Arts and Humanities Commons^™

After Dark: Reading Canadian Literature In A Light-Polluted Age, David S. Hickey

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

A threat to nocturnal ecosystems and human health alike, light pollution is an unnecessary problem that comes at an enormous cost. The International Dark-Sky Association has recently estimated that the energy expended on light scatter alone is responsible for no less than twelve million tons of carbon dioxide and costs municipal governments at least $1 billion annually (“Economic Issues” 2). Emerging research also suggests that excessive artificial light at night may compromise melatonin production, a hormone that has been linked to the suppression of certain cancers (Stevens 28; Haim 32). As scotobiologists seek to solidify the connection between the disruption …

Communicative Methodologies And Mechanisms In Public Art, Jeremy P. Jeresky

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

Communicative Methodologies and Mechanisms in Public Art articulates my community based public art practice and MFA research based in London, Ontario. This dossier of research includes: a comprehensive artist statement, a case study and a documentation of artistic practice and development; in Chapters 1, 2, and 3 respectively. This written and photographic documentation is intended to represent my thesis exhibition. In the body of the thesis I look to my artist statement as a method and means to establish a framework in order to understand, analyze and evaluate public art. I feel that developing a framework that is in concert …

The Orpheus Figure: The Voice In Writing, Music And Media, Jason R. D'Aoust

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

This study traces a historical trajectory of the voice as it encounters the Orpheus figure in writing, music, and other media. Following a critical discussion of Auerbach’s literary figuration, the author questions certain aspects of phonocentrism in relation to opera and texts using the voice for authoritative or rhetorical purposes. Grounded in the prefiguration of opera’s earlier displacement of the singing voice, the understanding of mass media and digital media then developed is critical of theories of immersion in media. The analyses of the series of works and figures (Orpheus, Ossian, and Tristan) in this study lead the author to …

We’Re On This Road Together: The Changing Fan/Producer Relationship In Television As Demonstrated By Supernatural, Lisa Macklem

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

This thesis explores the changing relationship between fans and producers of television. The traditional hegemonic relationship between these two groups has changed in the digital age giving fans more access to the production process than ever before. Television is under some duress to remonetise itself in the changing landscape. The cultural, media, and communication theories of Bourdieu, Fairclough, D’Acci, and Jenkins, among others, can help to shed light on the dynamics of this relationship and help to understand how it has changed in recent years. While many studies have examined fan communities and fan cultural production, this thesis will focus …

The Methodological Roles Of Tolerance And Conventionalism In The Philosophy Of Mathematics: Reconsidering Carnap's Logic Of Science, Emerson P. Doyle

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

This dissertation makes two primary contributions. The first three chapters develop an interpretation of Carnap's Meta-Philosophical Program which places stress upon his methodological analysis of the sciences over and above the Principle of Tolerance. Most importantly, I suggest, is that Carnap sees philosophy as contiguous with science—as a part of the scientific enterprise—so utilizing the very same methods and subject to the same limitations. I argue that the methodological reforms he suggests for philosophy amount to philosophy as the explication of the concepts of science (including mathematics) through the construction and use of suitably robust meta-logical languages. My primary …

Le Fait Divers Criminel Dans La Littérature Contemporaine Française (1990-2012), Fanny Mahy

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

Our collective representation of the « fait divers » underwent considerable revision in the early 1980s, as Marine M’Sili points out: « from being universally decried, denounced and censured, [it] sees its status change to the point of taking on a positive value », even among the intellectual elite. At the same time, according to Dominique Viart, literature takes on a new « transitivity »; it is no longer self-sufficient but requires a direct object, the world. These two developments provide a meeting ground where new and more frequent interactions between literature and the « fait divers » can take …

The Halifax Pop Explosion: Music Scenes, Sloan, And The Case For A Halifax Sound, Danielle Hamel

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

In the early 1990s, the Halifax music scene was catapulted into the limelight as Canada's answer to the Seattle grunge scene. Dubbed the Halifax Pop Explosion, the surge of bands that became popular during this time came of age in an already well-established music scene with nurturing local infrastructure. At the forefront of the city's mainstream success, the band Sloan and their peers had developed a particular style of songwriting and performance that led the media and local audiences to believe that a particular 'Halifax Sound' had emerged, a notion that still reverberates in the local music scene. Using the …

The Public School Washroom As Heterotopia: Gendered Spatiality And Subjectification, Jennifer C. Ingrey

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

This dissertation investigates how secondary school students understand their own gendered subjectivity and the discursive and material processes that contribute to it through visual artifacts (photovoice projects) the students created of school washroom spaces. Drawing primarily on Foucault’s analytics of disciplinary space and the heterotopia (Foucault & Miskowiec, 1986), I view the washroom space as producing and perpetuating gendered power relations that invert, suspect, or neutralize those existing in exterior spaces. Deploying both a Foucauldian and Butlerian analytics, these visual student responses are framed as confessional, queering or (de)subjugating (Stryker, 2006) and cartographic products, and hence, understood in terms of …

