English Language and Literature

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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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Interdisciplinary Pedagogy for Ethical Engineering and Responsible Innovation
(University of Waterloo, 2024-08-14) Orchard, Alexi
Since the early 2000s, North American engineering and technology regulatory associations have mandated that accredited engineering programs in higher education must fulfill teaching outcomes including ethics, equity, and the impact of engineering on society and the environment. Though this mandate propelled more research and pedagogical innovation in engineering ethics education (EEE) over the last two decades, some engineering programs have been slow to acknowledge and incorporate perspectives from outside of the engineering field, such as those situated in the humanities and social science (HSS) disciplines. There is an awareness that HSS knowledge and interdisciplinary expertise is well-positioned to enhance the teaching and research of engineering ethics and related topics, such as equity, diversity, inclusion, and social and environmental justice and, as this dissertation will show, there are multiple beneficial ways that this can happen. This dissertation examines and demonstrates multiple models for interdisciplinary ethics pedagogy that integrates HSS-based methods and approaches into the engineering curriculum, including workshops and cross-disciplinary curricular interventions. Specifically, this work focuses on how critical design – an arts- and humanities-based research-creation method that emphasizes critical thinking and reflection on the social, psychological, and ecological impacts of technology (Dunne & Raby, 2013) – can be a creative and effective approach to enhancing EEE. This work also incorporates methods and principles informed by the field of Science and Technology Studies (STS), such as responsible innovation (Stilgoe et al., 2013), value sensitive design (Friedman & Hendry, 2019), design justice (Costanza-Chock, 2020), and data feminism (D’Ignazio & Klein, 2020), arguing that they are promising approaches for this purpose as well. A significant contribution of this research is the development of curricular materials using these approaches. Considering the negative and harmful impacts stemming from the tech industry over the last several years, it is crucial for engineering students to learn and participate in more rigorous ethical deliberation as part of the engineering design workflow. This dissertation argues that by engaging in more interdisciplinary ethics pedagogy, the EEE curriculum will be better prepared to support the ethical development of future engineers.
Subjectivity Under the Smartphone: A Rhetorical Examination of Digital Communications Technologies
(University of Waterloo, 2024-07-25) Lodoen, Shannon
This dissertation examines how the ubiquitous presence of the smartphone is reshaping what it means to be a subject, and how people experience their subjectivity, in a digitally mediated society. I explore this question by analyzing the smartphone as a persuasive agent on both a micro (individual) and macro (societal) level. In positioning the smartphone as a persuasive agent, I move beyond traditional rhetorical analyses in or of digital environments to a multimodal analysis of the rhetorical nature of the smartphone itself. My analysis combines two empirical approaches for studying digital rhetoric—captology and procedural rhetoric—into what I call a captocedural rhetorical approach. The dual approach I employ considers both the intentions of phone designers and actual usage patterns for users, with a focus on the affordances of the smartphone that encourage and enable these particular usage patterns to emerge. With this approach, I identify three aspects of the smartphone’s address that make it so persuasive and pervasive: it is constant, it is customizable, and it alters the perceived consequentiality of the actions, interactions, and procedures conducted through and with these devices. Each of these three elements can be examined on both an individual level (looking at the smartphone’s captological features) and a broader level (which considers the processes and procedures that the smartphone either necessitates or facilitates). In both cases, it is clear that the smartphone is becoming more integral in daily life more quickly than any previous communications technology; as such, it is important to assess how and why this device differs from previous technologies in terms of its affordances and effects. By scrutinizing the smartphone’s impact on users’ behaviours, beliefs, and values, I aim to bring it back to the forefront of thought and discern some of the key consequences of its “taken-for-grantedness” (Ling).
