Arts and Humanities Commons^™

The Cleaving Of House And Home: A Lacanian Analysis Of Architectural Aesthetics, Sarah E. Thorne

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

Drawing on Lacanian psychoanalysis and digital media studies, this thesis explores the radical disconnect between the home as a fantasmatic object of desire and the house as the space in which the fantasy of home is staged. By analyzing the house as a prosthetic replacement for our originary home (the womb), the aim is to uncover how architectural aesthetics of the Victorian, modern, and postmodern house respond to this irreconcilable gap, and why each aesthetic necessarily fails to create a more homely home. Considering recent trends in architecture, the thesis then examines the coincidence of the “small house” movement with …

Ruining Representation In The Novels Of China Miéville: A Deleuzian Analysis Of Assemblages In Railsea, The Scar, And Embassytown, Kristen Shaw

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

This work explores the social and political potentialities of body-assemblages in China Miéville‘s novels Railsea, The Scar and Embassytown. Using the theories of Deleuze and Deleuze and Guattari, my analysis focuses on the manner in which assemblages within these texts resist unification and reification under representational frameworks and forge new identities based on an ethical appreciation of difference, fluidity, and creative self-actualization. Whereas representational schemas privilege supposedly ahistorical, transcendent, and cognitive-based iterations of identity divorced from material contingencies, the assemblages at work in Railsea, The Scar, and Embassytown instead focus on embodied-knowledge and fluid, emergent notions …

Miscegenation In The Marvelous: Race And Hybridity In The Fantasy Novels Of Neil Gaiman And China Miéville, Nikolai Rodrigues

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

Fantasy literature in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries uses the construction of new races as a mirror through which to see the human race more clearly. Categorizations of fantasy have tended to avoid discussions of race, in part because it is an uncomfortable gray area since fantasy literature does not yet have a clear taxonomy. Nevertheless, race is often an unavoidable component of fantasy literature. This thesis considers J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings as a taproot text for fantasy literature before moving on to Neil Gaiman’s American Gods and China Miéville’s Perdido Street Station, both newer fantasy …

Human Automata, Identity And Creativity In George Du Maurier's Trilby And Raymond Roussel's Locus Solus, Adrienne M. Orr

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

George Du Maurier’s Trilby (1895) and Raymond Roussel’s Locus Solus (1914) feature a unique figure, the human automaton, a human being who has been transformed into a machine. Rather than becoming objectified and dehumanized, thus transformed they produce great music and art defined by the single quality supposedly irreproducible by machines—variability. Drawing multiplicity from the sameness of exact repetition in their art, the human automata’s identities are equally capable of embodying otherness and oppositions in a plural identity that remains uniquely singular. This challenges contemporary attitudes towards automation as a fixative, deterministic and reductive, and ultimately dehumanizing transformation. Linking automatism, …

Architectures Of The Veil: The Representation Of The Veil And Zenanas In Pakistani Feminists' Texts, Amber Fatima Riaz

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

My dissertation, which works at the intersections of feminist theory, architectural theory and postcolonial literary theory, examines the spatiality of the zenana and the burqa as represented in Pakistani literary and cultural texts. I propose that the burqa creates a portable closet, an interstitial, liminal, “third space” that allows Pakistani (secluded and veiled) women to not only traverse the borders between the private (female, domestic) and public (male) spaces, but to also signal chastity and religiosity while in the public, and semi-public spaces of the cities and villages of Pakistan. I argue that the dupatta, the chador and the hijab …

Broken Passages And Broken Promises: Reconstructing The Komagata Maru And Air India Cases, Alia Rehana Somani

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

My dissertation examines two events in Canada’s past that have played formative roles in the debate about the place of the South Asian diaspora within the Canadian nation. The first is the 1914 Komagata Maru incident, in which 352 British subjects of South Asian origin aboard a Japanese ship – the Komagata Maru – were denied entry into Canada and forced to return to India. The second is the 1985 bombing of Air India Flight 182, an event that claimed the lives of almost 300 Canadian citizens, most of South Asian origin, who were traveling from Canada to India. My …

Hazardous Experiments: The Elusive Prefaces Of William Godwin, Mary Hays, William Wordsworth And Percy Bysshe Shelley, Jeffrey W. Miles

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

This study analyzes the prefaces of four Romantic-period writers: William Godwin, Mary Hays, William Wordsworth, and Percy Bysshe Shelley. Historically, the preface can be traced back to the insinuatio of classical rhetoric, the purpose of which is to evade audience hostility for writers presenting a bad case. Given the repressive political and cultural atmosphere of the Romantic period, writers like Godwin, Hays, Wordsworth, and Shelley, idealists who seek to disseminate radical ideas in an era of state censorship, must devise a strategy to convey their messages without attracting attention to their subversiveness. Thus, all four writers continually preface their works …

From Tawa'if To Wife? Making Sense Of Bollywood's Courtesan Genre, Teresa Hubel

Department of English Publications

Introduction:

Although constituting what might be described as only a thimbleful of water in the ocean that is Hindi cinema, the courtesan or tawa'if film is a distinctive Indian genre, one that has no real equivalent in the Western film industry. With Indian and diaspora audiences generally, it has also enjoyed a broad popularity, its music and dance sequences being among the most valued in Hindi film, their specificities often lovingly remembered and reconstructed by fans. Were you, for example, to start singing "Dil Cheez Kya Hai" or "Yeh Kya Hua" especially to a group of north Indians over the …

One Dead White Guy At A Time: Miss Julie: Sheh’Mah, By Tara Beagan, Kim Solga

Department of English Publications

New Canadian Realisms: Eight Plays collects works of contemporary theatre, each of which may be defined as "realist" through both a crucial link to the past and a zest for re-tooling old definitions. Grounded by Gwen Pharis Ringwood's pioneering Still Stands the House, the anthology also features Trey Anthony's 'da Kink in my hair, Tara Beagan's Miss Julie: Sheh'mah, Madeleine Blais-Dahlem's sTain, Hillar Liitoja's The Last Supper, selections from the Impromptu Splendor series by National Theatre of the World, Theatre Replacement's BioBoxes, and Zuppa Theatre's Penny Dreadful, as well as a series of text-specific introductions and a resource page for …

Peter Dickinson World Stages, Local Audiences: Essays On Performance, Place, And Politics, Kim Solga

Department of English Publications

Peter Dickinson’s World Stages, Local Audiences is a book I really, really wanted to like. It takes significant risks in style and structure. It is personal and invested. It is compelled by the same kinds of ques- tions—about political performance, social justice, community affect, and cultural change—that motivate a great deal of my own work. It is relentlessly eclectic in its choice of primary sources, examining everything from the Beijing and Vancouver Olympics to the drama of Tony Kushner to the media spectacles of professional soccer. It is a scholarly nomadology (136-175)—a term I suspect Dickinson won’t mind me applying …

The Monstrosity Of Anne Carson's Autobiography Of Red, Leif Erik Schenstead-Harris

Department of English Presentations

No abstract provided.