British-Romanian Relations During The Cold War, Mihaela Sitariu

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

In the aftermath of the Second World War British-Romanian relations were strained, marked by accusations of espionage directed towards Britain’s diplomats and requests for recalls. The British Government reacted moderately to these, acquiescing to recall their diplomats but refusing to concede to the Romanians when it came to their ‘flimsy’ accusations. Negotiation was preferred to reprisals especially when certain Britons had to be rescued from the Communists’ hands. In one respect Britain was not that indulgent: when money was involved, particularly the assets of oil companies nationalized in 1948.

Trade remained a priority for both the British and Romanian governments. …

Dark Sympathy: Desiring The Other In Godwin, Coleridge, And Shelley, Jeffrey T. King

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

Dark Sympathy: Desiring the Other in Godwin, Coleridge, and Shelley explores how Romantic writers took up and responded to eighteenth-century discourses of sympathy in the context of an increasingly influential materialist epistemology and ontology. In its formulation by David Hume and Adam Smith, sympathy plays a central role in society, using the imagination to smooth over uncertainties about the status of the self and its relation to the world that might otherwise paralyze human activity. Sympathy therefore carries a twofold purpose: on the one hand, it provides a feasible substitute for personal identity; on the other hand, it facilitates social …

The Vancouver Asahi Baseball Team And Cultural Acceptance 1920-1941, Christopher M. Pellerin

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

This thesis analyzed how the Vancouver Asahis, through excellence in baseball, gained acceptance within the newspaper media and community from 1920 to 1941. An examination of Vancouver’s history and culture determined the importance of baseball to the city, especially upon Bob Brown’s, Vancouver’s greatest builder of the game, immigration. A history of the Asahis was also examined to help frame baseball’s importance to the Japanese and why they wished to engage in this specific sport. Through a content analysis within the Vancouver Sun and Daily Province newspapers, this thesis examined how the Asahis were represented in each of the two …

Optimality And Teleology In Aristotle's Natural Science, Devin Henry

Devin Henry

In this paper I examine the role of optimality reasoning in Aristotle’s natural science. By “optimality reasoning” I mean reasoning that appeals to some conception of “what is best” in order to explain why things are the way they are. We are first introduced to this pattern of reasoning in the famous passage at Phaedo 97b8-98a2, where (Plato’s) Socrates invokes “what is best” as a cause (aitia) of things in nature. This passage can be seen as the intellectual ancestor of Aristotle’s own principle, expressed by the famous dictum “nature does nothing in vain but always what is best for …

Producción De La Concordancia En Español Por Hablantes De Náhuatl, Alma P. Ramirez-Trujillo

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

Esta tesis investiga la adquisición de la concordancia de género y número en el sintagma determinante, y de sujeto, verbo y objeto en el sintagma verbal por hablantes de náhuatl que hablan español como L2 (n=19) y por bilingües simultáneos (náhuatl-español) (n=6). Los resultados son contrastados con un grupo de control (n=5).

El español y el náhuatl son muy diferentes. El español dista mínimamente de otras lenguas romances, mientras que el náhuatl es una lengua polisintética sin género, el número está restringido a sustantivos animados, tiene que expresar concordancia de objeto y no tiene verbos infinitivos. La falta de concordancia …

Entre El Juego Y La Memoria: El Detective Y La Ciudad En La Narrativa Neo Policiaca De Paco Ignacio Taibo Ii Y Leonardo Padura Fuentes., Carlos Pardo

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

This dissertation examines the development of the characters in the detective series of Paco Ignacio Taibo II (Mexico) and Leonardo Padura Fuentes (Cuba) and their relationship with their Hispanic-American cities: Mexico D.F. and Havana. To accomplish it, this dissertation initially deals with the connection between the “neo policiaco” and the narrative tradition that precedes it: the classical detective story or whodunit and the American hardboiled crime story, as well as its link with Spanish contemporary detective fiction. As a result, the Hispanic-American “neo policiaco” explores new possibilities of detective narratives in which complex characters and the Hispanic American city as …

Manufacturing Legitimacy: A Critical Theory Of Election News Coverage, Gabriel N. Elias

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

To what degree does instrumental reason influence election news coverage? Using Habermas's understanding of system/life-world as a heuristic, I map the rationalization process of political communication. This illuminates the institutional logics at play in the field of politics and the field of journalism, and the way the social dynamics between them enable the framing of political life as a strategic game. This understanding is then contextualized within an analysis of the media frames that informed the Canadian federal election of 2011. I find that news coverage does tend to focus on political strategy; but this is not wholly at the …

A Revised Account Of Simcoe’S Exploration Of The Forks, Marvin L. Simner

History Publications

No abstract provided.