Mosaics of Resistance: Political Identity Expression in Palestinian Youth Subcultures
(University of Waterloo, 2024-07-03) El-Amyouni, Elianne
This thesis examines contemporary transnational Palestinian hip-hop as part of a continuum of politically informed and informing cultural expression, emphasizing the increasing heterogeneity of ideals and visions for Palestinian national liberation in response to a series of expulsions, defeats, and treatises. It traces the relationship between politics and the poem-song from the late 18th century to the present, and there is a focus on the noticeable shifts in the geopolitical landscape at pivotal moments throughout the 20th century—the 1948 Nakba, the 1967 Naksa, and most importantly, the 1993 signing of the Oslo Accords—to reveal how the Palestinian situation has become what it is today, and what role the poem-song has played and continues to play in that evolution both within the historic homeland and without. Its focus is on contemporary Palestinian hip-hop and delves into a semiotic analysis of specific songs written and performed by contemporary Palestinian rappers and hip-hop artists from around the world to delineate a possible shared vision of or affiliation with Palestine. What we find in our analysis is a mosaic of opinions, identifications, and preoccupations that sometimes converge with one another and demonstrate a continuity with pre-Oslo resistance culture, while at other times diverge completely into their own new territory.
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
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 Intimate Fandoms of Men’s Hockey Real Person Fanfiction
(University of Waterloo, 2024-01-15) Vist, Mari Elise
Using queer phenomenology, rhetorical genre theory, and fanfiction written about National Hockey League (NHL) athletes, this dissertation develops the concept of intimate publics of fandom: small, reciprocal and protective groups of fans who write to and for each other to assuage desires otherwise unmet by public fandom. Historically, fan scholars convincingly argued for the literary and social value of the political and interpretive work of slash fandoms that write fanfiction where two otherwise straight male characters are reimagined in a queer relationship. In this way, slash is seen as a powerful, subversive fandom that poaches material from texts that uphold oppressive norms. However, most of the slash studied has been based on fictional characters, because Real Person Fanfiction (RPF) or RPF slash is frequently seen as immoral and shameful by both fans and fan scholars. Even though RPF slash is common in many fandoms, such as boy band fandom (e.g. Harry Styles and Louis Tomlinson from One Direction), or actors who are popular slash pairings (e.g. Benedict Cumberbatch and Martin Freeman who play Sherlock and Watson in BBC’s Sherlock), RPF slash has not received the same scholarly attention as slash based on fictional characters. In this dissertation, I argue that this gap exists in part because of fan studies’ attachment to the metaphor of poaching to empower slash-fans as subversive interpreters, which would make RPF slash an infringement on a real person’s autonomy. Understanding that some fandoms function as intimate publics, however, makes it possible to see some RPF slash not as a subversive interpretation, but as a shelter from public fandom. To develop the framework of intimate publics of fandom, I use my experience as a hockey fan as the case for this dissertation. Through Men’s Hockey RPF, I find queer joy and community that is absent to me in the traditional, public spaces of hockey fandom. I trace this journey through 5 chapters, each addressing a different facet of intimate publics of fandom. Chapter 1 develops squatting as an alternative metaphor to poaching and argues that, where poaching comes from the antagonistic mode of suspicious reading common in literary studies, squatting comes from reparative modes of reading which do not require a hostile relationship between reader and text. Chapter 2 uses feminist literary theories and rhetorical genre theory to define intimate fandoms through hockey’s public fandom in Canada. Building on those first two chapters, the next three chapters offer close readings of my own intimate fandoms to test the usefulness of the framework. Chapter 3 demonstrates that understanding Hockey RPF slash as an intimate fandom allows us to see how fans use Hockey RPF as a shelter from the relation of cruel optimism to the NHL. Chapter 4 argues that the framework of intimate fandoms makes it more possible to see the ways in which even fanfiction that seems subversive may still uphold other norms, such as the white supremacy of hockey. Chapter 5 tests the limits of intimate fandoms by reading fanfiction that makes erotic monsters out of NHL athletes to argue that intimate fandoms help us better understand the desires that create ‘creepy’ slash. I close the dissertation with a short conclusion that reflects on the end of my attachment to hockey, and how the framework of intimate publics allows me to trace the shift in desires that move me into new intimate fandoms.
Representational Queerness Within Marvel’s Loki: Liminality through Identity, Genre, and Medium
(University of Waterloo, 2024-01-02) Smith, Jay
Loki, a prominent Norse god and more recently prominent Marvel character, is entwined with an understanding of liminal queerness. Part of the broader notion of liminal queerness is its relationship to questions of identity and the self. This paper explores two divergent texts, 2014-2015’s Loki: Agent of Asgard and 2021’s Loki streaming series, that take that concept in different directions, creating a broader understanding of liminal queerness and its place in narrative spaces. The broader natures of the respective texts’ narrative, medium, and genre elements all frame and modify discussions of liminality and queerness around a given text. This modulation around the theme between two texts helps build a more complete image of how liminal queerness is entwined with Loki and what that means for liminally queer identities in broader structures.
