Reading and Language Commons^™

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 …