English Language and Literature

Permanent URI for this collectionhttps://uwspace.uwaterloo.ca/handle/10012/9876

This is the collection for the University of Waterloo's Department of English Language and Literature.

Research outputs are organized by type (eg. Master Thesis, Article, Conference Paper).

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Now showing 1 - 9 of 9

Cognitive Constellations: Neurodivergent Aesthetics in 20th Century Experimental Poetries
(University of Waterloo, 2023-12-19) Watts, Hannah; Dolmage, Jay
“Inaccessible” is a term shared by both Critical Disability Studies (CDS) and literary criticism, although this term means different things to each discipline. For CDS, an inaccessible space is one that prevents physically or cognitively disabled people from fully participating as valued members of society. For literary scholars, “inaccessible” refers to strategies used by authors to estrange readers. Inaccessible techniques necessitate strenuous close reading, and may either in- crease or decrease the absorption and investment a reader experiences. Inaccessible strategies are often present in texts labelled “experimental” or “conceptual.” However, some of the techniques modern and post-modern authors use in order to estrange readers mimic or perform disabled pat- terns, practices, and aesthetics. Ironically, the cultural value assigned to famous inaccessible texts often separates poetic techniques from disabled people’s embodied experiences; scholars may praise representations or metaphors of disability while rejecting disabled perspectives as valuable critical lenses for reading literature. In this way, inaccessible texts may also become inaccessible literary spaces that perpetuate ableist academic systems. For example, even if a literary scholar identifies as neurodivergent (a person with a cognitive disability) they are still expected to write in neurotypical forms, and interpret literature using neurotypical methodologies: they still must “access” ability to be academically successful. This project joins interdisciplinary scholarship that refuses to categorize CDS and English Literature as discrete areas of study, but suggests that physically and cognitively disabled aesthetics illustrate important reading values. This is especially true for scholarship that already acknowledges the presence of disability in inaccessible poetic texts without naming or engaging with disabled perspectives. This dissertation tracks some of the ways that readers have reacted to disability aesthetics in experimental texts like James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake, Gertrude Stein’s Tender Buttons, and Hannah Weiner’s Code Poems. It traces how ableism, specifically ideas associated with the pseudoscience of eugenics, is connected to “inaccessible” labels bestowed on these texts. This project then offers readers creative interpretive modes that will help them engage with and explore disabled aesthetics in the text instead of dismissing such poems as too difficult, or diagnosing them as symptomatic of a disabled writer and therefore not worth reading. This dissertation is also written using the form of my own neurodivergent expressive practice, ADHD, as one example of how literary scholarship might encourage scholars to celebrate their neurotype instead of leaving it behind in favour of the exceptional level of ability expected in academic spaces.
Disablement, Diversity, Deviation: Disability in an Age of Environmental Risk
(University of Waterloo, 2016-12-21) Gibbons, Sarah; Dolmage, Jay
This dissertation brings disability studies and postcolonial studies into dialogue with discourse surrounding risk in the environmental humanities. The central question that it investigates is how critics can reframe and reinterpret existing threat registers to accept and celebrate disability and embodied difference without passively accepting the social policies that produce disabling conditions. It examines the literary and rhetorical strategies of contemporary cultural works that one, promote a disability politics that aims for greater recognition of how our environmental surroundings affect human health and ability, but also two, put forward a disability politics that objects to devaluing disabled bodies by stigmatizing them as unnatural. Some of the major works under discussion in this dissertation include Marie Clements’s Burning Vision (2003), Indra Sinha’s Animal’s People (2007), Gerardine Wurzburg’s Wretches & Jabberers (2010) and Corinne Duyvis’s On the Edge of Gone (2016). The first section of this dissertation focuses on disability, illness, industry, and environmental health to consider how critics can discuss disability and environmental health in conjunction without returning to a medical model in which the term ‘disability’ often designates how closely bodies visibly conform or deviate from definitions of the normal body. It shows how inadequate medical care, heavily polluted environments, and negative social attitudes might be understood as barriers to access that create disability. The second section of this dissertation focuses on disability, neurological difference, and ‘ecological othering’ as it considers how autistic artists and writers offer an alternative to the belief that their communicative practices are unnatural. This section argues that metaphors linking ecological devastation to changes in human neurology promote fear, and suggests that exploring the parallels between understandings of neurological diversity and understandings of biological diversity would allow for a more nuanced means of pursuing efforts to link disability rights and environmental justice. An important aspect of this project involves a critique of the impetus to celebrate the promise of technology for solving social issues, as it brings critiques of the technological fix approach to environmentalism into conversation with critiques of the medical cure as a techno-fix for disability. With the introduction of concept of critical ecologies of embodiment, a concept that unites these two critiques, this dissertation offers insight into how disability studies scholars and environmental justice scholars might further collaborate.
