Arts and Humanities Commons^™

The Ecology Of American Noir, Katrina Younes

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

In The Ecology of American Noir, I investigate the relationship between the conventions of noir fiction and film and its sub-types in relation to environmental crises. Specifically, I address questions that not only allow us to (re)read early hardboiled literature and neo-noir films, but that also help us identify a new sub-genre of noir and develop an ecocritical methodology: I call this contemporary sub-genre and methodology “eco-noir.” I trace the development of strategies of mapping urban blight and environmental deterioration in classic hardboiled fiction of the 1940s, neo-noir films of the 1970s, and eco-noir texts of the post millennial …

Chilean Canadian Literature In English: Memories Of Home And Belonging, From The Postcolonial To Decolonial Practice, Luis Jaimes-Domínguez

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

This dissertation aims to present a compelling exploration of identity and cultural hybridity, and of the intricate tapestry of diasporic experiences. As such, it delves into the significance of Chilean Canadian literature written directly in English, with a specific focus on the works authored by female writers as part and parcel of an emerging diasporic literature. Employing a postcolonial and hemispheric lens, this research employs a multidimensional methodology embedded in cultural memory, border studies, and representational intersectionality. Within this framework, this study attempts to unravel how Chilean Canadian literature written in English might contribute to a repository of Chilean Canadian …

Capacious Feminism: Intimacy And Otherness In Mina Loy's Poetry, Elise Ottavino

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

This dissertation explores Loy’s interest in the “woman’s cause” to interrogate how the poet was recaptured as an early feminist figure by the academy. After Virginia Kouidis “rediscovered” Loy’s work in the 1980s, the poet has been consistently drafted as a central feminist figure despite her lack of commitment to organized feminist movements of her time. This retrospective lens offers a catachrestic view of Loy’s feminism. I use “catachresis” to refer to the slightly inaccurate use of “feminism,” tinted by current perceptions of the term, but also to hint at Loy’s capacious feminine poetics. While the rise of feminist theories …

Bodies Of Silence And Space: Victimhood, Complicity, And Resistance In Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale, Sana H. Mufti

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

This thesis examines the complexity of resistance and the conditions of power for women in The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood. Using feminist theory, theories of neoliberalism, and Dominionism, this thesis works to understand the ways in which victimhood and complicity influence resistance in totalitarian regimes. I argue that neoliberal ideologies skew understandings of freedom, agency, and power in a way that ensures individuals, specifically women, remain trapped in the system. Focusing on reproduction, I examine how Gilead controls women’s bodies and reproductive abilities to ensure a future for itself. The Eve-Complex is one way that the state integrates itself …

Early-Stuart Funeral Elegies From Manuscript, James Doelman

Brescia School of Humanities Publications

This document is a collection of English funeral elegies from the years 1603 to 1640, which survive in manuscript but were not published, either in their own time or more recently. It served as the basis for James Doelman, The Daring Muse of the Early Stuart Funeral Elegy (Manchester University Press, 2021).

Bureaucratic Sorceries In The Third Policeman: Anthropological Perspectives On Magic & Officialdom, Alexandra Irimia

Languages and Cultures Publications

This article discusses The Third Policeman through the lens of a dialectic of enchantment and disenchantment that is firmly anchored in the history of anthropological discourse on bureaucracy (Malinowski, Lévi-Strauss, Tambiah, Herzfeld, Graeber, Jones). From this angle, Flann O’Brien’s novel is examined as an aesthetic illustration of an essentially anthropological argument: although bureaucracy has been described as an eminently rational form of social systematisation, regulation, and control (since Weber), it also functions, paradoxically, as a symbolic site for irrationality and supernatural occurrences, haunted by madness, mystery, and delusion. The novel is intriguing partly due to its nonchalant, humorous entwining of …

Buried Feelings, Standing Stones: Secularity, Animism, And Late-Victorian Pagan Revivalism, Jeff Swim

