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Graduate Theses & Dissertations
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- Robert Bringhurst and Polyphonic Poetry
- Robert Bringhurst states that polyphonic art is a faithful, artistic reflection of the multiplicity of the world’s ecosystems. This ecocritical perspective recognizes that human art informs our understandings of the world, and therefore artists have a moral obligation towards that world. In Chapter One I argue that mimesis should be reclaimed as a useful literary category since all art, regardless of intentions, has an effect on both culture and the natural world. In Chapter Two I argue that by reconnecting publishing craft and philosophy, our books can serve to bring us more in tune with the structures of the natural world. I conclude in Chapter Three by asking how a counterpublic consciousness can be cultivated, and how Bringhurst’s mission of transforming culture might be fully realized. Altogether, this view of literature offers an antidote to Western culture’s destructive tendencies towards the natural world. Author Keywords: Bringhurst, ecocriticism, mimesis, poetry, polyphony, typography
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- Phantoms of Mars
- My analysis of twentieth century Mars science and fiction outlines how the ongoing dialogic between Mars science and fiction publics influences the American frontier dialectic and how Mars serves as the arena where this debate comes to life. It examines connections between myth, science, and fiction by tracing the evolution of historical and literary representations of the American frontier and understandings of Mars spanning the twentieth century. To illustrate these findings, I investigate the fictional visions of the planet in the works of Edgar Rice Burroughs, Ray Bradbury, and Kim Stanley Robinson. Ultimately, Mars is revealed as a fictional frontier where a better way of living may be achievable by transforming the planet and ourselves. Finally, the planet’s physical site holds a haunting potential value that inspires further research and new narratives, which informs the future use of Mars in American culture. Author Keywords: Bradbury, Burroughs, Frontier, Mars, Myth, Robinson
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- Composite Frankenstein
- This thesis explores Frankenstein’s popular culture narrative, contrasting recent Frankenstein texts with the content of Mary Shelley’s classic novel and James Whale’s iconic films Frankenstein (1931) and The Bride of Frankenstein (1935). The research investigates how Frankenstein’s legacy of adaptations function intertextually to influence both the production and the consumption of Frankenstein texts, referring to this complicated and contradictory intertextual web as “the Composite Frankenstein.” This thesis present the Composite Frankenstein as a hermeneutic by which to view Frankenstein’s collaborative and cumulative identity in popular culture, drawing on the work of other scholars on adaptation and intertextuality. Sarah Milner investigates the context of the key Frankenstein texts, the novel and the 1931 film; this research’s goal is to destabilize the perception of authorship as an individual’s mode of production and to investigate the various social processes that influence text creation and consumption. Author Keywords: adaptation, authorship, Frankenstein, intertextuality, James Whale, Mary Shelley
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- Educating the Passions
- My thesis proposes to uncover what I term an Emilian Philosophy in the reading of Emily Brontë’s only novel, and suggests that Wuthering Heights reflects Brontë’s vision of a society progressing toward social and spiritual reform. Through this journey, Brontë seeks to conciliate the two contrasting sides of humanity – natural and social – by offering a middle state that willingly incorporates social law without perverting human nature by forcing it to mold itself into an unnatural social system, which in turn leads to a “wholesome” (Gesunde) humanity. While Heathcliff embodies Bronte’s view of a primitive stage of humanity, Hareton reincarnates the wholesome state of humanity that balances human natural creativity and cravings with Victorian unrelenting reason. Brontë treats Heathcliff’s death as a point in life, in which mankind is emancipated from social constraints and is able to achieve ultimate happiness. This view of death is reassuring as it displaces the anxiety associated with death and separation. My study will highlight the influence of Friedrich Schiller’s, Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s Philosophical writings and literary works, as well as the influence of the Franciscan Order in Catholicism and its founder St Francis of Assisi, patron saint of animals and environment, in framing Bronte’s philosophy to propose a social and religious reform anchored in nature. Author Keywords: Friedrich Schiller, Jean-Jacque Rousseau, Natural Education, Reincarnation and Reformation, St Francis of Assisi, wholesome (Gesunde) humanity, Wuthering Heights, Emily Brontë
