommendations of critical material throughout the year. I am also grateful to Jesse Arseneault, Brandon Kerfoot, Stephanie Leach, and Mathew Martin, who were always willing to read over paragraphs, and who not only listened to me talk nigh-endlessly about boy actors but also provided me with coffee as I did so. "A thankful [wo]man owes a courtesy ever"!

Master of Arts (MA)

Spenser's concern with English sovereignty is evident throughout The Faerie Queene, and in "The Legend of Holinesse" he promotes an entirely indigenous faith structure aligned with the state as the basis for a unified nation. I argue that in Book I of The Faerie Queene, Spenser presents an allegorical model of England through the Redcrosse Knight, Prince Arthur, and Una. These three characters represent the English citizenry, monarchy, and Protestant church, the three institutions proposed as necessary for a unified nation. Spenser's heroic model is presented as an emblem in Canto ix, where through the efforts of Prince Arthur, Redcrosse is reunited with Una. These three characters are similarly used in this paper as a structuring device to organize this thesis into three self-contained, interrelated essays, and issues relevant to each character/institution are explored in his or her chapter. After a brief discussion of the poetic emblem in Canto ix, where all three characters are present and exchange tokens of friendship, Redcrosse, Arthur, and Una are considered individually.

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.

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.

The mercenary whore is a recurring character-type in Henry Fielding’s plays and early fictions. This thesis examines Fielding’s representations of the sex-worker in relation to popular eighteenth-century discourses surrounding prostitution reform and the so-called ‘woman question’. Fielding routinely confronted, and at times affronted his audience’s sensibilities toward sexuality, and London’s infamous sex-trade was a particularly contentious issue among the moralists, politicians, and religious zealots of his day. As a writer of stage comedy and satirical fiction, Fielding attempted to laugh his audience into a reformed sensibility toward whoredom. He complicates common perceptions of the whore as a diseased, licentious, and irredeemable social other by exposing the folly, fallibility, and ultimate humanity of the modern sex-worker. By investigating three of Fielding’s stage comedies—"The Covent-Garden Tragedy" (1732), "The Modern Husband" (1734), and "Miss Lucy in Town" (1742)—and two of his early prose satires—"Shamela" (1741) and "Joseph Andrews" (1742)—in relation to broader sociocultural concerns and anxieties surrounding prostitution in eighteenth-century Britain, this thesis locates Fielding’s early humanitarian efforts to engender a reformed paradigm of charitable sympathy for fallen women later championed in his work as a justice and magistrate.

Thesis

Master of Arts (MA)

The power and beauty of all Indigenous cultures lies within the oral tradition of each respective group. The Eastern Cherokees continue today to regenerate and reinvigorate their culture, lifeways, spirituality, dance and song, and healing practices through their daily use of oral storytelling and historical narratives. As a small Native community in the southern United States (North Carolina), the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians (EBCI) function as a sovereign Indigenous nation who have steadfastly remained in their original homeland, despite a forced removal of most of the tribe in the late 1830s, infamously known as the Trail of Tears. These are the descendants of those brave Giduwah ancestors who resisted the colonizer demands to remove to Indian Territory, now called Oklahoma. The oral tradition with its ancient cultural teachings and stories provide the impetus for the Eastern Band to reassert their indigeneity to their sacred homeland in the Smoky Mountains, and to practice their unique and distinctive culture so that future generations of their young will keep the language and the old ways alive. Oral storytellers and community Elders use their spoken word art and share their vast orature in order to both revitalize the culture within their Native community, and to share cultural knowledge and educate those thousands of non-Cherokee tourists who visit there. My research into the living oral tradition of the Eastern Cherokees involved recording and collecting the oral stories shared at community events, and creating an archive in order to examine these varied stories and cultural specifics. Although it is difficult to analyze orality transcribed onto a written page, it was necessary for this formal dissertation. I have used a Native and specifically Cherokee theoretical methodology, known as Duyvkta and Gadugi, in order to frame and explicate the wealth of cultural knowledge held within this oral tradition. This dissertation may be complete, but the stories and spoken words will live on for the Eastern Cherokee, and there is much more work to be done so that the sacred Fire will continue to burn. Hvwa.

Dissertation

Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

Normally a formal dissertation in English Literature would examine works of literature and apply western literary theory to examine the intricacies of the poem or story. My project attempts a more difficult task – that of taking the spoken word in the form of Cherokee oral stories and, first, transcribing this orature into written words on paper, and, second, using an Indigenous critical approach in order to present a Cherokee-centric method of understanding the rich cultural and spiritual teachings held within these spoken stories and histories. I offer the ancient concepts of Gadugi (giving of oneself and working for the betterment of the community) and Duyvkta (walking the right path of harmony and balance) as ways of learning from the ancient and contemporary stories of the Eastern Cherokee. It is the originary oral tradition which created the…