Hesitant Belonging: Understanding Generational Traumas of Forced Migration in Black and Palestinian Diaspora Contemporary Transnational Fiction
(University of Waterloo, 2024-05-17) El Mekaui, Lara; Smyth, Heather; Dolmage, Jay
This dissertation explores the concept of "hesitant belonging" within the context of Black and Palestinian Diaspora Contemporary Transnational Fiction. The study investigates how forced migration, identity formation, and the related affects of uncertainty and ambivalence shape the experiences of diasporic individuals. By analyzing four literary case studies, the work highlights how hesitancy, as a space of uncertainty and stagnation, a response to past trauma and ongoing violence, and a tool for refusal and resistance, influences the sense of belonging in migrant bodies navigating different locales. The broader goal of the dissertation is to elucidate the role of hesitation in understanding complex and difficult forms of belonging, as well as its intersection with diaspora studies, postcolonial studies, affect theory, and trauma studies.
The mad manifesto
(University of Waterloo, 2023-08-15) Currie, Sarah; Dolmage, Jay
The “mad manifesto” project is a multidisciplinary mediated investigation into the circumstances by which mad (mentally ill, neurodivergent) or disabled (disclosed, undisclosed) students faced far more precarious circumstances with inadequate support models while attending North American universities during the pandemic teaching era (2020-2023). Using a combination of “emergency remote teaching” archival materials such as national student datasets, universal design for learning (UDL) training models, digital classroom teaching experiments, university budgetary releases, educational technology coursewares, and lived experience expertise, this dissertation carefully retells the story of “accessibility” as it transpired in disabling classroom containers trapped within intentionally underprepared crisis superstructures. Using rhetorical models derived from critical disability studies, mad studies, social work practice, and health humanities, it then suggests radically collaborative UDL teaching practices that may better pre-empt the dynamic needs of dis/abled students whose needs remain direly underserviced. The manifesto leaves the reader with discrete calls to action that foster more critical performances of intersectionally inclusive UDL classrooms for North American mad students, which it calls “mad-positive” facilitation techniques: 1. Seek to untie the bond that regards the digital divide and access as synonyms. 2. UDL practice requires an environment shift that prioritizes change potential. 3. Advocate against the usage of UDL as a for-all keystone of accessibility. 4. Refuse or reduce the use of technologies whose primary mandate is dataveillance. 5. Remind students and allies that university space is a non-neutral affective container. 6. Operationalize the tracking of student suicides on your home campus. 7. Seek out physical & affectual ways that your campus is harming social capital potential. 8. Revise policies and practices that are ability-adjacent imaginings of access. 9. Eliminate sanist and neuroscientific languaging from how you speak about students. 10. Vigilantly interrogate how “normal” and “belong” are socially constructed. 11. Treat lived experience expertise as a gift, not a resource to mine and to spend. 12. Create non-psychiatric routes of receiving accommodation requests in your classroom. 13. Seek out uncomfortable stories of mad exclusion and consider carceral logic’s role in it. 14. Center madness in inclusive methodologies designed to explicitly resist carceral logics. 15. Create counteraffectual classrooms that anticipate and interrupt kairotic spatial power. 16. Strive to refuse comfort and immediate intelligibility as mandatory classroom presences. 17. Create pathways that empower cozy space understandings of classroom practice. 18. Vector students wherever possible as dynamic ability constellations in assessment.
