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 …

Killing, Combat And The Princess Patricia’S Canadian Light Infantry: Legendary Soldiers’ Stories Of The First World War – 1914-1918, Ryan B. Flavelle Cd

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

This study interrogates the stories and legends of six soldiers who served in the Princess Patricia’s Canadian Light Infantry during the First World War, and the ways in which they described their primary occupation as soldiers, killing enemy combatants. It asks a fundamentally important question; how and why do men kill at war? Soldiers tended to narrate their descriptions of killing from the perspective of an innocuous reporter, and downplay their agency in the killing act. They also, often, framed their descriptions of killing in terms of revenge for the loss of comrades, or atrocities committed by the enemy. Alternatively, …

Drum Voice, Quinn J. Smallboy

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

My creative practice works to incorporate my own experiences and memories and connect these to issues confronting Indigenous communities. As I continue to develop this practice a key work has proven to show or highlight these issues. This work, reinterpreting the traditional drum form has offered immense possibilities. This document considers certain aspects of my culture and ask what Indigenous art means today.

Felix Mendelssohn And Sonata Form In The Nineteenth Century, Katharine G. Walshaw

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

Mendelssohn’s music is consistently measured by a Beethovenian yardstick and, more often than not, his music is found to be unfit to live up to this aesthetic model. The purpose of this dissertation is to ask: is the model of Beethoven’s music the only appropriate choice for guiding analysis and research of Mendelssohn’s compositional style? I argue that the answer is an emphatic no. This dissertation attempts to open other avenues of research into Mendelssohn’s compositional style by training the focus directly on Mendelssohn’s works themselves. Using an inductive approach, this dissertation summarizes the results of the analysis of a …

Mnidoo-Worlding: Merleau-Ponty And Anishinaabe Philosophical Translations, Dolleen Tisawii'ashii Manning

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

This dissertation develops a concept of mnidoo-worlding, whereby consciousness emerges as a kind of possession by what is outside of ‘self’ and simultaneously by what is internal as self-possession. Weaving together phenomenology, post structural philosophy and Ojibwe Anishinaabe orally transmitted knowledges, I examine Ojibwe Anishinaabe mnidoo, or ‘other than human,’ ontologies. Mnidoo refers to energy, potency or processes that suffuse all of existence and includes humans, animals, plants, inanimate ‘objects’ and invisible and intangible forces (i.e. Thunder Beings). Such Anishinaabe philosophies engage with what I articulate as all-encompassing and interpenetrating mnidoo co-responsiveness. The result is a resistance to cooption that …

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 …

Pitching The Feminist Voice: A Critique Of Contemporary Consumer Feminism, Kate Hoad-Reddick

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

This dissertation’s object of study is the contemporary trend of femvertising, where seemingly pro-women sentiments are used to sell products. I argue that this commodified version of feminism is highly curated, superficial, and docile. The core question at the centre of this research is how commercial feminism—epitomized by the trend of femvertising—influences the feminist discursive field. Initially, I situate femvertising within the wider trend of consumer feminism and consider the implications of a marketplace that speaks the language of feminism. Then, through detailed content analysis of advertising by brands like Dove, Secret, CoverGirl, and Barbie, examples of this trend …

The Representation Of The Canadian Government’S Warrantless Domestic Collection Of Metadata In The Canadian Print News Media, Alan Del Pino

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

In January 2014, the former NSA contractor Edward Snowden revealed that Canada’s foreign intelligence agency CSEC was engaging in warrantless electronic surveillance of Canadians by monitoring communications metadata. Prior to these disclosures Canadians knew very little about metadata and about how the CSEC used information technology to collect electronic intelligence. Media outlets such as newspapers are important sources through which Canadians learn about issues such as warrantless surveillance of citizens. However, to date no research analyzes how Canada’s warrantless domestic collection of metadata has been represented in the Canadian new media. This thesis addresses this gap by analyzing the representation …

Regarding Aid: The Photographic Situation Of Humanitarianism, Sonya De Laat

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

Since the invention of photography, the medium has played an increasingly central role in shaping spectators’ imagination of distant suffering and calamitous experiences. The discourse of humanitarianism has evolved alongside photography and has relied on the medium to give it shape. Indeed, humanitarianism is and always has been a photographic situation, which is to say, photography has played and continues to play a significant role in constituting the very terms of humanitarianism, including how it is referenced, conceived, understood, and practiced. This dissertation is concerned with the historical role of photography in shaping the humanitarian imagination, as well as the …

The Foundations Of Revealed Religion 100 Years Before David Hume: The Contribution Of Anthony Collins, Nicholas Bryant Nash