Talking Nonsense: Spiritual Mediums And Female Subjectivity In Victorian And Edwardian Canada, Claudie Massicotte

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

This study traces the development of mediumship in Canada in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Especially popular among women, this practice offered them an important space of expression. Concealing their own identities under spiritual possession, mediums ubiquitously invoked well-known historical figures in séances to transmit their opinions on current issues. As such, they were able to promote new ideas to interested audiences without claiming responsibility for their potentially controversial words.

While many studies have been conducted in the United States, Britain, and France regarding the significant role of mediumship in the emergence of women on the political scene, …

The Religion Of Success: The Religious And Theological Roots Of The American Success Industry Of Self-Help, Personal Growth, And Wealth, Sharon M. Lindenburger

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

Abstract

The American success industry comprises an $11 billion for-profit enterprise that is growing by almost six percent every year in the United States and Canada (and increasingly in other countries). Purveyors of success teachings claim that they teach methods by which anyone, with enough commitment and vision, can “have it all.” “Having it all” includes health, relationships, careers, and spirituality, but the bottom line for the success industry is almost always material wealth. This thesis argues that religious and theological memes characterize the modus operandi of the success industry, particularly themes derived from American Protestantism, in the form of …

A Defence Of Anti-Psychologism About Reasons, Alex Beldan

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

My concern is the ongoing debate regarding the relationship between the reasons for which an agent acted (motivating reasons) and the reasons which count in favour of that action (normative reasons). Normative reasons seem to be facts, whereas motivating reasons seem to be psychological states. Agents look to be capable for acting for the reasons that favour an action, which would require that motivating reasons are capable of being the same kind of thing as normative reasons, which in turn is in conflict with the different natures of normative and motivating reasons. My object in my dissertation is to resolve …

Magic(Infra)Realism: Jetztzeiten Of Believability And Latin American History In García Márquez’S Cien Años De Soledad And Otoño Del Patriarca., Katarzyna Jasinski

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

This thesis examines the idea of Colombian history as ‘random coincidence’ in Gabriel García Márquez’s Cien años de soledad and El otoño del patriarca. Walter Benjamin’s Theses on the Philosophy of History and Michel Foucault’s Nietzsche, Genealogy, History provide the theoretical framework for the research. This thesis examines magic realism as a way of representing the true invisible past of Latin America. The combination of Foucault’s concept of genealogy, Walter Benjamin’s ‘messianic historical materialism’ and García Márquez’s ‘magic realism’ demonstrates that the combination of living and telling produce a Jetztzeit of believability that redeems Latin American history from historicism. …

Interstory: A Study Of Reader Participation And Networked Narrative In Media Convergence, Elika Ortega Guzman

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

Recently we have seen the proliferation of narratives developing in media convergence: simultaneously on websites, blogs, multimedia platforms, books, magazines, etc. In this thesis, I propose the term interstory to characterize this narrative tendency. Interstory is a narrative constituted by a network of story pieces published in different media and compiled by readers. To illustrate the concept of interstory I take as a study case Hernán Casciari’s and Christian Basilis’ Orsai, which in two years has incorporated into its narrative three blogs, a print magazine, and a web magazine. Orsai has been a successful project thanks to the formation of …

Flying Fish In The Great White North: The "Culture" Of Black Barbadian Migration To 1967, Christopher Stuart Taylor

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

Notwithstanding First Nations peoples, Canada is a nation of immigrants. As a settler colony, the French and English charter immigrant “solitudes” created a paradigm of “White Canada” nation-building defined by exclusionary and hypocritical immigration policies. Canada was a “White man’s country” built by non-Whites on the stolen lands of colonized Aboriginal peoples, where discriminatory anti-Black immigration policy, particularly during the early twentieth century up to the immigration policy reforms of the 1960s, was designed to restrict and prohibit the entry of Black Barbadians and Black West Indians. The Canadian state capitalized on the public’s fear of the “Black unknown” and …

A Case Study Mapping Literacy Learning Opportunities And Identity Construction Among African Immigrant Youth In A Canadian Secondary School, Wambui J. Gichuru

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

Studies with immigrant and refugee youth highlight challenges, school failure and early push-out rates (Anisef, 2008; James, 2012; Roessingh, 2010). There is limited research about how immigrant students especially from continental Africa negotiate their identity at school for positive outcomes. The goal of this qualitative case study was to explore literacy learning opportunities afforded by the school for African youth who were learning to become literate in English as an additional language in a Canadian secondary school and the implications for the students’ communicative and identity options.