Plurality, promises and practice: A case of Nepali immigrants’ transliterating and translanguaging in Canada
(University of Waterloo, 2018-09-20) Neupane, Dhruba; Dolmage, Jay
Plurality, promises and practice: A case of Nepali immigrants’ transliterating and translanguaging in Canada is a community-based study among sixteen Nepali immigrant students in graduate and undergraduate programs that have intensive writing, research and communication components. It combines group discussions, interviews, case studies and participant observations to explore the ways featured migrants adapt, appropriate, repel and repeat dominant practices of meaning making in academic and social spaces. Participants’ phenomenological experiences and narratives consist of difficulties in navigating unfamiliar academic and social expectations, especially at the transitional stage; the lack of appropriate support mechanisms; the presence of direct and indirect forms of racism; the resolve to challenge existing strange-making practices; and the hope for a better future. This research further shows that migrants’ hybrid literacy and epistemological practices go beyond what can be contained within the established academic writing grids. While the research problematizes a romanticized narrative within some multilingual scholarships: that multilinguals ‘carry’ mobile and portable language and communicative resources available for an uncomplicated usage and seamless blending; it stresses the need to actively and qualitatively approach difference in ways that appreciates diverse ways of meaning making, doing, being and valuing that the sheer presence of our students, particularly those marked as linguistic and cultural Others, demand of us. The central ask of this dissertation is to diversify our practices from what appears to be more of the same in different guises. For example, various language and cultural difference-based approaches including the bi-multi- pluri- turns have been identified as not significantly punctuating Eurocentric privileges. More specifically, participants will help us know that English monolingualism persists in academic and institutional settings despite translingual realities, for it is defended, encapsulated and framed in the depoliticized language of “needs”, “demands”, and the “reality outside”— of students, communities, markets, success, growth, mobility, global connection. Participants in this research join diversity and plurality debates, including multiculturalism, and suggest ways in which to pluralize and diversify existing additive-accretive and discrete-separate ways and views of plurality and diversity.
The Rhetorical Life of Surgical Checklists: A Burkean Analysis with Implications for Knowledge Translation
(University of Waterloo, 2018-09-10) Whyte, Sarah J; Dolmage, Jay
This dissertation uses the terms of Kenneth Burke’s dramatism to identify rhetorical aspects of surgical team checklists as they have been promoted, performed, studied, and surveilled. I argue that these terms can help to account both for the rapid uptake of checklists into policy and for their more variable effects and uptake into practice. I develop this argument by analyzing a large archive of texts published between 1999 and 2017, including popular media, news coverage, promotional campaigns, primary research, and other forms of scholarship. These published texts are considered alongside ethnographic fieldnotes from a study in which I collaborated to design, introduce, and evaluate an early version of a preoperative checklist at four Canadian hospitals. My analyses are guided heuristically by the first principles and central terms of dramatism, including action and motion; motive and situation; identification and division; attitude, form, and circumference. I use these terms to chart the early emergence of checklists within professional literature; to trace their rapid uptake as a standard of professional communication; to discern their multiple purposes and effects; to illustrate how and why they are enacted, accepted, and sometimes rejected in the operating theatre; and to locate blind spots in applied health services research. Taken together, these analyses demonstrate the importance of diverse rhetorical processes both to the uptake and to the basic functions of checklists. They also demonstrate the value and versatility of dramatistic terms. I contend in particular that the concept of rhetorical situation, as elaborated by Burke, holds significant potential for understanding and mediating the material and symbolic dimensions of practice and practice change. This dissertation points the way toward a uniquely rhetorical approach to the study and practice of knowledge translation in healthcare work.