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

In this dissertation I examine the contributions of Anthony Collins (1676-1729) to the eighteenth-century debate about the grounds of Christianity. I show that by the early eighteenth-century British philosophers addressing this topic had begun to abandon appeals to miracles in favor of appeals to the completion of Old Testament prophecy. I argue that this alternative was short lived, in large part because of the critical work of Anthony Collins. This episode in the debate is often overlooked but without it, later discussions of miracles, including those of David Hume in An Enquiry concerning Human Understanding, would have been anti-climactic. …

The Revolution Will Be Social And Poetic: The Insurgent Poetics Of Decolonial Thought, Marshall Hill

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

This thesis examines decolonization from the theoretical perspective put forth by Walter Mignolo and others as modernity/coloniality/decoloniality. It understands decoloniality to be a political-epistemic project grounded in the critique of colonial structures of violent domination as well as the autopoietic self-organization of autonomous communities. It argues that poetics as a creative relation of language to the social body is necessary in order to produce knowledge by thinking from and with these autonomous communities. Basing its examination of decolonization on the work of poets Aimé Césaire, Cecilia Vicuña and Beth Brant, this thesis shows how poetics forms a horizon in which …

Fuzzy Family Ties: Familial Similarity Between Melodic Contours Of Different Cardinalities, Kristen Wallentinsen

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

All melodies have shape: a pattern of ascents, descents, and plateaus that occur as music moves through time. This shape—or contour—is one of a melody’s defining characteristics. Music theorists such as Michael Friedmann (1985), Robert Morris (1987), Elizabeth Marvin (1987), and Ian Quinn (1997) have developed models for analyzing contour, but only a few compare contours with different numbers of notes (cardinalities), and fewer still compare entire families of contours. Since these models do not account for familial relations between different-sized contours, they apply only to a limited musical repertoire, and therefore it seems unlikely that they reflect how listeners …

A Complete Special Goods Theory Of Filial Obligations, Cameron Fenton

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

Until recently little philosophical attention has been paid to ethical issues arising within the family. This has changed in the past few decades, and a growing body of literature has developed on the obligations that exist within families. However, one area of family ethics that remains under-theorized is the nature of children’s obligations to their parents. What, if anything, do children owe their parents? And, on what parts of the filial relationship are obligations based?

My argument runs along three major lines that correspond to the chapters of this dissertation. In the first chapter, I claim that the two dominant …

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 …

'Empire Without End': John Finch, Orientalism, And Early Modern Empire, 1674-1681, Remi Alie

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

Between 1674 and 1681, John Finch (1626-1682) and Thomas Baines (1622-1681) produced a substantial body of writing on statecraft, religion, and the Ottoman Empire, while Finch was serving as the English ambassador to the Ottomans. This thesis, which represents the first substantial scholarly engagement with Finch’s political thought, reconstructs both his understanding of the Ottoman Empire, and his theory of sovereignty. By synthesizing a skeptical epistemology, a robust defense of the royal supremacy over the Church of England, and his understanding of Ottoman history and politics, Finch developed a theory of sovereignty in which liberty and coercion were equally useful …

The Other Side Of Our Game, Kim Solga

Department of English Publications

No abstract provided.

Pedagogical Encounters In Music: Thinking With Hannah Arendt, Cecilia F. Almqvist, Cathy Benedict, Panagiotis A. Kenellopoulos

Music Education Publications

This paper employs aspects of Hannah Arendt’s thought to explore different but interrelated questions that haunt contemporary music education. We see the importance of a return to Arendt now more than ever as we find ourselves, three authors in three different countries, trying to contribute to democratic music education practices and to researching the conceptual base of such practices, in countries where technocratic approaches to policy development prevail. More specifically in this article we address the following questions: how can we re-think the political and creative dimensions of music education pedagogies in the face of recent educational policy trends? How …

Does Reproductive Justice Demand Insurance Coverage For Ivf?, Carolyn Mcleod

Philosophy Publications

This paper comes out of a panel honoring the work of Anne Donchin (1940-2014), which took place at the 2016 Congress of the International Network on Feminist Approaches to Bioethics (FAB) in Edinburgh. My general aim is to highlight the contributions Anne made to feminist bioethics, and to feminist reproductive ethics in particular. My more specific aim, however, is to have a kind of conversation with Anne, through her work, about whether reproductive justice could demand insurance coverage for in vitro fertilization. I quote liberally from Anne’s work for this purpose, but also to shower the reader with her words, …

Citizenship Education In A Fragile State: Ngo Programs For Democratic Development And Youth Participation In Haiti, Gary W.J. Pluim