Cognitive Constellations: Neurodivergent Aesthetics in 20th Century Experimental Poetries
(University of Waterloo, 2023-12-19) Watts, Hannah
“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.
Sounds of the Land of Promise: Listening to Ralph Ellison’s Metaphors of Memory in Invisible Man
(University of Waterloo, 2023-10-12) Rowland, Samuel
This project studies Ralph Ellison’s incorporation of sonic memory, soundscapes (sonic environments), and music into his novel Invisible Man (1952). The central focus of this dissertation is the influence of the sonic on Ellison’s work, beyond his interest in jazz. This project argues that Ellison’s work incorporates his memories of sound and music as well as the sonic imagery and philosophies of the sonic he draws from his literary influences, namely T.S. Eliot, James Joyce, and Fyodor Dostoevsky. I approach Invisible Man as a semi-autobiographical text, which I argue transfigures Ellison’s own sonic experiences into fiction. I draw on Ellison’s essays, interviews, and letters, as well as the two major biographies on Ellison, Lawrence Jackson’s Ralph Ellison: Emergence of Genius (2002) and Arnold Rampersad’s Ralph Ellison: A Biography (2007), in order to contextualize the sonic elements and metaphors of memory that Ellison integrates into the soundscapes of Invisible Man. This project argues that Ellison is an “earwitness” who draws on the sonic in his work in order to emphasize the significance of listening as well as draw attention to overlooked African-American soundscapes. Carolyn Birdsall elaborates on the term “earwitness” as follows: “In 1977, Raymond Murray Schafer defined the earwitness as an author who lived in the historical past, and who can be trusted ‘when writing about sounds directly experienced and intimately known’ (1994 [1977], p. 6). Schafer’s understanding of the earwitness endorses the authority of literary texts for conveying an authentic experience of historical sounds” (169). Essentially, Ellison and his novel’s narrator are concerned with both the intimacy of listening and the critical consideration of the psychological and personal impact of diverse and unique sound memories and soundscapes. I employ a variety of approaches in my study of Ellison’s use of the sonic in his work – including history, autobiography, analysis, and compositional method – in order to contextualize the nuances of sonic experience that inform Ellison’s writing. I begin this project with a study of the historical context that informs Ellison’s work, and then I gradually introduce analytical perspectives of the sonic as the dissertation progresses. I scaffold this project in this way in order to foreground the historical, contextual, and subjective uniqueness of listening before I apply scholarly approaches and analysis of the sonic to Ellison’s work later in the dissertation. Chapters One and Two are history-based, as I provide historical context on Harlem’s soundscapes and Ellison’s education at the Tuskegee Institute. Chapters Three and Four are analytical approaches to Ellison’s use of the sonic which build on the background information I provide in Chapters One and Two. Chapter Five blends sonic analysis, autobiographical and historical context, and compositional method in order to demonstrate the breadth of Ellison’s nuanced integration of the sonic into his writing.
Agatha Christie and Dorothy L. Sayers. Detecting Community in their Public, Private, and Fictional Lives.