“Sorry If My Words Aren’t Right”: Writing Studies’ Partnership with Second Language Writing to Support Translingual Students in the Anglo-Canadian Classroom
(University of Waterloo, 2021-11-02) Wright-Taylor, Christin; Dolmage, Jay
Since the early 2000s, Canadian higher education has recognized the economic benefit of courting and enrolling visa students at higher tuition rates. Austerity measures in federal funding combined with falling domestic enrollment shifted previous partnership models of internationalisation toward a neoliberal agenda wherein students are positioned as human capital. The rising numbers of visa students entering Canadian higher education introduces a new body of linguistically and culturally diverse learners that the academy must integrate into academic discourse. Previously, language competency testing was used exclusively to sort and filter incoming, language diverse students. However, testing fell out of favour with key Canadian institutions enrolling some of the highest numbers of visa students. In place of testing, writing courses have been implemented to help address the language and communication needs of both mother tongue and translingual students. However, without careful implementation and design, writing courses can perpetuate an English Only standard that manifests in the form of the myth of the native speaker. In light of this nascent Euro-centric and white supremist ideology, it is imperative that writing studies scholars draw on existing theories and partnerships to decentralize native speakerism in writing curriculum. One such theory has evolved south of the border in US composition called, translingualism. While translingualism promises to deconstruct ideologies that marginalize language diverse students, it also contains inherent fault lines that threaten to undermine its gains. In addition to these fault lines, translingualism comes out of a specifically American academic history which may not fit well in a Canadian context. For these reasons, this dissertation advises that translingualism be adapted, rather than adopted, to fit writing studies in Canada. More importantly, pre-existing partnerships exist within writing studies to support translingual students, primarily with second language acquisition. An historical narrative of both disciplines reveals that while second language acquisition grew up firmly housed in the faculty of education, writing studies’ decentralized nature created a resilience and ingenuity that allowed the field to reach across disciplinary borders to not only establish itself as a discipline but to survive and thrive to the present moment. One such cross-disciplinary partnership was with second language writing. Unlike composition in the US, writing studies has a rich history of partnership with scholars from second language writing. This partnership holds the key for a language-based, writing model to support translingual students in the Canadian writing classroom.
Talk, Body, Performance: Mental Health Rhetoric in Corporate, Government, and Institutional Settings
(University of Waterloo, 2018-09-17) Powell, Meredith; Dolmage, Jay
Rhetorical studies in health and medicine often point out the ways in which medical empiricism is structured as an arhetorical entity. This dissertation delves into a rhetorical analysis of psychiatric illness through a study that considers how rhetoric informs how mental health is viewed, treated, and embodied in the present-day Canadian context. This study uses a combined methodological approach, merging classical concepts of rhetorical analysis from Aristotle with more contemporary conceptual theories by Kenneth Burke to Michel Foucault, within a disability studies framework. This approach is applied to examine how mental illness is rhetorically structured in corporate, government, and institutional settings. The major campaigns informing this study include the Bell Let’s Talk campaign, the Government of Canada’s E-Health initiative, Better Health Together, the institutional response to student suicide at the University of Waterloo, and Queen’s University's Jack Talks campaign. By bringing together various mental health campaigns that purport to end stigma, treat mental health, and work towards a mentally “healthier” society, this study seeks to formulate a framework that students and teachers can use to rhetorically assess mental health discourse without resorting to what Robert Crawford would call ‘healthist’ assumptions while concurrently encouraging the formulation of non-discriminatory practice. This dissertation argues that the mental healthcare campaigns call forth very specific forms of “talk,” performativity, and embodiment that shape, limit, and constrain the ways in which psychiatric disability is treated within a Canadian context. Through a rhetoric of self-care, healthcare is depoliticized and individualized; a constrained conceptualization of “good” mental health is shaped through corporate, government, and institutional campaigns.
“That’s Gold, Jerry, Gold!”: The Sophisticated Contradiction at the Heart of Stand-Up Comedy
(University of Waterloo, 2016-12-15) Henry, George Joshua; Dolmage, Jay
This dissertation examines the word “sophisticated” by re-situating it within the Greek tradition and explicating how such a move informs a study of humor and amusement. In regard to “techniques and theories,” the OED suggests the word sophisticated can be used to mean “highly developed” and “employing advanced or refined methods,” but also “not plain, honest, or straightforward,” and “containing alterations intended to deceive.” In other words, as a discourse descriptor, “sophisticated” can be taken complimentarily to mean complex, intricate, and worldly-wise, but also disparagingly to mean deceptive, misleading, and superficially-wise. The opposition between these meanings illustrates the central idea of this study—that what lies at the heart of both sophistic rhetoric and amusement is contradiction: a state of tension in which “incompatible things” are held together “because both or all are necessary and true” (Haraway). In the context of contemporary North American stand-up comedy, this dissertation links sophistic rhetoric and humor theory such that they mutually support each other, gain meaning, and become more approachable. Defined as an orientation to contradiction, sophistic rhetoric provides a way to theorize humor, while the universal phenomenon of amusement provides justification for theorizing a thing called “sophistic rhetoric.”

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Browsing English Language and Literature by Author "Dolmage, Jay"