Comparative and International Education / Éducation Comparée et Internationale

This research centres on NGO citizenship education programs in Haiti to better understand youth experiences, outcomes, and perceptions of democracy. The findings from this study illustrate how programs from Western-based NGOs with liberal democratic traditions typically construct citizenship education in relation to the individual agency of the learners, whereas youth living in the context of fragility note the prerequisite for stable social structures as a foundation for citizenship. Through multi-dimensional analyses, this article highlights the importance of historical perspectives, the value of comparing disparate societies, and the necessity to explicate social locations in cross-cultural research. The concluding proposition states that …

“Walking Around With Broken Hearts On Their Hands:” Intimate Writings In Contemporary Comics, Gabriella Colombo Machado

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

This thesis aims at analyzing diary fiction in contemporary comic books. I have selected three primary sources, Wet Moon by Sophie Campbell (2004), Skim by Mariko Tamaki and Jillian Tamaki (2008), and Bleu Est une Couleur Chaude by Julie Maroh (2010). These works are close in time of publication, all written and illustrated by women. Moreover, they share other similarities: the protagonists are young female adults, and there is a queer motif underlying the stories. All three protagonists use diaries in order to express their thoughts, and feelings. Diary fiction focuses on character’s development, more than on action. Especially, the …

(Not) One Of The Boys: A Case Study Of Female Detectives On Hbo, Darcy Griffin

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

In 1997 HBO aired its first original drama series, Oz. In the years that have followed the network has positioned itself as vanguard in the television landscape, however, HBO drama series have remained a complicated, and often dangerous site for female characters. Moreover, with a few exceptions (Sex and the City, or True Blood for example), original HBO drama series remain focused on the network’s primary audience demographic: the predominantly male, relatively affluent consumers of quality television. This research explores the representation of female detectives within original HBO crime drama series, The Wire (2002--8) and Season Two of True Detective …

Being Gender/Doing Gender, In Alice Munro And Pedro Almadovar, Bahareh Nadimi Farrokh

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

In this thesis, I compare the short stories, “Boys and Girls” and “The Albanian Virgin”, by Alice Munro, with two films, La Mala Educación and La Piel Que Habito, by Pedro Almodóvar. This comparison analyzes how these authors conceive gender as a doing and a performance, and as culturally constructed rather than biologically determined. My main theoretical framework is Judith Butler’s theory of gender performativity as developed in Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. In my first chapter, I compare “Boys and Girls” with La Mala Educación, and in the second chapter, I compare “The …

Midheaven, Samantha R. Noseworthy

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

This dossier and accompanying exhibition at McIntosh Gallery, both titled Midheaven, constitutes my Master of Fine Arts Degree at the University of Western Ontario. Within this dossier I reflect upon what guides my art practice. This includes various historical influences, such as artist and writer Carolee Schneemann, philosopher Manly Palmer Hall, and the astrologer Stephanie Clement. In addition to the inclusion of anecdotes from my own life, within my thesis I analyze various occult concepts and practices, particularly tarot and astrology. I consider these understandings to be a direct window into the thought processes that drive my art practice. …

Virtual Archaeology, Virtual Longhouses And "Envisioning The Unseen" Within The Archaeological Record, William M. Carter

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

We are of an era in which digital technology now enhances the method and practice of archaeology. In our rush to embrace these technological advances however, Virtual Archaeology has become a practice to visualize the archaeological record, yet it is still searching for its methodological and theoretical base. I submit that Virtual Archaeology is the digital making and interrogating of the archaeological unknown. By wayfaring means, through the synergy of the maker, digital tools and material, archaeologists make meaning of the archaeological record by engaging the known archaeological data with the crafting of new knowledge by multimodal reflection and the …

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 …

The Ontological-Ontic Character Of Mythology, Jeffrey M. Ray

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

This thesis interrogates the concept of mythology within the opposing philosophical frameworks of the world as either an abstract totality from which ‘truth’ is derived, or as a chaotic background to which the subject brings a synthetic unity. Chapter One compares the culturally dominant, classical philosophical picture of the world as a necessary, knowable totality, with the more recent conception of the ‘world’ as a series of ideational repetitions (sense) grafted on to material flows emanating from a chaotic background (non-sense). Drawing on Plato, Kant, and Heidegger, I situate mythology as a conception of the false—that which fails to …

Remembrance As Presence: Promoting Learning From Difficult Knowledge At The Canadian Museum For Human Rights, Kelsey Perreault

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

This thesis explores the relationship between memorial museums and the Canadian Museum for Human Rights (CMHR), Winnipeg. Although the CMHR self-defines as an idea museum, using theories of remembrance, commemorative museum pedagogy, memory, and difficult knowledge, the CMHR is also easily situated in the growing global network of memorial museums. Angela Failler's theory of consolatory hope and my own theory of past-future dissonance suggest that there are several reasons the CMHR has not fulfilled its intended mandate of advocating for human rights in the present. Through a compare and contrast approach, this paper argues that the CMHR should look to …

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 …