Arts and Humanities Commons^™

Literary Language Revitalization: Nêhiyawêwin, Indigenous Poetics, And Indigenous Languages In Canada, Emily L. Kring

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

This dissertation reads the spaces of connection, overlap, and distinction between nêhiyaw (Cree) poetics and the concepts of revitalization, repatriation, and resurgence that have risen to prominence in Indigenous studies. Engaging revitalization, resurgence, and repatriation alongside the creative work of nêhiyaw and Métis writers (Louise Bernice Halfe, Neal McLeod, and Gregory Scofield), this dissertation explores how creative, literary applications of nêhiyawêwin (Cree language) model an approach to Indigenous language revitalization that is consonant with nêhiyaw understandings of embodiment, storytelling, memory, kinship, and home. Broadly, I argue that Halfe’s, McLeod’s, and Scofield’s creative practices encourage the ongoing use, valuing, and teaching …

Terrorism, Islamization, And Human Rights: How Post 9/11 Pakistani English Literature Speaks To The World, Shazia Sadaf

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

The start of the twenty-first century has witnessed a simultaneous rise of three areas of scholarly interest: 9/11 literature, human rights discourse, and War on Terror studies. The resulting intersections between literature and human rights, foregrounded by an overarching narrative of terror, have led to a new area of interdisciplinary enquiry broadly classed under human rights literature, at the point of the convergence of which lies the idea of human empathy. Concurrently with the development of human rights literature as a distinct field of study, two new strains of Pakistani literature have emerged on the Anglophone literary scene. Firstly, there …

No Delicate Flower: Victorian Floral Symbolism’S Mediation Of Social Issues In Selected Works Of Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Alfred Tennyson, John Ruskin, And Isabella Bird Bishop, Christine Penhale

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

No Delicate Flower: Victorian Floral Symbolism’s Mediation of Social Issues in Selected Works of Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Alfred Tennyson, John Ruskin, and Isabella Bird Bishop examines floral symbols in the writings of four Victorian authors. Although a large body of work exists on the Romantic literary symbol, its Victorian counterpart is often ignored: Barrett Browning, Tennyson, Ruskin, and Bird Bishop use floral symbols in their work as outward-looking instruments, in contrast to the more inward-looking Romantic symbol, to help understand changing social conditions and address real-world concerns.

Chapter one offers an overview of the Victorian symbol and the language of …

The Hermetic Enigma Of A Protean Poet: Gnosis And The Puritanical Error In Shakespeare's Venus And Adonis, Luke Jennings

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

This thesis offers a study of Shakespeare’s Venus and Adonis (and by extension Lucrece) that builds on Ted Hughes’s claim that they function as two halves of a binary whole.[1] Tracing a contrapuntal surface symmetry between the poems, Hughes argues that Venus and Adonis encodes the founding myth of Catholicism and Lucrece that of Puritanism; the poems together convey the great metaphysical war between these two oppositional forces that so haunted Elizabethan England.[2] Critics have dismissed Shakespeare’s mythological references as mere “poet’s argot,” yet I shall build on Hughes’s reading of this ‘argot’ as “a sacred symbolic …

The Other Side Of Our Game, Kim Solga

Department of English Publications

No abstract provided.

The Tapestry Of Memory, Kathryn M. Lawson

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

Rationality points to the complete annihilation and end of a life when the body perishes, and yet when a loved one dies we continue to experience that person in a myriad of ways. The focus of this thesis will be a phenomenological exploration of the earthly afterlife of those we have loved and lost. By positing the subject as always intersubjective and as temporal in nature, this thesis will investigate how we continue to create and interact with the deceased upon the earth. In the introduction, this work will be placed in the context of the phenomenological tradition. The first …

The Voice As An Object Of Desire In The Work Of Ann Quin, Jennifer Komorowski

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

This thesis is a discussion of the voice as an object of desire in the work of Ann Quin. In life Quin suffered from bouts of silence and after death her work was itself silenced; I believe investigating the voice as an object is a fitting way to think about her work. My first chapter discusses the object voice as a silent, interior voice using the concept of the voice which Mladen Dolar develops to expand on Jacques Lacan naming the voice as an object of desire. In the second chapter I continue my discussion of the object voice with …

Waiting For God: John Milton’S Millenarianism Reconsidered, Rainerio George Ramos

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

Challenging consensus, I argue that John Milton never adhered to the politico-religious ideology of millenarianism, the belief that in the end times Christ would descend to rule the world with his saints for a thousand years. No definitive evidence for millenarianism exists in Milton’s English poetry and prose. Milton explicitly mentions the millennium only in De Doctrina Christiana, his Latin theological treatise. However, my research has demonstrated that even that brief reference is tentative and inconclusive. Consequently, the Oxford editors of De Doctrina (2012) have decided to revise a crucial sentence in their translation. I reveal the persistence of …

Romantic Metasubjectivity: Rethinking The Romantic Subject Through Schelling And Jung, Gord Barentsen

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

This thesis takes up Friedrich Schelling’s philosophy and Carl Jung’s analytical psychology to develop Romantic metasubjectivity, a model of the subject absorbing more of the vast compass of Romantic thinking on subjectivity than what prevails in Romantic criticism. Romantic criticism tends to be dominated by psychoanalysis as well as deconstruction and poststructuralist theory, which see the subject as either a linguistic phenomenon or simply a locus of difference without a unified “I.” In response to this critical tradition, Romantic metasubjectivity discerns a notion of Self which is neither a linguistic fantasy nor a transcendental essence which is or becomes fully …