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- All I've Found is Pain and Terror
- This thesis is concerned with how specific aesthetic elements function in various contemporary texts to distort, obscure, or illuminate the immoral actions and behaviours being represented. This thesis applies the moral status philosophy of Mary Anne Warren, along with the moral philosophy of Emmanuel Lévinas and Zygmunt Bauman. Close reading and critical analysis are supported by Michele Aaron’s theory of spectatorship. The sublime is explored in Dexter (2006) and Batman: The Dark Knight Returns (1986), the uncanny in Battlestar Galactica (2003) and Westworld (2016), and the abject in The Walking Dead (2003) and World War Z (2006). The intentions of this project are to conduct a formal examination of the relationship between audience and text as it is filtered through aesthetic representation and moral frameworks. This thesis argues that aesthetic effects must be understood in connection to morality for active consumers to engage with these texts as sites for ethical consideration. Author Keywords: aesthetic theory, moral status philosophy, Popular fiction, spectatorship, The Walking Dead, Westworld
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- Remembering the "Home" through YouTube Cooking Videos
- This thesis examines how food, culture and identity are linked to the idea of "home." Through a reading of oral narratives produced on the YouTube channel "ShowMetheCurry," I investigate how presenters Anuja and Hetal "write back" from a diasporic space in Texas, to the YouTube global public, and how food and cuisine, even in the age of globalization can be problematic in terms of representation of identities, work and space. I explore how the YouTube videos operate as a heterotopia, as what is presented to the audience in this medium is an embedding of spaces. The space that is projected through "ShowMetheCurry," that of Anuja and Hetal's own home kitchen, is then projected and viewed within the audiences' own spaces, in various locations around the world. What connects these spaces is an interest in cooking, and a longing to satiate culinary nostalgia. Author Keywords: Affect, Culinary nostalgia, Discourse analysis, Food culture, South Asian Diaspora, YouTube
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- Ripe for the Taking
- This thesis considers the fanfiction genres of slash-fiction, and Alpha/Beta/Omega fiction through an analysis of fandom’s embedded gift economy structures. Previous research on fanfiction and fandom structures have often characterized the gift economy nature of these spaces as countercultural and as separate from the frequent exploitation inherent in economic-based systems. There has been less attention paid to considering the potential disruptions that can come with unregulated and large-scale sharing. This thesis undertakes a critical discourse analysis of Alpha/Beta/Omega slash-fiction with a focus on commodity fetishism to reveal how the subgenre’s relationship with the fanfiction gift economy complicates and at times counters the conception of these spaces as a ‘queer utopia.’ The purpose of this research is to dismantle traditional archetypes within Alpha/Beta/Omega fanfiction by exploring how male Omegan characters become fetishized cultural commodity objects internally through interactions with Alpha characters and externally through the desires of fanfiction readers and writers. Author Keywords: Alpha/Beta/Omega, Commodity Fetishism, Fanfiction, Gift Economy, Queer Theory, Slash-fiction
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- Uplifting Her Voice
- This thesis creates an adaptation of act five, scene three of William Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus that reshapes the play by focusing on female empowerment through the character Lavinia. Specifically, by using other Shakespearean characters’ dialogue that can speak towards her situation, I have written a monologue and stage directions for Lavinia. The same patriarchal superstructures which existed in the West during the time of Shakespeare and at the time of the play’s setting—and which still exist today—ensure that Lavinia remains silenced. Through my adaptation, I aim to challenge these structures in a meaningful way by returning both voice and agency to Lavinia. Author Keywords: Adaptation, Agency, Metamorphosis, Patriarchy, Revenge, Voice
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- Final Makeover, Deindividualization of Women in Contemporary Death Notices
