Arts and Humanities Commons^™

"Rank Corpuscles": Soil And Identity In Eighteenth-Century Representations, Nina Patricia Budabin Mcquown

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

In this dissertation, I analyze scenes of encounter between human beings and human dust in eighteenth-century texts. Ploughmen exhume bones and armor in the arable, consumers taste other people’s excrement in their vegetables, and improvers lime the earth to break down ancient corpses. In process, I find that eighteenth-century British authors recognized the soil as an agent of continuity, with the capacity to preserve, mobilize, and disseminate the material constituents of identity from one body into another. At times, the soil’s powerful co-operative agency is threatening to the integrity of the human self, but I argue that authors negotiate between …

Yaari With Angrez: Whiteness For A New Bollywood Hero, Teresa Hubel

Department of English Publications

This chapter comments on the relative insignificance of whiteness to Hindi film narratives, with white characters turning up, when they do, often as peripheral figures to create the effect of historical accuracy. It argues that in Hindi cinema, whiteness cannot function as it does in the West, where the legacy of imperialism has made it an unmarked category, whose invisibility allows it to function as a norm against which the aberration of racial others may be measured. In Indian films, whiteness is marked; and it is, increasingly, markedly white—to be resisted, or desired, or dismissed.

Fatal Attraction: The Fetishized Image Of The Fatal Woman As Gothic Double, Margaret Anne Young

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

The Gothic heroine is often doubled by an image – a painting, statue, costume, drawing, projection, or mental image – that is preternaturally powerful and endowed with an antagonistic sexual presence. This image of the fatal woman, unlike portraits of the heroine, is a representation without a referent: a fetish object, both for fictional characters and critics.

I argue that the simulacrum of dangerous femininity is a shifting signifier rather than a one-dimensional representation of – as previous critics have argued – ‘male fears and desires’ or female empowerment. Following the work of sociologist Bruno Latour and narratologist Mieke Bal, …

What Are You Reading?, Kim Solga

Department of English Publications

In May 2010, a general election in the United Kingdom produced a coalition government headed by David Cameron's Conservatives and (nominally) the Liberal Democrats under deputy PM Nick Clegg. The coalition (still in power in 2014) quickly plunged the nation into a period of postcrash austerity the likes of which had not been seen for generations. When I landed at Heathrow in June 2012 to start a new job at Queen Mary University of London, the ground was thick with casualties—and getting thicker. Significant challenges to the U.K. welfare state have been launched before, of course: most visibly and famously …

“Companions Of The Flame”: Concealment And Revelation In H.D.’S Trilogy, Cam Riddell

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

In part one I connect the theme of concealment, which manifests in animals and morphology, to the revelation of the “one-truth”, which I present, in part two, as a Midrash of the Book of Revelation in Tribute to the Angels. I argue that the “one-truth”, in H.D.’s cosmology, is conveyed by discussions of time, geometry, and genetic inheritance (of biology, theology, language), which synonymizes the Tree of the Sephiroth and the universal absolute from which all existence is derived. The Tree relates to the proto-mythology from which H.D.’s syncretisms derive and the proto-language from which the sources of her …

The Luminous Detail: The Evolution Of Ezra Pound's Linguistic And Aesthetic Theories From 1910-1915, John J. Allaster

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

In this study John Allaster traces the evolution of Ezra Pound’s linguistic theories from the method of the Luminous Detail during 1910-12, to the theory of the Image in Imagism during 1912-13, to that of the Vortex in Vorticism during 1914-1915. By tracing the similarities and differences in Pound’s theoretical claims regarding the role of language and history in poetry, Allaster demonstrates that the roots of Pound’s Imagist and Vorticist articulations are situated in the underappreciated essay series “I Gather the Limbs of Osiris.” At the same time, Allaster also highlights the constructedness of Pound’s theoretical frameworks, as well as …

Eecology: (Pata)Physical Taoism In E. E. Cummings’S Poetry, Nathan B. Tebokkel

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

Using an approach rooted in deconstructive close-reading and branching into pataphysics, this thesis studies, with and through the poetry of American modernist E. E. Cummings, ethical cultivations of aesthetics. First, a lover-beloved paradigm is unearthed in Cummings’s poetry, where love, a response to flaws, is the creative actualization of the world, others, and selves. Second, this love is extended (back) into poetry, using Cummings’s figures of birds—his “ornithopoeia,” the double movement of figuring the flesh and enfleshing the figure. Third, the ethico-aesthetic growth of the poet-reader, lover-beloved, and bird-figure is traced to a Taoist responsivity and eecological responsibility, using Cummings’s …

The Book Beautiful: Aestheticism, Materiality, And Queer Books, Frederick D. King

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

The Book Beautiful: Aestheticism, Materiality, and Queer Books studies the multimedial art of decorated books of the British Aesthetic Movement (1880-1900). Incorporating textual scholarship and queer theory, the project considers how the language of sexual intercourse, as it was expressed through Aestheticism’s conception of Eros, influenced a textual intercourse between literary content and bibliographical design. Paying particular attention to the influence of book design, typography, and illustration, the decorated book is reread as a total work of art that is realised when diverse concepts of beauty and eroticism are bound together in a single edition of a book. The …