(University of Waterloo, 2023-09-26) Beresford-Sheridan, Sally
This thesis examines the detective fiction of Agatha Christie and Dorothy L. Sayers in the context of their public and professional lives. Both women became professional detective fiction authors in the same social milieu while utilizing the same social and cultural productions which surrounded publishing popular fiction in this interwar period. To consider how these women re-imagined the detective fiction genre, this thesis examines embodied social communities in Christie’s and Sayers’s fiction. It further examines how both of these writers in their representation of women push the gendered expectations of roles for women in their social and cultural settings. Building upon Benedict Anderson’s theory in Imagined Communities, and the role which the cultural artefacts of the newspaper and the novel play in establishing imagined communities, I examine how the rise in popularity of detective fiction also coincided with a r/evolution in a type of print culture, which contributed to the rise of a ‘golden age’ in the British interwar period for both newspapers and popular literature, including detective fiction (Mayhall “‘Indecently Preposterous’: The Interwar Press and Golden Age Detective Fiction”, 145). The Introduction establishes the social, cultural, and critical background to my examination of Agatha Christie and Dorothy L, Sayers, their lives and their fiction, in the interwar years. Providing the social and cultural background, Chapter 2 first examines how women were targeted by the press to become readers, and yet, in turn, how women writers could reach a further reading community through participating in celebrity culture in the press; specifically, the ways in which Christie and Sayers could serialize their novels in the press. Chapter 3 compares/contrasts how Christie and Sayers each dealt with personal trauma and how this was reflected in their public lives and the types of advertisement which they performed for the reading public. Moving into textual analysis, Chapter 4 focuses on Agatha Christie’s 1930s travel novels to show how characters abroad or back home can imagine social communities built upon these cultural artefacts of the newspaper and the novel. Ultimately, these imaginings are forced to be re-examined once murder exposes the anxieties of these communities and social structures. Building upon this, Chapter 5 turns to Dorothy L. Sayers’s Gaudy Night to examine how social imagined communities – academic and professional – can be reconstructed as places which can offer ‘equal citizenship’. Chapter 6 takes the detective fiction trope of the sidekick, and through the characters of Miss Climpson and Harriet Vane, examines how Sayers navigates expanding genre expectations in her conversation surrounding women in the interwar society. Understanding the ways in which Christie and Sayers built these communities – in their lives and in their fiction – allows us to further re-evaluate and assert that Sayers’s and Christie’s writing(s) can be seen as “serv[ing] as the vehicles for the articulation of feminist goals and challenges”, and thus one can find the “compelling evidence of the pluralisation and diversification of interwar feminist discourses” (DiCenzo “Feminist Media and Agendas for Change: Introduction” 313), throughout the interwar period and within the various texts of the newspapers and the novels. Additionally, it allows us to increasingly understand and examine the literary, cultural, social, and lasting impact of these two women detective fiction authors whose contributions extend far beyond their influence on the detective fiction genre.
Idle No More: A Rhetorical Analysis of a Movement
(University of Waterloo, 2023-08-29) Torbica, Maša
This project investigates discursive and material constraints against and possibilities for decolonial resistance and existence by rhetorically analyzing key features of the Idle No More movement. Since November 2012, Idle No More has been an active, Indigenous-led, grassroots social justice movement advocating for environmental protections and Indigenous rights. I contribute additional insights about the movement’s cumulative impacts by interrogating two defining features of its emergent phase (flash mob round dances and social media activism) and its relation to reconciliation-based and resurgence-based approaches to decolonization. Foregrounding structural and symbolic violence against Indigenous women, girls, and 2SLGBTQQIA people as a foundational feature of settler colonialism, I outline how Idle No More-affiliated round dances challenge the gendered constraints of coloniality. Next, reading the Twitter hashtag “#Ottawapiskat” as a successful reframing of colonial attempts to delegitimize Indigenous political activism, I argue that Idle No More digital activism is characterized by dynamic interactions between discursive and embodied interventions. Turning toward the temporal overlap between the movement’s emergence and the proceedings of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada, I find that state and public responses to Idle No More illustrate the limits of pursuing decolonial aims through the institutions and discourses of the settler state. Finally, examining a resonant example of resurgence-based initiatives within the Idle No More movement, I posit that youth-led long walks like the Journey of Nishiyuu constitute embodied and emplaced testimonies of survivance. Foregrounding existing insights by Indigenous scholars, artists, and activists, I identify and evaluate how systemic constraints on inherent Indigenous sovereignty become sites of active contention and subversive political struggle. In doing so, I assert that the Idle No More movement can be understood as an ongoing revitalization of the third space(s) of sovereignty. Altogether, this project challenges normalizations of settler colonialism as an unalterable reality by actively anticipating futures informed by other sociopolitical realities: ones which already existed before and will continue to exist beyond currently dominant power structures.