Laughing Doubles: The Duality Of Humour, Evan A. Pebesma

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

This thesis examines humour as a theoretical problem, taking humour as both an object to be defined and as a mode of thinking in its own right. In the first chapter, I position humour between good sense and nonsense within a Deleuzian and psychoanalytic framework, culminating in a discussion of humour’s relationship to perversion. In the second chapter, I further develop this connection to perversion through an analysis of Christian humour, exploring the incongruity between the transcendent heights and corporeal depths, with special attention paid to the comedic works of Erasmus and Rabelais. In the third chapter, I examine how …

The Unknown Soldier In The 21st Century: War Commemoration In Contemporary Canadian Cultural Production, Andrew Edward Lubowitz

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

Over the past two decades, expressions of Canadian national identity have become increasingly militarized in cultural production in the commemorative works that have been created, renovated, or re-inscribed in Canada or in important Canadian international sites such as the Vimy Memorial in France. An integral component to this militarization is the paradoxical figure of the Unknown Soldier, both a man and a symbol, known and unknown, individualized and universal. Despite its origins in Europe after the First World War, the Unknown Soldier Memorial tradition has been reinvigorated in a Canadian context in the twenty-first century because it elevates white masculine …

Islam's Low Mutterings At High Tide: Enslaved African Muslims In American Literature, Zeinab Mcheimech

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

This dissertation traces the underexplored figure of the African Muslim slave in American literature and proposes a new way to examine Islam in American cultural texts. It introduces a methodology for reading the traces of Islam called Allahgraphy: a method of interpretation that is attentive to Islamic studies and rhetorical techniques and that takes the surface as a profound source of meaning. This interpretative practice draws on postsecular theory, Islamic epistemology, and “post-critique” scholarship. Because of this confluence of diverse theories and epistemologies, Allahgraphy blurs religious and secular categories by deploying religious concepts for literary exegesis. Through an Allahgraphic …

Crossing The Line: Censorship, Borders, And The Queer Poetics Of Disclosure In English-Canadian Writing, 1967-2000, Kevin T. Shaw

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

Since Confederation enshrined Canada Customs’ mandate to seize “indecent and immoral” material, the nation’s borders have served as discursive sites of sexual censorship for the LGBTTQ lives and literatures that cross the line. While the Supreme Court’s decision in Little Sisters v. Canada (2000) upheld the agency’s power to exclude obscenity, the Court found Customs discriminatory in their preemptive seizures of LGBTTQ material. Extrapolating from this case of the state’s failure to sufficiently ‘read’ queer sex at the border, this dissertation moves beyond studies of how obscenity law regulates literary content to posit that LGBTTQ authors innovate aesthetics in response …

Let Me Tell You What It Means: Reading Beyond Humor In Selected Iranian-American Memoirs, Stand-Up Comedy, And Film In The Post-9/11 Era, Reza Ashouri Talooki

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

ABSTRACT

Since the tragic events of September 11, 2001, Muslims in America have continued to remain the subject of cultural and political debates. In their artistic endeavours, Muslim artists have tried to rectify the negative and mediated images attributed to Islam, Muslims, and their cultures. In this dissertation, I look at Iranian works from the diaspora that not only represent Iranian culture and attempt to raise public awareness in America, but also extensively wade into humor as their linking theme. It is humor embedded in socio-cultural and political implications along with cultural representations that constitute my analysis in this dissertation. …

Introduction:The Impossible Modern Age, Kim Solga

Department of English Publications

No abstract provided.

W.B. Yeats: A Poet In A Destitute Time, Kristiana N. Karathanassis

2017 Undergraduate Awards

In the elegy titled “Bread and Wine,” Friedrich Hölderlin asks, “and what are poets for in a destitute time?” Drawing on the theories of Martin Heidegger, who addresses this very question in his essay “What are Poets For?”, I argue that the modernist poetry of William Butler Yeats offers an answer, as well as a demonstration. Through an analysis of “The Second Coming” (1919), “Sailing to Byzantium” (1926), and “The Circus Animals’ Desertion” (1939) in the order of their publication, I reveal that as Yeats’ poetic career developed and transformed, so too did his understanding of, and relationship to, his …

“I Am No Woman, I”: The Myth Of Ganymede In Shakespeare’S Venus And Adonis And Marlowe’S Hero And Leander, Kristiana Karathanassis

2017 Undergraduate Awards

Epyllion poems, or little epics, functioned in Renaissance society as provocative, comedic, and deeply intertextual explorations of Elizabethan sexuality and gender. Venus and Adonis (1593) by William Shakespeare and Hero and Leander (1598) by Christopher Marlowe are widely recognized as seminal poems of this erotic genre. Through their engagement and experimentation with the titular characters and narratives from Ovidian classical mythology, both poems seem to present subversive explorations of heterosexual love and desire in the Renaissance. In apparent transgressions and reversals of Petrarchan love conventions, Adonis, the beautiful male youth, is feminine and sexless, while Venus—the love goddess herself—is aggressive …