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

In this project, I argue that during the late-Victorian period a revived form of paganism developed in response to an emerging kind of secularity. My first chapter engages post-secularism as a framework for understanding how paganism responds to this new sense of secularity, which I demonstrate formed alongside developments in geology, archaeology, and anthropology. In chapter two, I show how ideas of “primitivity” and “animism” put forth by John Lubbock and E. B. Tylor influence what Matthew Arnold and Walter Pater debate as “the pagan sentiment.” The rest of the project concerns forms of what I call “pagan affectations,” authorial …

The Time Helix: Nonlinear Narrative Structures And The Paradox Of Delayed Simultaneity, Jaclyn A. Reed

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

My study of contemporary (post-2000) Anglophone novels combines themes of time and temporality with narratological analysis. I argue that nonlinear narrative structures (which originate in science fiction novels) challenge the supposed impossibility of simultaneity in the novel, undermine the literary construct of realism, and model new, more optimistic ways of imagining the future(s) beyond our present. I build upon Mathias Nilges’ argument that in the wake of the crisis of the “long now”—a societal belief that the future has been exhausted and we are trapped in an unchanging present—the contemporary time novel critiques historical forms of time and models new …

Men Under Microscopes: “Medical Gaze” And Homeostasis In Victorian Realist Literature, Nida Rashid

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

This thesis aims to explore the following questions implicit in four Victorian novels: is the relationship between science and humanities continuously at odds due to fundamental differences in philosophies? Can an understanding of how medicine transformed from an art to a science help bridge the gap between the arts and sciences? As medicine transformed into a science in the nineteenth century, it adopted three key innovations: first, Claude Bernard’s experimental method; second, what Michel Foucault later came to conceive of as the “medical gaze”; and third, Bernard’s theory of homeostasis. The thesis traces the changes in medicine as inflected across …

The Masochian Woman: Coming To A Philosophical Understanding Of Haudenosaunee Women's Masochism, Jennifer Komorowski

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

This dissertation is a philosophical examination of women’s masochism from several different viewpoints. Beginning from a centre of Western psychoanalytic thought, I analyse what Sigmund Freud, Jacques Lacan, Gilles Deleuze, and Slavoj Žižek say about women and masochistic practices, and then continue the discussion by looking at the work of several women theorists and writers, including Angela Carter, Judith Butler, Kathy Acker, and Luce Irigaray. This analysis centres around Lacan’s theorization of the death drive through the figure of Antigone, and while he does not describe her as the original woman masochist, I believe she is a central figure in …

The Myth Of Fanfiction: An Examination Of Two Deeply Connected Traditions Of Storytelling, Fionntan I. Ferris Mr.

Undergraduate Student Research Internships Conference

Fanfiction is an often dismissed medium of storytelling, however our investigation shows that it is deeply linked to the storytelling tradition of Classical mythology. Through the lens of classical reception studies we will examine the shared structures of these mediums as well as the deeper meaning they have and had to their audience in order to establish this deep connection. This paper will conclude with an investigation of why, despite their deep similarities, copyright law has led to fanfiction becoming derided while myth is placed on a pedestal.

Decolonizing Toronto Theatre, Hanna Shore

Undergraduate Student Research Internships Conference

This research project, “Decolonizing Toronto Theatre,” examines how Soulpepper, a mainstream Toronto theatre company, and their collaboration with Native Earth Performing Arts are contributing to the equity, diversity, inclusion, and decolonization of Toronto theatre through their recent Indigenous productions: Kamloopa and Where the Blood Mixes. We watched, read, and analyzed both plays to explore how these two productions transform and redefine the intellectual, political, and artistic conventions of Anglo-Canadian theatre. Our analyses of these plays are informed by the various texts centred around Canadian Indigenous history and Indigenous theatre. We also used an ethnographic approach by talking to people …

The Black Artiste: Politization As Racialization, Matthew Dawkins

Undergraduate Student Research Internships Conference

The idea that the personal doubles as the political is a modern analysis of socio- political regimes, popularized by second-wave feminism in the 1960s. However, this understanding has become increasingly relevant for a number of ideologies due to the ways in which modern political frameworks (ie. campaigns, policies, legislation, etc.) continue to target marginalized groups while the global social consciousness demands that political leaders rectify social issues in political arenas.