William Blake as a Visionary of the New Age: Comparing the New Age Concepts of Eckhart Tolle’s Mind-Body-Spirit Books with Blake’s Illuminated Works
(University of Waterloo, 2023-08-17) Battaglini, Alexandra
Although William Blake was overlooked in his time, today he is considered a visionary who created worlds with his mythology and encrypted symbolic language. Scholars such as Mark Lussier and David Weir have connected the poet to the religious practices in Buddhism and Hinduism, since parts of his poems include symbols that can be connected to both Eastern religions. His connection to these specific religions has been, by scholars, investigated with the inclusion of his dreams and visions that inspire his work and include deceased loved ones and angels, with the result that Blake has been seen as a mystic. However, Blake’s at times otherworldly concepts go beyond traditional religion and mysticism and can be connected to the New Age movement, more specifically, to the concepts that stem from New Age Thought. His poetry has been quoted by supporters of the New Age in the 1960’s (also coined as the The Age of Aquarius movement) and his work continues to be displayed on tarot cards as well as New Age streaming networks. His mythology does not just explore religious or spiritual concepts, but dives deep into thought patterns of the mind itself and how to alter our states of thinking. Blake demonstrates a curiosity to reform and reprogram the mind through perception and consciousness similarly to the New Age spiritual teachers, authors and influencers we know today. Eckhart Tolle, a popular mind-body-spirit self-help author and spiritual teacher/speaker explores reconstruction of the mind through thought patterns that at times hold similarities to Blake’s understanding of perception that he expresses in his poems and other works. Tolle’s spiritual self-help books will be compared to Blake’s poetry, prose and illuminated pages. Though there are some major differences to address when comparing these two writers, the purpose of this comparison is to explore the idea that Blake could be considered a visionary of the New Age (even before the New Age period) while investigating if his works can then be read as Mind-Body-Spirit texts to assist in the altering of our perspective that New Age authors strive towards. Blake in his lifetime worked towards changing the world through his art and more importantly, strove to change the minds of humankind to achieve a higher state of being, much like mind-body-spirit texts.
Alternative Risk: A Diagnostic and Canadian Anti-Vaccine Case Study
(University of Waterloo, 2023-08-17) Casey, Sarah
This thesis builds on a growing body of interdisciplinary risk scholarship that is taking place across the humanities and sciences. It combines Ulrich Beck’s sociological concept of “risk society”, legal scholar Dayna Nadine Scott’s “risk frame” as a Foucauldian “governmentality” and the techniques of the professional writing discipline of “risk communication” with multi-modal rhetorical analysis to show that “risk” is more than a deliberative discussion of statistics and probabilities: it is a multi-dimensional form of argument that has become a topos, or persuasive “place,” in our social discourse, one where we find arguments about preventing catastrophe ... or where we find arguments for all kinds of other purposes. I argue that this complex rhetorical practice is vulnerable to capture by “alternative risk”: risk communications that adopt the conceptual and formal features of risk discourse to exploit their audience’s risk anxieties. In a context of increasing concern about the volume and impact of disinformation, the concept of “alternative risk” offers a framework for diagnosing patterns and structures of disinformation, which I apply in a Canadian anti-vaccine case study, Stop the Shots in Kids. Mapping this anti-COVID vaccine campaign to the “alternative risk” framework reveals (1) how it uses the stylistic and conceptual features of risk communication alongside rhetorical strategies characteristic of the “alt-right” to advance conspiracy theories and other forms of mis- and dis-information in a manner that makes them difficult to distinguish from legitimate COVID-19 risk communications, and (2) how it uses the risk of vaccination as a “place” to argue about COVID-19 restrictions, mitigation practices such as masking, and the trustworthiness of government and other institutions. The case study, and the other examples included in this thesis highlight that alternative risk is not a “fringe minority” issue, but something of mainstream and ongoing importance in our daily lives.
The mad manifesto
(University of Waterloo, 2023-08-15) Currie, Sarah
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.