- As a result of the COVID-19 pandemic, print death notices have increased in number, length, and deviations, often as the only form of public recognition for the deceased. This thesis provides close readings through feminist and anti-ageist lenses of ninety print death notices, published in The Peterborough Examiner and Peterborough This Week between October 2019 and October 2021. These readings inform and illustrate the deindividualization of older women in death notices as the product not only of the limitations of language and format, but of a community that panders to regional public interests and traditional ageist tropes of femininity to create worthy public subjects. An exploration of ambiguities, contradictions, and overdeterminations that break with conventions of death notices reveals unintentional makeovers, deindividualization, and the sidelining of older women as subjects of their own memorials and photos in an extension of the systemic and internalized gendered ageism older women experience in life. Author Keywords: Ageism, COVID-19, Death Notices, Deindividualization of Women, Feminism, Older Women
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- Affective Power of Intimacy
- This case study’s fan fiction and its subsequent non-RPF romance novel version reveal a complex blend of the fan fiction, romance novel, intimatopia, pornography, slash fan fiction, Real Person Fan Fiction, and Men’s Hockey Real Person Fan Fiction genres and subgenres. Intimatopia’s ideological framework provides a specific method for the romance novel’s reordering of self and society, as well as a description of the resulting ordered society and self. As analysis of the reader comments left on the Archive of Our Own fan fiction reveals, intimacy is also critical to the fan fiction’s community, because the reader is driven to comment by the text’s affective power. The relationship between the reader and the text is primary for the reader, whereas the author’s primary aim is to seek an intimate relationship with their readers. There is a conceptual link between the literary and social contexts through their privileging of intimacy as a mode of interaction for the texts’s characters, readers, and authors. Author Keywords: Archive of Our Own, community, fan fiction, intimatopia, Men's Hockey Real Person Fan Fiction, romance novel
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- "Non-compliance" in the system
- This thesis examines how co-creators Kelly Sue DeConnick and Valentine De Landro’s 2014 graphic work, Bitch Planet, is in all conceivable ways a seminal and prescient example of — to use their term — “non-compliance” in the comics form and industry. From its inception as a feminist dystopia, written by a white woman and illustrated by a Black man, in an industry that is over-represented by white men, Bitch Planet is a prime example of activist comics that is situated perfectly within the “Blue Age” of comics, to use the term coined by comic scholar Adrienne Resha. This is evident in the main narrative of Bitch Planet in which, in an industry still over-represented by white characters, the main cast of characters are four Black women and one Japanese-American woman, each of whom we see come up against a theologically patriarchal white supremacist system that imprisons them for crimes that are gendered, racialized, classist and ableist. DeConnick and De Landro’s collaboration with other artists extends from Laurenn McCubbin’s satirical paratextual in-universe advertisements on the back page of each comic which complement Bitch Planet’s main narrative to an invitation to world- building to the greater comic community, allowing creators with marginalized identities to craft short comic stories that satirically and deeply explore the socio-political issues developed in the main narrative of Bitch Planet. The final act of “non-compliance” comes out of the expansion of authorship of Bitch Planet to the readership via the letters pages, and beyond: highlighting readers’ Twitter messages, connecting with them through Tumblr, and posting pictures of fan “non-compliant” tattoos within the pages of Bitch Planet. Author Keywords: Bitch Planet, comics, critical race studies, dystopia , gender studies, intersectional feminism
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- Great Liberation (or Standing Up, Laying Down)
- This thesis presents a critical history of stand-up comedy alongside rhetorical analyses of specific stand-up routines and performances to argue for stand-up’s efficacy as a therapeutic artform. Through analysis of the history, function, and content of satire, this thesis presents stand-up comedy as an artform utilized for more than just simple laughter. Stand-up comedy, as a form and genre, provides the unique ability to engage with difficult subject matter, traumatic experiences, and offense for the benefit of both listener and audience in a way that subverts, therapizes, and equalizes instances of discrimination, trauma, and denigration. Author Keywords: Abjection, Offense, Satire, Stand-up Comedy, Therapy