In this research project, I challenge the relationship between the personal and the political for Black artists in order to examine the extent to which Black art is inherently political. …

Nostalgic Metafiction: The Adventure Fiction Of Stevenson, Kipling, And Conrad, Hanji Lee

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

A sense of nostalgia for real adventure is ubiquitous in the adventure fiction of Robert Louis Stevenson, Rudyard Kipling, and Joseph Conrad. While many scholars consider the object of the writers’ nostalgia to be the exploratory age of the British Empire before her massive territorial expansion in 1890s, I argue that there is a missing piece in the current critical understanding of nostalgia: its textual dimension. Nostalgia in my texts is more than a historical longing for the youthful days of the Empire; it is a textual longing for the ideal adventure as imagined and constructed by the previous generation …

Speaking Chastity: Female Speech, Silence, And The Strategic Performance Of Chaste Identity In Early Modern Drama And Women's Writing, Lisa Templin

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

This dissertation explores the complex and contradictory relationship between female speech and chaste reputation in the early modern period. I draw on J.L. Austin’s speech act theory, Judith Butler’s theory of gender performativity, and Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s understanding of homosociality to study the acts of speech and silence involved in the strategic construction of chaste identity in early modern drama and women’s writing and the role that female homosocial networks play in helping to support the public appearance of feminine virtue. This dissertation scrutinizes literary moments in which the chaste reputations of women writers and their theatrical counterparts are at …

Unmade And Unmanned Men: Reading Traumatized Masculinity In Late Nineteenth-Century British Adventure Fiction Through The Lens Of The Indian “Mutiny” Of 1857, Madison A. Bettle

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

Unmade and Unmanned Men: Reading Traumatized Masculinity in Late Nineteenth-Century British Adventure Fiction through the Lens of the Indian “Mutiny” of 1857 examines the selected adventure fiction of George Alfred Henty, Rudyard Kipling, and Joseph Conrad through the historico-political context of India’s First War of Independence, known in Victorian Britain as the Indian “Mutiny” of 1857. Examining masculine trauma in adventure fiction reveals how British men, who were themselves colonized by the Empire’s expectations of them, sought not only to recover from the scars inflicted by imperialism, but also to expose the Empire for inflicting the psychologically damaging expectations that …

Phantasms Of Hope: The Utopian Function Of Fantasy Literature, Alexander C. Morgan

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

Fantasy literature has long been considered an inherently conservative genre. However, Ernst Bloch’s Marxist theory of a utopian anticipatory consciousness and his concept of nonsynchronism recognize a progressive, utopian function within the archetypes and allegories of fairy tales, a precursor to modern fantasy. Bloch argues that archetypes are not static entities and can be repurposed to critique the world contemporary to a text’s production. Even archetypes produced under a past mode of production, like those used in fantasy, can therefore be anticipatory and utopian. By extending Bloch’s utopian function to include fantasy and integrating his philosophy with the historical-materialist hermeneutic …

State Of Praxis In The Oath Of Vayuputras: An Eco-Critical Perspective, Karthik S, Sangeeta Mukherjee

Department of English Publications

The depletion and drying of river water across India is a growing problem in the contemporary period. According to the CPCB report on Assessment of Impact of Lockdown

on Water Quality of Major Rivers (2020-21), during the Corona Virus pandemic the water quality of rivers is alleviated a bit little due to minimum discharge of industrial waste, no access to pilgrimage, vehicle etc. On the other hand, it can be observed that dead bodies of the Covid-19 patients are dumped in the most sacred river Ganga in India which has increased the pollution level of the river and also will …

Resonances: An Examination Of Republication Through Four Case Studies, F S. Nakhaie