Digital Dialogism: Space, Time, and Queerness in Video Games
(University of Waterloo, 2023-05-04) Brey, Elizabeth
Video games are multimodal pieces of media; they communicate meaning through many layers of signification including aural, visual, narrative, mechanical, and more. To understand the ways that games communicate meaning and influence interpretation, it is crucial to not just examine the various layers of game modalities, but the ways that those layers communicate with each other as multimodal objects. By adapting Mikhail Bakhtin’s literary and language theory of dialogism (1981), this dissertation argues that because games are multimodal, they have layers of different “voices” that communicate ideas about the game to its players. These dialogic multimodalities “speak” different meanings to players, who then transform their interaction with these multimodalities into a narrative whole. Joining queer theory, narrative theory, and game studies, this dissertation examines one of the most successful video game titles to date, The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim (2011), which in addition to its widespread popularity, has also been identified by white supremacist groups as a game that supports white nationalist causes. Through a dialogic analysis of the multimodalities of temporal and spatial representation within the game, this dissertation identifies narrative, genre, gameplay, and representational elements of Skyrim that support white nationalist play while also silencing potential anti-racist perspectives within the game. Chapter 1, Chapter 2, and Chapter 3 work together towards a functional version of dialogism for the study of games, proving its relevance, formalizing the changes I make to the original theory, and indicating how important dialogic readings can be. Chapter 4 argues that the construction of timespace of Skyrim follows a chronotope of domination, where the player’s use of and engagement with the game are devoted to the control of time and space. Chapter 5 examines player self-narration and embodiment in queered space, looking at how spaces communicate to players, and Chapter 6 makes the case that player use and manipulation of queered time in the game encourages players to understand and interact with Skyrim in particular ways. Together, these chapters suggest that the ways players are oriented to play Skyrim, based on its spaces and temporalities, points players towards interpretations of the game that normalize and uphold instances of white supremacy based on narrative, interactive, and mechanical means.
Rhetorical Figures in Music
(University of Waterloo, 2023-04-01) Slater, Maire
This paper looks at rhetorical figures in music, focusing on figures within the chiastic suite. It argues for a cognitive provenance of these figures, accounting for their appearance in both literature and music. It looks at examples of chiasmus found in instrumental music from across the world and throughout history and suggests the proliferation of these examples has implications for our understanding of the relationship between language and music and may shed light on the neural processes involved in producing both.
Fictocritical Cyberfeminism: A Paralogical Model for Post-Internet Communication
(University of Waterloo, 2023-03-13) Pearl, Zachary
This dissertation positions the understudied and experimental writing practice of fictocriticism as an analog for the convergent and indeterminate nature of “post-Internet” communication as well a cyberfeminist technology for interfering and in-tervening in metanarratives of technoscience and technocapitalism that structure contemporary media. Significant theoretical valences are established between twen-tieth century literary works of fictocriticism and the hybrid and ephemeral modes of writing endemic to emergent, twenty-first century forms of networked communica-tion such as social media. Through a critical theoretical understanding of paralogy, or that countercultural logic of deploying language outside legitimate discourses, in-volving various tactics of multivocity, mimesis and metagraphy, fictocriticism is ex-plored as a self-referencing linguistic machine which exists intentionally to occupy those liminal territories “somewhere in among/between criticism, autobiography and fiction” (Hunter qtd. in Kerr 1996). Additionally, as a writing practice that orig-inated in Canada and yet remains marginal to national and international literary scholarship, this dissertation elevates the origins and ongoing relevance of fictocriti-cism by mapping its shared aims and concerns onto proximal discourses of post-structuralism, cyberfeminism, network ecology, media art, the avant-garde, glitch feminism, and radical self-authorship in online environments. Theorized in such a matrix, I argue that fictocriticism represents a capacious framework for writing and reading media that embodies the self-reflexive politics of second-order cybernetic theory while disrupting the rhetoric of technoscientific and neoliberal economic forc-es with speech acts of calculated incoherence. Additionally, through the inclusion of my own fictocritical writing as works of research-creation that interpolate the more traditional chapters and subchapters, I theorize and demonstrate praxis of this dis-tinctively indeterminate form of criticism to empirically and meaningfully juxtapose different modes of knowing and speaking about entangled matters of language, bod-ies, and technologies. In its conclusion, this dissertation contends that the “creative paranoia” engendered by fictocritical cyberfeminism in both print and digital media environments offers a pathway towards a more paralogical media literacy that can transform the terms and expectations of our future media ecology.
