Arts and Humanities Commons^™

After Dark: Reading Canadian Literature In A Light-Polluted Age, David S. Hickey

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

A threat to nocturnal ecosystems and human health alike, light pollution is an unnecessary problem that comes at an enormous cost. The International Dark-Sky Association has recently estimated that the energy expended on light scatter alone is responsible for no less than twelve million tons of carbon dioxide and costs municipal governments at least $1 billion annually (“Economic Issues” 2). Emerging research also suggests that excessive artificial light at night may compromise melatonin production, a hormone that has been linked to the suppression of certain cancers (Stevens 28; Haim 32). As scotobiologists seek to solidify the connection between the disruption …

Dark Sympathy: Desiring The Other In Godwin, Coleridge, And Shelley, Jeffrey T. King

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

Dark Sympathy: Desiring the Other in Godwin, Coleridge, and Shelley explores how Romantic writers took up and responded to eighteenth-century discourses of sympathy in the context of an increasingly influential materialist epistemology and ontology. In its formulation by David Hume and Adam Smith, sympathy plays a central role in society, using the imagination to smooth over uncertainties about the status of the self and its relation to the world that might otherwise paralyze human activity. Sympathy therefore carries a twofold purpose: on the one hand, it provides a feasible substitute for personal identity; on the other hand, it facilitates social …

Talking Nonsense: Spiritual Mediums And Female Subjectivity In Victorian And Edwardian Canada, Claudie Massicotte

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

This study traces the development of mediumship in Canada in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Especially popular among women, this practice offered them an important space of expression. Concealing their own identities under spiritual possession, mediums ubiquitously invoked well-known historical figures in séances to transmit their opinions on current issues. As such, they were able to promote new ideas to interested audiences without claiming responsibility for their potentially controversial words.

While many studies have been conducted in the United States, Britain, and France regarding the significant role of mediumship in the emergence of women on the political scene, …

Metaphor And Metanoia: Linguistic Transfer And Cognitive Transformation In British And Irish Modernism, Andrew C. Wenaus

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

This dissertation contributes to the critical expansions that Douglas Mao and Rebecca L. Walkowitz identify as New Modernist Studies. This expansion is temporal, spatial, and vertical. I engage with the effects Modernist texts have “above” the page: lived experience. I examine the structural similarity of linguistic metaphor and the mind as considered by cognitive scientists. Identifying the human mind as linguistic and language as an artifact of the human mind, my research extrapolates upon what I call the “psycho-ecology” of reading, a self-representational knot between text and mind that constitutes lived experience. Far from being an abstraction, psycho-ecology is concrete: …

Strata, Soma, Psyche: Narrative And The Imagination In The Nineteenth-Century Science Of Lyell, Darwin, And Freud, Pascale M. Manning

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

My dissertation, “Strata, Soma, Psyche: Narrative and the Imagination in the Nineteenth-Century Science of Lyell, Darwin, and Freud,” contributes new research to the diverse field mapping the intersections of science and literature in the nineteenth century. Although scholars such as Gillian Beer and George Levine have established ties between developments in the natural sciences and the scope of the nineteenth-century novel, there has not been a sustained effort to attend to the narrative structures of the primary texts that most influenced coterminous literary movements of the period. My work thus attends closely to the narrative and imaginative form of scientific …

Feeling With Imagination: Sympathy And Postwar American Poetry, Timothy A. Dejong

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

This dissertation examines how sympathy, defined as the act of “feeling with” another, develops within American poetics from 1950-1965 both as aesthetic strategy and as political response to Cold War culture. Re-examining the social aims of postwar poets typically either thought of as apolitical or yoked to political positions not in fact evidenced by their poems, I argue that these poets, by developing forms of sympathy that negotiate the middle space between the aesthetic conventions of late modernist poetry and the social concerns of postwar American culture, instantiate a self-questioning, often implicit form of “soft politics” that both prefigures and …

"Radiant Imperfection": The Interconnected Writing Lives Of Robert Bringhurst, Dennis Lee, Tim Lilburn, Don Mckay, And Jan Zwicky, Kostantina Northrup

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

Over the course of the past two decades, Robert Bringhurst, Dennis Lee, Tim Lilburn, Don McKay, and Jan Zwicky have come to be known as a coterie of ecological writers and ethicists. All five poets have inhabited the Canadian university at various points throughout their careers, and by discussing their ecopoetics in light of their commentary on academic epistemologies and contemporary education in the humanities, this dissertation observes how the poets’ respective approaches to aesthetics, philosophy, and pedagogy are intimately intertwined. By contextualizing the group’s ecopoetics in light of their academic interventions, I argue that their public reputations as ecological …