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

Republication, with or without textual changes, keeps a work in circulation. This protects the work from destruction but also affects how we receive it, because publication is always a socializing act. Despite its consequences for works and their reception, republication has not yet been theorized in textual studies. My dissertation addresses this research gap by employing the term resonance to discuss the relationships—between versions, contexts, and ideas—that develop out of republication. I explore republication at its extremes with four case studies of works that underwent major changes in republication. The first chapter examines Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray …

Assessing Reading Comprehension And Memory Recall Of Children With Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder, Jasmeen Mander

Undergraduate Student Research Internships Conference

This project examined the influence of background knowledge on reading comprehension and memory recall of children with Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder in comparison to typically developing children. Furthermore, the true or false scores and average story recalls of the two groups of children, ADHD and without ADHD were also compared. The participants varied in ages 9-14 years old and were assigned a self-paced reading task followed by 24 true or false questions and two memory recall questions. For both groups of children, the amount of background knowledge an individual conveyed did not correlate to their reading comprehension and memory recall. …

Sport, Space And Gender: Embodying Alternate Girlhoods With The Wolves, Kim Solga

Department of English Publications

What does it mean to throw like a girl? If we empower girls to throw – and to kick, to jump, to fly through the air like never before – how does that space-making impact the humans into which they grow? Does staging girls at sport help us to understand sport as a space-making activity every girls needs, and to which every girl has a right? This article reflects on the Pulitzer Prize-winning play The Wolves as it explores the relationship between the practice of sport and the practice of gender.

Artificial Frontiers, Simulated Indigeneity: Western Big-Budget Open World Games And The Settler Colonial Imaginary, Adam Bowes

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

This dissertation studies Western big-budget video games of a genre often referred to as “open world.” By tracking the concept of the “frontier” as a settler colonial (and later neoliberal) signal for space that invites access, I argue these games are both expressive of and cater to settler and neoliberal cultural anxieties regarding extermination and desires for accumulative dominance. Furthermore, these games exhibit their settler colonial and neoliberal ideologies through their narratives, gameplay mechanics, and productive contexts. That exhibition of ideology comes in several formulas of settler and neoliberal cultural production identified by various fields of scholarship. This dissertation, drawing …

Capital Distress: Productive Citizenship And Mental Health In Adolescent Literature, Jeremy Tl Johnston

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

This dissertation explores the complexities of adolescent mental health under neoliberal capitalism in twentieth- and twenty-first-century U.S. fiction about and for adolescents. Drawn on research that defines youth citizenship as responsibilities-based in nature, this project outlines the ways contemporary young adult (YA) novels of mental distress reveal an inextricable link between adolescent mental health and the conditions of what I term productive citizenship. Constituting my theorization of productive citizenship are three distinct tenets adolescents must adhere to: (1) displaying the motivation to achieve specific goals; (2) showing a propensity for self-reliance and individuality; and (3) accepting the translation of …

“The Seal Set On Our Nationhood”: Canadian Literary Responses To The South African War (1899-1902), Alicia C. Robinet

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

This dissertation seeks to modify the widely held view that the Great War (1914-18) was the defining military event in Canadian identity by turning to Canadian literary responses to the nation’s participation in early post-Confederation overseas combats: Garibaldi’s expedition against Rome, to which a regiment of French-Canadian Papal Zouaves went in support of Pope Pius IX (1868-70); the Nile Expedition (1884-85); and the Boer or South African War (1899-1902). In exploring these literary responses, the dissertation demonstrates that the construction of a national identity was articulated through overseas military engagement long before Canada’s collective reflections on Vimy, Passchendaele, and the …

Unsettling Sympathy: Indigenous And Settler Conversations From The Great Lakes Region, 1820-1860, Erin Akerman

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

Situated at the intersection of Indigenous, Canadian, British, and settler colonial literary studies, this dissertation is a transatlantic analysis of the personal and textual interactions of Drummond Island Métis interviewees, Ojibwe poet Jane Johnston Schoolcraft, British travel writer Anna Jameson, and British Lieutenant Governor of Upper Canada Francis Bond Head in the Great Lakes region in the nineteenth century. During the period after the War of 1812 and leading up to Confederation, settler narratives of sympathy for Indigenous peoples proliferated in politics and literature, yet what remains largely unexamined in the Canadian context is how this sympathy supports “the settler-colonial …