Masks and Caricatures: Prosopopoeia, Ethopoeia, and the Effect of Social Media on Canadian Political Leaders’ Debates
(University of Waterloo, 2023-01-20) Kampherm, Monique
This dissertation examines the recent effect of social media on televised political leaders’ debates through the lens of ethos. It features two case studies from two Canadian federal elections: the 2015 Maclean’s Leaders’ Debate, and the 2019 English-Language Leaders’ Debate. It opens the lens of ethos through the tools of prosopopoeia and ethopoeia, ethotic moves which respectively incorporate ethoi beyond the immediate speaker, and characterize the ethoi of others. With the emergence of participatory digital media, leadership debates are increasingly constrained and shaped to serve social media. I argue that there is an increased pressure on political parties to have their leader adopt a mask, or perform another’s ethos, through prosopopoeia, while also characterizing, or depicting another’s ethos, through ethopoeia. Both moves capitalize on the Aristotelian ethotic qualities of phronesis, arete, and eunoia. I develop this argument by analyzing political parties’ and political leaders’ debate-related social media posts from Canada’s 2015 and Canada’s 2019 federal elections. I examine political parties’ and political leaders’ debate-related posts on three social media platforms: Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram, from the 2015 and the 2019 election campaign timeframes. In examining the parties’ and leaders’ top shared Facebook posts, top retweeted Twitter posts, and top liked Instagram posts, I identify six major debate-related themes for 2015, and six major debate-related themes for 2019. Examining the posts within these themes reveals how ethos is refracted in social media, moderately in 2015, and vigorously in 2019, and how the rhetorical moves prosopopoeia and ethopoeia infiltrate the political parties’ and leaders’ social media accounts. A significant finding of this study is political debates are changing because of social media in a way that foregrounds issues of ethos. In 2015, it was more prominent for debate content to move out onto social media, whereas in 2019, debate content is being shaped for social media. In both cases, but more so in 2019, the forces of social media fostered prosopopoeia and ethopoeia. This research contributes to the fields of rhetoric, social media, and political communication by demonstrating how debates, and democracy, are being (re)shaped by social media, and brings precision to the rhetorical figures prosopopoeia and ethopoeia as figures of argumentation. This critical investigation into the effect of social media on political leaders’ debates reveals the rhetorical influence social media has on political parties, political leaders, and ultimately voters.
Alone Together - Convergence Culture and the Slender Man Phenomenon
(University of Waterloo, 2023-01-10) Morton, Robert Travis
This project engages in a close examination of the Slender Man phenomenon, an online practice in which a community of pseudonymous enthusiasts share scary stories featuring a faceless, long-limbed, humanoid monster in a black business suit. The stories take various forms, including text-based narrative, amateur video, doctored images, and games. They are presented with an affectation of folklore, and treat the accounts as true testimonies of encounters they, or others they know, have allegedly had with Slender Man. This is a self-conscious effort on the part of its creators to manifest Slender Man as a real-life legend. Resulting from this effort, several individuals have carried out acts of real-world violence in the name of Slender Man, or with some connection to him. In response to these acts, and the ensuing moral panic, members of the community defensively stated that it was the responsibility of their readers to be able to know the difference between fantasy and reality. Yet, as this dissertation demonstrates, the Slender Man phenomenon itself is predicated on using digital media to blur this distinction. Through readings of Slender Man in various media forms, this dissertation shows how it blends horror aesthetics with the online cultures of trolling—in which individuals intentionally misrepresent themselves in order to mislead and antagonize others, allegedly for the lulz—that is, for the laughs, pranking or joking. Trolling has however produced many serious consequences, from individuals targeted for harassment to bad-faith political movements that disrupt existing institutional functions more broadly. In its origins, trolling began as apocryphal storytelling designed to mislead others into believing they were true and expose the ignorance of newbies. Notably, the sites in which this occurred evolved to become the fora from which the similarly apocryphal stories in the Slender Man text community originate, such as 4Chan. These same pseudonymous fora have acted as safe havens for bad actors that have gone on to become notorious for their promotion of real-world violence, from Erik Minassian’s violence in the name of the incel community to Elliot Rodger’s misogynistic manifesto posed to 4Chan. In short, this dissertation argues that Slender Man texts act as a canary in a coal mine, and that the mechanics of online horror communities lay bare the underlying strategies of trolling or post-truth internet culture more broadly. I undertake a close aesthetic and ideological examination of Slender Man in image, text, video and game, to offer a portrait of the community that shares them. The stories offer a glimpse into the anxieties, tensions, and alienation experienced in life online as a result of hypermediacy, premediacy, and anonymity. While much has been written regarding the potential for collaboration online and the possibilities for grassroots organization and community-building, the positive ends this convergence culture offers are offset to some extent by the kinds of anxieties emerging from a disaffected and alienated community. Ultimately, this project offers an account of the evolving relationship between interactive fiction, trolling, and political disaffection, a media ecology that is becoming ever more urgent to understand in twenty-first century society.
