Arts and Humanities Commons^™

Listening To "Silence": Alternative Modes Of Communication In Korean And Korean American Women's Literature, Judy Joo-Ae Bae

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

South Korean feminist activity may be relatively unknown to many Western readers; however, a distinct form of feminist activism can be seen when considering alternative modes of communication that are not less than, simply different from “speech” or “voice” as forms of agency celebrated in the West. Alternative modes of communications such as silence, song, touch, and performance also speak important messages which can be heard when understood through local knowledges. In the three cases of South Korean and Korean American women’s fictions used in this dissertation, I unpack these alternative modes of communications used by the female protagonists through …

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

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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 …

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

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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 …

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

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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

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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 …

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

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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 …

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

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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

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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 …

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

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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 …

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

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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

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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 …

Atmosphere And Religious Experience In American Transcendentalism, Thomas Sorensen

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I propose a new intellectual history of how the aesthetic obtains religious value in the American literary tradition. According to the account that prevails from Perry Miller to Tracy Fessenden, the Transcendentalists collapse scripture and literature into a single secular category. I argue instead that the Transcendentalists redraw the distinction along aesthetic criteria. A text’s sacred status has little to do with who wrote it when, and everything to do with a particular aesthetic quality expressive of divine inspiration. Scholarship has neglected two concepts instrumental to this development: the religious sentiment and atmosphere. Unitarian and Calvinist norms held all religious …

Malory, Chivalric Medievalism, And New Imperialist Masculinity, Andrew Livecchi

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

Over the course of the nineteenth century, Sir Thomas Malory’s fifteenth-century work of Arthurian romance, Le Morte Darthur, underwent significant reevaluation, from being warily considered a trivial, morally problematic text to being hailed as a national epic with a central place in the English canon. This shift in Malory’s status coincided with the rise of an increasingly competitive and unabashedly aggressive model of imperialism in the 1870s, which historians conventionally term New Imperialism. At the same time, a new model of masculinity emerged, one that bemoaned the “decadence” of the modernized, leisurely man and that celebrated the hypermasculine ideal …

Duration And Depravity: Religious And Secular Temporality In Puritanism And The American Gothic, Taylor Kraayenbrink

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

Duration and Depravity identifies a temporality of “sinful feeling” operating in the archive of Puritan writings of personal piety, such as diaries, autobiographies, conversion narratives, and sermons, and persisting into early American gothic literature. This temporality of sinful feeling is an attempt to discipline the self through temporal projection oriented towards the theological fact and religiously experienced feeling of sinfulness. Duration and Depravity engages with the proliferation of postsecular criticism in American literature studies generally, and Puritan studies more specifically. Postsecular criticism in literary studies is a style of historicism that reconsiders its primary archive’s position in newly complicated narratives …

The Simultaneous Book: Women's Writing In Contemporary Art, Maryse Lariviere

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Novels written by women authors who don’t adhere to the classification “visual artist” are nonetheless gaining momentum in today's contemporary art world. Yet works by authors such as Chris Kraus or Catherine Millet are often not recognized as artist’s novels because their authors are not or/and do not consider themselves to be visual artists. I contend that we can usefully situate their work within the genre of the artist’s novel by addressing how they invent artistic postures and artistic alter-egos within the autofictional worlds of their texts. My dissertation The Simultaneous Book proposes to open up the definition of the …

A Deleuzean Poststructural Deconstruction, Adam Nadir Mohamed

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This project seeks to reconceive a poststructural form of deconstructive criticism as a Deleuzean deconstructive commentary. I first explore the way Derrida’s concept of différance is confined to a deconstructive criticism which solely traces it in order to critique metaphysical concepts. As an alternative to the confined use of différance in deconstructive criticism, I develop a deconstructive commentary which deconstructs the primacy of a commentated text. Instead of using différance solely to trace the limitations of philosophical concepts (Hegelian in particular), it can serve as a plane of immanence that track a multitude of differently configured philosophical concepts in their …

Financial Frictions: Money And Materiality In American Literary Naturalism, 1890-1925, Patricia Luedecke

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My dissertation argues that American literary naturalists employ money—particularly the tension between its materiality and immateriality—as a metaphor for hidden ontological instability in the following nineteenth-century cultural cornerstones: financial speculation, criminal justice, race law, and social-Darwinian individualism. My first chapter investigates the tension between material accounting and Gothic ethereality in Theodore Dreiser’s The Financier (1912). This chapter argues that, since the Gothic genre involves a compulsive need to account for the incredible and incorporeal, The Financier’s irresolvable tensions between gambling and speculation, home and market, are Gothically inflected. I conclude that, just as speculation haunts the ontological coherence of …

Narratives Of Sexuality In The Lives Of Young Women Readers, Davin L. Helkenberg

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In recent years, research on adolescent sexuality in Young Adult (YA) Literature has included a discussion of its potential role in sex education. Based on the extensive yet problematic presentation of sexuality within these texts, it has gained both support and opposition. However, very few empirical studies have been done on how readers say YA Literature has informed their sexual lives.

This thesis investigates how narratives of sexuality found within YA Literature may inform the sexual lives of young women readers by examining both readers’ experiences and YA texts. First, semi-structured interviews were conducted with 11 female participants (aged 18 …

Antichrist In The Shadows: Biblical Allusion In Richard Iii And Macbeth, Curtis J. Simpson

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The tyrant kings in Shakespeare’s Richard III and Macbeth have been associated by scholars with pre-existing dramatic types such as the devil, the Vice, the Machiavel, as well as with biblical prototypes such as Saul, King Herod, and Judas. This thesis argues that Richard and Macbeth reflect all of these characteristics, but are best typified as figuras of the biblical Antichrist. The evidence, I argue, is situated in concrete biblical allusions diffused throughout the texts by Shakespeare, allusions that have been identified by scholars. I begin by identifying three primary signposts by which the figure of Antichrist was identified in …

There Is A Secret Heart, Dru Farro

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late 14c., originally in grammar (in reference to certain nouns that do not name concrete things), from Latin abstractus "drawn away," past participle of abstrahere "to drag away, detach, pull away, divert;" also figuratively, from assimilated form of ab "off, away from" (see ab-) + trahere "to draw," from PIE root *tragh- "to draw, drag, move."

“To drag away” I find particularly evocative.

“The candidate must ensure that the abstract refers to all the elements that would make the thesis worth consulting.”

I find this, of course, to be a paralyzing requirement. This thesis is not worth …