This dissertation examines the emergence of a discursive regime, which I call “the Anthropocenic Imaginary,” that invokes, instrumentalizes, and distorts the language of the earth sciences to bolster a neoliberal project of depoliticization. In recent years, the Anthropocene, a proposed geologic epoch, in which humanity figures as a planetary force and the planet exists as a human artifact, has become a frequent subject matter within American art and scholarship. It is now common for texts to refer, implicitly or explicitly, to the Earth’s transformation by humanity. This dissertation wagers that the Anthropocene should be understood not only as a geo-scientific descriptor, but also as a troping device, discursive regime, and cultural imaginary, which frames cultural and scholarly productions in a manner that legitimates the political and economic status quo. I argue that, despite appearing to be the product of studies that address the Earth’s anthropogenic modification, this discursive regime is a symptom of neoliberalism, a political, economic, and cultural ideology that schools subjects into privatized modes of being in order to induce acquiescence to the dominance of economic elites. I demonstrate that the discursive regime of the Anthropocenic Imaginary causes recent works of American scholarship, literature, and photography, which seem as though they should incite activism, to become depoliticized. I suggest that the Anthropocenic Imaginary is characterized by the metabolization of disaster, the transmutation of shocking material into something stultifying. I argue that it is possible to interpret the texts that the Anthropocenic Imaginary instrumentalizes otherwise than as legitimations of the status quo, and to bring to light the intractable disaster these works embody. Within this state of disaster, I suggest that it is possible to uncover a politically generative condition of non-normativity, which suggests that the way things are now cannot be made permanent.

Dissertation

Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

This dissertation responds to the advent within American culture of a range of discourses that posit humanity as a world-altering force and the planet as a human artifact. It seeks to answer the following questions: What is it about the present moment that makes the thought that humans are a terrestrial force appealing? Who benefits from the idea that humans are defined by the capacity to act as world-shapers? Against the scholarly consensus, I propose that this idea is not the product of scientific studies that announce the dawn of the Anthropocene, a geologic epoch characterized by anthropogenic modification of the earth system. Rather, I suggest that it is the effect of a discursive regime that I call “the Anthropocenic Imaginary,” which instrumentalizes the vocabulary of the earth sciences to legitimate the dominance of neoliberalism, a political, economic, and cultural ideology, which exerts a depoliticizing influence upon culture and scholarship.

"Recitations: The Critical Foundations of Judith Butler's Rhetoric" explores the textures and patterns in the writing of Judith Butler. Notoriously difficult, Butler's rhetoric has garnered much scholarly and journalistic literature, and yet, to date, there remains no book-length study on this topic. At the same time, Butler scholars have tended to theorize her style as "subversive." Such a defense readily connects with Butler's general effort to contour and challenge the lines of social and cultural intelligibility, lines that deem some identities, especially sexual and racial ones, unacceptable. However, I argue that the framework of "subversion" ultimately reduces some of the generative tensions central to Butler's ideas, which I draw out by focusing on the ambiguity of "recitation." Drawing on cultural and literary theory, particularly at the intersections between poststructuralism, psychoanalysis, feminism, queer theory, and semiology, I reframe Butler's writing through the questions of inheritance, paradigms, and critical alliances. Focused on three major works, I identify and research the thought of her key sources, and so the dissertation doubles as a study of G.W.F. Hegel (Butler's Subjects of Desire (1987), Sigmund Freud and Michel Foucault (The Psychic Life of Power (1987), and Emmanuel Levinas (Giving an Account of Oneself(2005). Focusing on the ways that Butler re-articulates and revises the language of these influential writers, I develop a theory of Butler's style of critique that seeks to move discussions of her writing past the notions of "subversion" and "liberation." More broadly, I interpret the ambivalent scenes of identification and disavowal that Butler's writing stages to shed light on problems of modern critical subjectivity, marked by the inheritance of intellectual, social, and cultural structures that may trouble us, but that also form our identities and our relations to others.

Thesis

Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

This dissertation argues that the imagination takes on a new importance in the current moment of "financialization": the expansion of financial power both broadly around the world and deeply into everyday life. I suggest that a dialectic theory of imagination and value is necessary to understand this shift. Following an introduction laying out this problematic, chapter two looks at the career of the Western notions of the imagination up to and including the 191h century, positing that it has been an important aspect of the rise of modernity, capitalism and colonialism, but one whose political salience diminished with the rise of discourses of value. In chapter three I turn to theories of imagination in the twentieth century. But I suggest that none of these theories sufficiently accounts for the economic. In order to do so, I turn in chapter four to the notion of value, arguing that we are better equipped to understand economic value under capitalism when we see its relationship to other social values (ethical, aesthetic, political, etc.). To do so, I revisit Marx's "Labour Theory of Value" and, after narrating the rise and fall of this influential idea, I discuss the work of current social theorists seeking to revivify this concept for new times. In the fifth chapter I delineate how capitalism as a system subordinates social values to economic value and how finance is both the highest articulation and a key moment of this process. I conclude by mapping this theoretical approach through a reading of children's play with Pokemon cards, arguing that financialization demands we revisit questions of structure and agency in cultural studies.

Thesis

Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)