Queen of the Academy: Academic Drag as Pedagogy and Praxis
(University of Waterloo, 2022-11-22) Mayberry, Tommy
Direct stories from and pedagogical representations of equity-denied and oppressed bodies remain largely missing from and kept out of the academy. And scholarship and scholarly gate-keepers across the academy – and especially in fields (like English Language and Literature) who claim to have pedagogy, social justice, and humanity at their hearts – continue to police and punish these bodies, questioning, if not mocking, the legitimacy and rigour of our methods, theories, and voices. In this dissertation, I ask: How can we intervene in, interfere with, and interrupt this ongoing, active equity-denial of diverse voices and diverse scholarly experiences from across the academy? More pointedly, I ask myself: What happens when I force the gaze of the academy to see me, to see and contend with all of me, with all of my intersections of privileges and oppressions as the whole person, the whole scholar, the whole body I am? And I answer both questions through what I call academic drag. Using counterstory and teaching queer as method and genre in this dissertation, I set up academic drag as pedagogy in three capacities – as visual pedagogy; as performative pedagogy; and as decolonial and anti-racist pedagogy – before I embody and demonstrate academic drag as praxis by literally trying on new ways of empowered and empowering teaching in the classroom and as generic interventions into the hallowed halls of dissertation gatekeeping. This looks like: first, revisiting some of my earlier Transgender Visual Culture teaching that I taught in a “shitty white way” seven years ago to try on teaching queer to re-teach more racially responsively today; and second, collating transcripts of some of my public scholarship talks on “Gender Pronouns and Cultures of Respect” into a counterstory novella imagining myself as a participant learning, unlearning, and relearning from myself as academic drag queen pedagogue. Through my academic drag as pedagogy and praxis modelled in this dissertation, I show how I enter into the academic space created by equity-denied scholars before me and join them in pushing further from the dominant centre toward the margins, widening the grounds of what is scholarly research and whose voices can be there and can belong there. Academic drag is part transgender visuality, part queer phenomenology and teaching queer, part visual performance and pedagogy, and all critical race counternarrativity toward decolonizing pedagogies and praxes. And through my synecdochic figuration of myself as an academic drag queen, I conclude this dissertation with a call that all of our pedagogies and praxes become dragged up to create meaningful, sustainable, and powerful change.
Element Focused Inquiry: Air and Water in American Literature
(University of Waterloo, 2022-09-12) Doyle, Jennifer
Element focused inquiry, in dialogue with environmental-crisis literature, proposes a theory and a methodology to explore human-elemental becomings, particularly pertaining to air and water. EFI is mobilized to acquire insight into the entwined nature of human beings and elemental others, and to foster understanding of the implications of these relations as they concern what it is to be human. Material imagination figures centrally in EFI and is considered alongside the potential for elements to form assemblages with human bodies, to move people to act, to shape events and the way narratives are structured. My dissertation draws on three American environmental-crisis novels from the late 20th to early 21st century, embracing the ways literary fiction always already figures a relation to the world—via the incorporation and mobilization of processes and practices of human-elemental becomings, environmental influence and crisis, and paradigms reflecting what are often unexamined aspects of human-elemental assemblages. The introduction offers an account of how the theory and methodology evolved from my observations and experience. Chapter one takes a traditional approach to positioning the theory within the evolving body of work on contemporary materialism, eco-materialism, and elemental ecocriticism. Chapter two focuses on the role of air in Don DeLillo’s novel White Noise, suggesting that air is not only at the centre of this uncanny novel and key events, but also at the centre of Jack’s imagination, perceptions, actions, narratives, and body. Chapter three looks at Cormac McCarthy’s The Road, exploring how water acts on the characters’ memory, language, and movement. Chapter four examines Barbara Kingsolver’s Flight Behaviour, grappling with the slow violence of environmental collapse, watery memories, elemental entanglements, and religious influences. The conclusion considers the question of what we are as human-elemental becomings and what that means for future inquiries.

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