Storied Truths: Contemporary Canadian And Indigenous Childhood Trauma Narratives, Michelle Coupal

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

This dissertation reconceptualizes generic distinctions between fiction and testimony in accounts of childhood trauma. Scholars such as Leigh Gilmore have argued that while writers of trauma stories are burdened by legalistic definitions of evidence and anxieties about truth-telling, they nonetheless push at the limits of autobiography, often scuffing the border between fact and fiction, in their effort to bring their traumatic stories into language. There has not, however, been a sustained effort to understand and legitimize the place of fiction in testimony, particularly in cases of adult narrations of recovered memories of childhood traumas. My research addresses this lacuna by …

Virtuosity On Virtu(E)Osity And Theatrical Community, Kim Solga

Department of English Publications

No abstract provided.

Uncommon Ecology: Reading The Romantic Oikos, Shalon Noble

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

This project contributes to the field of ecocriticism by reconsidering the idea of nature in the Romantic period in order to explore a new mode of artistic ecological thought. Ecocriticism develops in tandem with the environmental urgency of recent decades, responding mostly with an intense focus upon material nature in order to remind an increasingly artificial society of its earthy foundations and to encourage, in some kind or degree, a return to nature. Though the call for return is a powerful story, modern scientific and philosophical developments indicate that it is not ecologically sound. The return narrative requires a stable …

"Words, Words, Words": The Idea Of The Absurd As Method In Hamlet., Anthony Faber

Modern Languages and Literatures Annual Graduate Conference

In this paper I explore the idea that Hamlet develops the notion of the absurd as a method with which to confront his world: however, as art imitates nature, Hamlet's discourse of "an antic disposition" suggests, that he in fact embodies the absurd as constituting a meaningless existence.

Class Movements In The New South Africa: Post-Colonial Politics, Neocolonialism, And Mimicry In Pieter-Dirk Uys’S Macbeki A Farce To Be Reckoned With, J. Coplen Rose

Modern Languages and Literatures Annual Graduate Conference

This paper uses Homi Bhabha’s theory of colonial mimicry to analyze Pieter-Dirk Uys’s MacBeki: A Farce to be Reckoned With. In doing so I posit MacBeki is a colonial mimic, a character who comically imitates European gestures and language. MacBeki’s behaviour throughout the play highlights the dangers of greed and corruption in post-apartheid South Africa and encourages the play’s audience to respond with ridiculing laughter. My paper concludes by arguing that Uys’s play should be read as a hybrid text that draws on European dramatic styles and South African political events, staging a critical response to national uncertainties ahead …

’Tis Pity She’S A Realist: A Conversational Case Study In Realism And Early Modern Theater Today, Kim Solga, Roberta Barker, Cary Mazer

Department of English Publications

In this introduction to Barker and Solga’s 2013 special issue of Shakespeare Bulletin, Barker, Solga, and Cary Mazer discuss the use of emotional realist acting techniques in Cheek By Jowl’s ’Tis Pity She’s a Whore, assessing its political potential as well as reflecting on the risks it takes. The essay ranges beyond Cheek By Jowl to introduce some of the core questions explored by the issue as a whole.

Deconstructing History: An Analysis Of Rita Bouvier's Poem "Riel Is Dead And I Am Alive", Kate Osborne

Representing Aboriginality

No abstract provided.

Taking Back Stolen Voices: Mahlikah Awe:Ri's Poetry As Resistance For More Than 500 Missing Girls, Kate Richards

Representing Aboriginality

No abstract provided.

Resisting A Colonialist Reading: Examining The Strength And Superiority Of Native Women In Joseph Boyden's "Men Don't Ask", Victoria Fraser

Representing Aboriginality

No abstract provided.

Education, Culture And Identity In Rita Joe's "Keskmsi", Kathleen Sumpton

Representing Aboriginality

No abstract provided.

Problems Of Identity And Authenticity In Winona Linn's "Knock Off Native", Rachel Hunt

Representing Aboriginality

No abstract provided.

"A Track Is A Story Teller": Narratives Of Colonialism, Native Art And The City And The Bush In Marvin Francis's Bush Camp, Katya Heckendom

Representing Aboriginality

No abstract provided.

Mainstream Perspectives In "Indian Prince" By Trevino Brings Plenty, Angela Holmes

Representing Aboriginality

No abstract provided.