Browsing English Language and Literature by Title
Now showing items 21-40 of 128
-
Defining the Undefinable: Rhetorics of Democratic T̶o̶r̶t̶u̶r̶e̶ Interrogation
(University of Waterloo, 2017-03-09)Over the past decade and a half, public debate on the issue of torture has increased dramatically, with legal, political, and cultural discourses offering many, often conflicting, perspectives on the meaning and function ... -
Defragmenting Identity in the Life Narratives of Iraqi North American Women
(University of Waterloo, 2014-05-02)This dissertation examines contemporary Iraqi North American women’s life narratives within the frame of postcolonial autobiography theory. Through narrating their experiences of oppression, war, and displacement these ... -
The Department of Civic Images: Nature, Technology, and Urbanism
(University of Waterloo, 2012-08-31)The modern city is the cradle of human activity, and through it humankind has both the ability to strip the planet of life and the ability to create thriving social and ecological systems. Strategic and interactive urbanisms ... -
Deviant Society: The Self-Reliant "Other" in Transcendental America
(University of Waterloo, 2013-08-23)This dissertation utilizes theories of deviance in conjunction with literary methods of reading and analyzing to study a range of deviant or transgressive characters in American literature of the 1840s and 50s. I justify ... -
Dickens, Education, and Social Enrichment
(University of Waterloo, 2014-09-26)This thesis examines Charles Dickens’s criticism of Victorian education systems. This thesis considers three of Dickens’s novels: Hard Times, Nicholas Nickleby, and Great Expectations. By demonstrating the failure of ... -
Digital Darwin: Editing The Loves of the Plants as a Case Study of the Theory and Practice of Digital Editions
(University of Waterloo, 2016-04-26)Digital scholarly editing is an evolving field that allows for the rendering of complex print works that are rife with paratextual material. Erasmus Darwin’s The Loves of the Plants represents this kind of paratextually ... -
Digital Dialogism: Space, Time, and Queerness in Video Games
(University of Waterloo, 2023-05-04)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 ... -
Disablement, Diversity, Deviation: Disability in an Age of Environmental Risk
(University of Waterloo, 2016-12-21)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 ... -
Disentangling the Posthuman: Broadening Perspectives of Human/Machine Mergers through Inter-relational Subjectivity
(University of Waterloo, 2019-12-13)In the conclusion of How We Became Posthuman, N. Katharine Hayles states that the terror of posthumanism comes from its dual connotation of superseding the human and coming after it, implying that the days of being human ... -
Does NME even know what a music blog is?: The Rhetoric and Social Meaning of MP3 Blogs
(University of Waterloo, 2008-09-19)MP3 blogs and their aggregators, which have risen to prominence over the past four years, are presenting an alternative way of promoting and discovering new music. I will argue that MP3 files greatly affect MP3 blogs in ... -
Drawing on the Margins of History: English-Language Graphic Narratives in Canada
(University of Waterloo, 2013-09-26)This study analyzes the techniques that Canadian comics life writers develop to construct personal histories. I examine a broad selection of texts including graphic autobiography, biography, memoir, and diary in order to ... -
"Drawn towards the lens": Representations and Receptions of Photography in Britain, 1839 to 1853
(University of Waterloo, 2008-12-09)This dissertation studies the earliest years of photography’s invention. Attention to the earliest conceptions of photography reveals a more complex and contested understanding of the nature and significance of photographic ... -
The Effects of Ambiguity: A Feminist Study of Human Signifiers in Human-Computer Interaction
(University of Waterloo, 2016-02-01)A lack of diversity in STEM (science, technology, engineering and math) fields has been a popular topic of discussion and a persistent challenge in terms of recruitment, engagement, opportunity and equality spanning decades. ... -
Element Focused Inquiry: Air and Water in American Literature
(University of Waterloo, 2022-09-12)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 ... -
Elements of the Gothic in the Works of Judith Thompson
(University of Waterloo, 2012-02-23)This thesis is an examination of the Gothic elements present in a selection of works by Canadian playwright Judith Thompson. The Gothic genre is marked by continual flux and adaptation, ensuring that its ability to inspire ... -
Endorsement Editorials: Rhetorical Strategies of Compelling Arguments
(University of Waterloo, 2012-04-30)This thesis reports on a rhetorical study of endorsement editorials published in Canadian newspapers during the spring 2011 federal election. These editorials, intended to encourage readers to support or vote for a candidate ... -
Ethical Tech Innovation: Uniting Educational Initiatives and Professional Practice
(Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, 2021-08)Engineers and other workers at the forefront of technological innovation play a central role in shaping the future of our digital economy, and the COVID-19 pandemic has revealed with stark clarity the urgent need for ethical ... -
An Eurhythmatic Response to Adaptive Accrual: A Rhetoric of Adaptation
(University of Waterloo, 2008-01-21)This dissertation applies to the study of adaptation principles of rhetoric, transtextual analysis and visual semiotics. It posits that adaptations are imitations-with-variations and that rather than existing in binary, ... -
The Expendable Citizen:Patriotism, Sacrifice, and Sentiment in American Culture
(University of Waterloo, 2007-12-18)This study argues that the American citizen’s choice to perform or not perform sacrificial national duties has been heavily mediated by sentimental representations of sacrifice in popular narratives. Through an analysis ... -
Feeling Queer Together: Identity, Community, and the Work of Affect in the Pre-Stonewall Lesbian Magazine, The Ladder
(University of Waterloo, 2018-12-07)This project examines the emergence of lesbian identity and community through the work of queer feeling, specifically as it was produced in the American magazine, the Ladder (1956-1972). The Ladder was published by the ...