Practising Diversity At The Stratford Festival Of Canada: Shakespeare, Performance And Ethics In The Twenty-First Century, Erin Julian, Kim Solga

Department of English Publications

What does it mean to ‘practise’ diversity in Shakespeare production in the twenty-first century, specifically in an Anglo-American context? How is ‘practising’ diversity, from devising and directing to work in the rehearsal hall and on audience engagement, materially different from the now-familiar (but still important) goal of ‘representing’ diverse bodies on stage? In the last twenty years, debates about what the diversification of Shakespeare performance – along racial lines, gender lines, the lines of age and ability – means or could mean, and the simultaneous interrogation of what ‘Shakespeare’ signifies, for whom, and to whose benefit, have become increasingly urgent …

Sacred Mnemonics In Late Medieval England: Ars Memoria In The Hagiography Of Osbern Bokenham, Erica C. Leighton

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

This thesis examines the practice and understanding of the ancient ars memoria (art of memory) tradition in late medieval England. Using the work of fifteenth-century Augustinian friar Osbern Bokenham, I argue that his hagiography demonstrates a pronounced engagement with both ancient ars memoria techniques and original medieval adaptations and expansions of these narrative mnemonic strategies. The late medieval ars memoria, therefore, speaks to the education and training that allowed for complex and fluid approaches to mnemonic narration.

Bokenham’s surviving body of work includes a set of commissioned female saints’ lives entitled Legendys of Hooly Wummen, and a sizeable …

Education, Migration And Development Panel, Henri Boyi

Africa-Western Collaborations Day 2020

8 graduate students/recent graduate presentations on education, migration and development. Moderated by Dr. Henri Boyi. Reporting of panel done by current GHS students of the 2021 class. Abstracts can be found under "Africa-Western Collaborations Day 2020 Abstracts". Presenters as follows:

Jemima Nomunume Baada, "Experiences of Social Reproduction among Migrant Women in the Brong-Ahafo Region of Ghana"

Elmond Bandauko, "This is a Good Place to Live! Narratives and Counternarratives on Territorial Stigmatization in Harare's Informal Settlements"

Chinelo Ezenwa, "A History of 19th Century European Missionaries in Colonial Africa with Specific References to the Impact of Missionary Schools"

Rebecca Jackson, Jade Rozal, …

Material Witness: Occult Affects In The Mystery Fiction Of The Fin De Siècle, Thomas Matthew Stuart

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

As the nineteenth century progressed, Spiritualism blossomed from a religious movement to a cultural moment. While it remained an object of faith or ancillary faith, Spiritualism became as well a voice for radical reform, parlour entertainment, means of negotiating an increasingly mediated world, and so forth. Combined with enthusiasm for occult knowledge, Spiritualism offered intricately interrelated modes of narrating our relation to a consistently present past, in light of a rapidly approaching future. My project reads this fin-de-siècle fascination as a sensibility. Occult figures and spiritualist impulses, I argue, provide a vocabulary of feelings evoked in encounters with the mysterious. …

Critiquing Psychiatry, Narrating Trauma: Madness In Twentieth-Century North American Literature And Film, Sarah Blanchette

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

This dissertation explores representations of trauma and mental distress in twentieth-century novels and films. Drawn on research that emphasizes the ways that marginalized communities—in particular women-coded, racialized, and Indigenous persons—have historically been pathologized, the thesis considers how select novels and films query biomedical approaches to mental illness and critique psychiatric contexts, which prioritize social control more than they provide substantive and humane forms of support and care. How might representations of trauma and mental distress be understood without confirming regimes of psy-authority or psy-power? The thesis takes up this core issue by building on theories drawn from Mad Studies, illuminating …