The study utilized ethnographic tools, i.e., interview, classroom observation, mapping literacy activities and …

Galina Ustvolskaya (1919-2006): Analytical Approach To The Pitch Content Of Selected Compositions, Lindsay S. Murrell

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

Galina Ustvolskaya was overshadowed throughout her lifetime, both personally and professionally, by her compositional colleague, Dmitri Shostakovich. This dissertation seeks to establish Ustvolskaya’s separate identity, making her idiosyncratic compositional design the forefront of the research. A contextual transformational approach suits her compositional design built upon the element of repetition. Employing Joseph Straus’s analytical approach to the music of Ruth Crawford Seeger, this dissertation will explore a selection of Ustvolskaya’s work, demonstrating the evolution of her compositional design.

The melodic foundations of Ustvolskaya’s compositional approach are based upon compact motives established at the onset of each work. The motives are then …

Some Disputed Aspects Of Inertia, With Particular Reference To The Equivalence Principle, Ryan S. Samaroo

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

This thesis is a contribution to the foundations of space-time theories. It examines the proper understanding of the Newtonian and 1905 inertial frame concepts and the critical analysis of these concepts that was motivated by the equivalence principle. This is the hypothesis that it is impossible to distinguish locally between a homogeneous gravitational field and a uniformly accelerated frame.

The three essays that comprise this thesis address, in one way or another, the criteria through which the inertial frame concepts are articulated. They address the place of these concepts in the conceptual framework of physics and their significance for our …

An Autoethnographical Tapestry Of Feminist Reflection On My Journey Of A Fitness Model Physique, Stephanie A. Paplinskie

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

Weight training and fitness competitions are increasingly popular activities for many women seeking an aesthetically fit body. This thesis entails a critical reflection of the various factors surrounding my personal decision to partake in body sculpting, examining how these factors parallel the experience of other women in the fitness industry. Using a feminist theoretical framework and autoethnography, a history of feminist theory is incorporated to demonstrate some of the various perspectives surrounding women bodies. Two challenges for women are discussed in this paper: i) the fear of fat, and how it is connected to a woman’s initial decision to attend …

The Violence Of Aesthetics: Benjamin, Kane, Bolaño, Nicholas A. Fagundo

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

This thesis is an attempt to grapple with and make sense of a particular type of violence which forms an integral part of contemporary aesthetics. This multifarious violence strives, and often fails, to transgress conventions of form and content through appealing to what Deleuze calls the violence of sensation, as opposed to the violence of representation or the sensational. Taking Walter Benjamin’s distinction between mythic and divine violence as an entry to discussion concerning the poetic possibilities of the transgression of and redemption from violence, British playwright Sarah Kane and Chilean novelist Roberto Bolaño will be read not only as …

"Being Stuck": Understanding The Health-Related And Everyday Lived Experiences Of Young Mothers In Rexdale, Ontario Through A Social Determinants Framework, Jaspreet Kaur

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

The purpose of this study was to gain an understanding of the ways the health-related and everyday lived experiences of young mothers are shaped by various social determinants, and in the context of their neighbourhood. Using a critical qualitative methodology, five mothers between the ages of 17 to 19 were interviewed from Rexdale, a neighbourhood in the City of Toronto characterized by a number of social risk factors(e.g. high rates of visible minorities, unemployment, and teen mothers). In-depth thematic analysis led to the emergence of four themes: 1) Living in Rexdale: Representations and realities; 2) Leaving Rexdale and wanting something …

“Alma” O “Arma”, Evidencia De La Neutralización /L/ /R/ En La Variedad Dialectal Andaluza De Sevilla, Maria De La Esperanza Ruiz-Peña

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

The Andalusian variety of Spanish is characterized by a weakened articulation (Hualde, 2005). The purpose of the present study is to analyze and characterize liquid neutralization in this variety of Spanish. This experiment specifically provides new evidence on lateral rhotic alternation, quantifying the rate of lateral maintenance, substitution of laterals by rhotics, production of in between sounds and deletion in 40 Andalusian speakers of Spanish. In doing so, it rigorously examines the effect of a number of linguistic and extra-linguistic factors. The linguistic factors comprised of number of syllables, stress, position (incomplete neutralization) and across word boundary. The extra-linguistic factors …

What Canada Read/Red: A Content Media Analysis Of The Montreal Olympic Games And The Soviet Union As Reported In The Montreal Gazette And The Globe And Mail, Joshua F. Archer

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

This study describes the media coverage of the 1976 Montreal Summer Olympic Games. Two newspapers were used for the data collection: the Montreal Gazette and The Globe and Mail. A systematic, descriptive content analysis of the Olympic Games news coverage was completed using 966 articles. Five categories were constructed for the quantitative analysis: general themes, change over time, sport, gender, and national representation. Based on the findings from the quantitative analysis, a qualitative analysis that examined the way in which the Soviet Union was represented in both newspapers was completed. Three dominant constructions were found, including sport dominance, political …