Reading and Language Commons^™

Romantic Citation And The Receding Future, Andrew Sargent

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

This dissertation reads citation in Romantic literature as an aporetic movement between present and past, whereby what is cited becomes the receding ground on which the present and future’s erosion is inscribed. Citation exceeds quotation in that it forwards a disastrous intertextuality that retroactively determines not only past texts but events, histories, objects, and genres as accelerants that overshadow and ghost the present with its own extinction. Against generative modes of intertextuality such as those of Kristeva and Bakhtin in which texts’ repetitions of other texts facilitates the open-ended overturning and transformation of prior writing, citation precipitates a no future. …

Participatory Knowledge Of Motion: Ezhianishinaabebimaadiziyaang Mii Sa Ezhianishinaabeaadisokeyaang. The Way In Which We Live, That Is The Way We Write Stories., Erin E. Huner

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

This is a dissertation based upon the Customary Ways Dataset, which is comprised of 50 interviews given by Elders from Walpole Island First Nation, in 2010. The over-arching, community-designed research question that guided this dissertation was: How do the Elders of Walpole Island describe their relationship to the land? To answer this question, I co-designed a mixed-methods analysis that included traditional methods from the Social Sciences, including Grounded Theory, to establish emergent themes, and some simple statistical analysis using Chi-square and crosstab analysis. I also utilized methods closely related to the Humanities, deploying Story Mapping, Close Reading and a …

Improving Reader Motivation With Machine Learning, Tanner A. Bohn

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

This thesis focuses on the problem of increasing reading motivation with machine learning (ML). The act of reading is central to modern human life, and there is much to be gained by improving the reading experience. For example, the internal reading motivation of students, especially their interest and enjoyment in reading, are important factors in their academic success.

There are many topics in natural language processing (NLP) which can be applied to improving the reading experience in terms of readability, comprehension, reading speed, motivation, etc. Such topics include personalized recommendation, headline optimization, text simplification, and many others. However, to the …

Bastard Reasoning: A "Preposterous" History Of Walter Benjamin's Ideas, Vladimir Cristache

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

This dissertation presents the theory of ideas developed by Walter Benjamin in the “Epistemo-Critical Prologue” of his Trauerspiel book and thereby seeks to fill an existing gap in English-language Benjamin literature. On the one hand, it performs its task by closely reading this thinker’s early, epistemo-linguistic writings up to and including the “Prologue”: most prominently, “On Language as Such,” “The Program of the Coming Philosophy,” “The Concept of Criticism,” and the theoretically inclined sections of “Goethe’s Elective Affinities.” On the other, it does so by positioning Benjamin’s theory of language within existentialist philosophy and by applying his theory of …

A Study Of Six Nations Public Library: Rights And Access To Information, Alison Frayne

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

Contemporary Indigenous public libraries play a critical role in providing access to information in Indigenous communities. My research focuses on the relationship between rights and access to information for individuals and communities within the context of Indigenous public libraries. I use a qualitative case study methodology of the Six Nations Public Library (SNPL) in Ohsweken, Ontario, Canada. Interviews were conducted with SNPL patrons and library management and with off-reserve participants from government and library associations.

I analyse four themes, library governance, rights, library value and access to information, which are outcomes of the SNPL case study findings. This analysis reveals …

Double/Cross: Erasure In Theory And Poetry, John Nyman

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

This dissertation investigates the implications of overt textual erasure on literary and philosophical meaning, especially with reference to the poststructuralist phenomenological tradition culminating in the work of Jacques Derrida. Responding both to the emergence of “erasure poetry” as a recognizable genre of experimental literature and to the relative paucity of serious scholarship on Derrida’s “writing under erasure,” I focus on twentieth- and twenty-first-century literary and philosophical works in which visible evidence of erasure is an intended component of the finished (i.e., printed and disseminated) document. Erasure, I argue, performs a complex doubling or double/crossing of meaning according to two asymmetrically …

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 …

Los Usos De La Lectura Realista: Ficción Y Crítica, Dagoberto Caceres Aguilar

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

La presente tesis examina el proceso de negociación de modelos de realidad que surge desde el circuito de comunicación literaria. Se argumenta que mediante el tratamiento realista de los textos narrativos la recepción crítica contemporánea expresa y reafirma estrategias de aceptación, rechazo o trascendencia de paradigmas de espacio y subjetividad. La instrumentación de las narraciones se traduce en un rango muy amplio de respuestas. Con todos sus matices, las experiencias del uso realista de la ficción pueden oscilar desde la asimilación acrítica hacia el distanciamiento del lector de los modelos que mediatizan su visión de las culturas hispánicas. En la …

The Cruelty Of Reading: Reading And Writing In The Works Of Friedrich Schelling, Marc D. Mazur

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

Friedrich Schelling has re-emerged in Anglo-Saxon philosophy as a singularly important figure in Germand Idealism, not as some mediate figure in between Kant, Fichte, and Hegel. Because Schelling's works resist being subsumed into a univocal or systematic articulation, they instead invite a reading, in the sense developed by Jean-Luc Nancy, that itself is transported to the writing of his texts. In order to show the auto-immune character of Schelling's writing, this thesis will turn to Schelling's First Outline of a System of the Philosophy of Nature (1799), the Philosophical Investigations into the Essence of Human Freedom (1809), and the unfinished …