Transnational Conversations: The New Yorker And Canadian Short Story Writers, Nadine Fladd

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

This dissertation explores The New Yorker magazine's role in shaping the Canadian short story, the contributions of Canadian authors to the magazine, and the aesthetic and ideological implications of transnational literary production. Using archival evidence, it explicates the publication histories of stories by Morley Callaghan, Mavis Gallant, and Alice Munro, as well as these authors' relationships with their editors at The New Yorker, in order to demonstrate some of the ways that Canadian literature emerged out of, as well as contributed to, North American transnational contexts. This project uses the work of textual studies scholars, and applies theories of …

What Feminists Do When Things Get Ruff, Kim Solga

Department of English Publications

This past spring I wrote a post for my teaching blog about learning to live with failure – to experience what it means to mess up, or to be messed up, without needing desperately to get outside of that feeling, to move quickly on and away from the terror of what seems in the moment like a shattering personal disaster.1 This is a skill that artists and students especially need: getting back on the proverbial horse after corpsing on stage, or after failing that crucial term paper, can be utterly gut-wrenching, madness-inducing stuff. Then, literally a few days after …

Graphic Drama: Reading Shakespeare In The Comics Medium, Russell H. Mcconnell

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

This project adopts a formalist method of literary analysis to approach the modern genre of Shakespearean comic book adaptations. These texts have as yet received little attention from the academy, despite their sophisticated engagement with problems of visualizing the transition from stage to comics page, as well as their capacity for making original contributions to the interpretation of Shakespearean drama. The formalist method that this thesis employs is derived from the foundational work of comics theorists Will Eisner and Scott McCloud, combined with an understanding of Shakespearean language and stage conventions. Once this method is developed and explained, the dissertation …

The Romantic Posthuman And Posthumanities, Elizabeth Effinger

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

This dissertation focuses on the way Romantic-period philosophers, artists and writers were critically engaged with various Romantic-period disciplines, those branches of learning that were complexly enmeshed with the inhuman and putting increasing pressure on the concept of “the human.” Over the course of five chapters, this study pursues the problematic of “the human” across the borders of philosophy, where Immanuel Kant entertains extraterrestrials while organizing the new discipline of pragmatic anthropology; the early and late illuminated work of poet-engraver William Blake, which enables us to think the inhumanities within the human; the closet drama and poetry of Percy Bysshe Shelley, …

Unmasking The Protester: The Meanings And Myths Of Collective Civil Resistance Movements In African American And Polish Postresistance Prose Fiction, Agnieszka Herra

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

My contention is that the narrative framework of social movements, especially the ones deemed “successful” such as the American Civil Rights Movement and the Polish Solidarity Movement, reflects unity and collectivity within collective memory. During the period of the movements’ duration, this provides a clear rhetorical purpose: to give the appearance of unity in order to give effective voice to the demands. I argue that the voices that did not fit into the collective movements emerge subsequently to question this monologic language in literary form. This dissertation uses Bakhtin’s notion of dialogic language to argue that novels in the postresistance …

Diffuse Connections: Making Sense Of Smell In Canadian Diasporic Women's Writing, Stephanie Oliver

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

This dissertation explores the crucial, yet often unacknowledged, role smell plays in Canadian diasporic women’s writing. While some critics discuss scent in their work on taste, memory, and diasporic nostalgia, I argue for considering scent in its specificity and suggest that smell shapes diasporic subjectivities differently than taste. Complicating frameworks that focus primarily on notions of memory, homeland, and nostalgia, I consider how diasporic subjectivities are shaped by a range of feelings connected to experiences in past homelands and present places of habitation, including racialized and gendered forms of olfactory discrimination in the ostensibly tolerant nation of Canada. Appropriating the …

Exposing The Monsters Behind Victorian Domestic Abuse, Jennifer Komorowski

2014 Undergraduate Awards

Domestic violence was a social issue prominently debated during the Victorian period. Literature published during this time period, which included Robert Browning’s “Porphyria’s Lover” and Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights, addresses the problem of domestic violence and exposes the problems women faced in the home, problems that were previously thought to be private matters. Throughout the nineteenth century, the laws regarding both domestic violence and the rights of women drastically changed to provide more protection and grant greater rights to both women and children. Both of Browning and Brontës works expose the hidden monsters that could exist behind the closed doors …

Wee Whizz Bang: Englishness And Noise In Ford Madox Ford's Parade's End, Rowan Morris

2014 Undergraduate Awards

This paper explores representations of Englishness in Ford Madox Ford's Parade's End, identifying in particular a taciturn, monoglossic form of pre-Great War Englishness that is threatened by the cacophonous, heteroglossic post-War world. Through close formal analysis of "noise" in Ford's tetralogy, framed by an historicist reading of the socio-political contexts of the First World War, this paper demonstrates how Parade's End simultaneously elegises a "stiff-upper-lip" Englishness while marking such reticence as an obsolete mode of thinking that is incompatible with modernity. In contrast to criticism that identifies The Last Post, the final novel in the tetralogy, as a return to …