Browsing English Language and Literature by Type "Doctoral Thesis"
Now showing items 1-20 of 82
-
Agatha Christie and Dorothy L. Sayers. Detecting Community in their Public, Private, and Fictional Lives.
(University of Waterloo, 2023-09-26)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 ... -
Alone Together - Convergence Culture and the Slender Man Phenomenon
(University of Waterloo, 2023-01-10)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 ... -
Ametros: A Technogenetic Simulation Game for Professional Communication Coursework
(University of Waterloo, 2014-08-27)This dissertation develops a pedagogy of professional communication for online education that provides a degree of feedback higher than that of a classroom setting. In order to construct such pedagogy, I examine professional ... -
Aural, Ocular, and Sequential Rhetoric in Two Contemporary American Stories, in Prose and Film: Patterns of Anxiety in Fight Club and The Road
(University of Waterloo, 2017-02-21)The dissertation rhetorically examines anxiety and fear in Fight Club and The Road, in their both cinematic and prose versions, texts that reflect a mood of contemporary American society that has been characterized by ... -
Black Frontiers: Race, Region, and Myth in African American Westerns, 1854-1954
(University of Waterloo, 2021-10-04)Up until the 1960s the African American West remained largely unexamined in scholarship and, when examined, was marked for its historical absence or, as Eric Gardner notes, “limited to brief biographical asides focusing ... -
Broadcasting a Performance of Caring: Social Justice and Migrant Narratives on the CBC's Canada Reads
(University of Waterloo, 2022-01-24)My dissertation argues that migrant narratives are used to facilitate a Canadian performance of caring on the popular broadcast television and radio program Canada Reads. The program brings together popular culture and ... -
Canadian Literatures Beyond the Colour Line: Re-Reading the Category of South-Asian Canadian Literature
(University of Waterloo, 2011-03-18)This dissertation examines current academic approaches to reading South Asian-Canadian literature as a multicultural “other” to Canadian national literature and proposes an alternative reading strategy that allows for these ... -
Christopher Nolan and the Art of Anamorphosis
(University of Waterloo, 2017-07-20)This dissertation explores the cinema of Christopher Nolan over a 15-year period. It focuses on the portrayal of the subject in five of his major films: Memento (2000), The Prestige (2006), The Dark Knight (2008), Inception ... -
Cognitive Constellations: Neurodivergent Aesthetics in 20th Century Experimental Poetries
(University of Waterloo, 2023-12-19)“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 ... -
The Comics Other: Charting the Correspondence Between Comics and Difference
(University of Waterloo, 2010-07-21)My research demonstrates how Othering practices affect the cultural status of the comics form. Comics frequently rely upon Othering practices such as stereotype when representing minority characters. This tendency contributes ... -
Contextual Complexities and Nelson Mandela's Braided Rhetoric
(University of Waterloo, 2019-05-21)This dissertation revolves around the complex political circumstances in apartheid South Africa that produced Nelson Mandela the rhetorician, human rights activist, and the longest political prisoner in human history. The ... -
"Covetous to parley with so sweet a frontis-peece": Illustration in Early Modern English Play-Texts
(University of Waterloo, 2010-09-28)This dissertation studies visual artifacts associated with early modern theatre and book culture, and through them examines acts of communication in the marketplace. These artifacts, illustrated play-text title pages from ... -
Critical Techno-dramaturgy: Mobilizing Embodied Perception in Intermedial Performance
(University of Waterloo, 2016-02-16)This dissertation attends to the ways in which the deployment of technological devices in twenty-first-century intermedial performance might influence the audience members’ perception of the relationship between humans ... -
Critical Tools: Using Technology to Augment the Process of Literary Analysis
(University of Waterloo, 2016-09-29)When it comes to the arts and sciences, Northrop Frye argues that “it is clear that the arts do not stabilize the subject in the same way that science does. . . The stabilizing subject of science is usually identified ... -
Debasing Dissent: The Role of The News Media in the Devaluation of Black Canadian Activism
(University of Waterloo, 2020-10-28)My dissertation examines the way that the Canadian news media delegitimizes anti-racist activism to contribute to the harmful national narratives of racial equality disseminated by the white Anglophone majority. I examine ... -
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 ... -
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 ... -
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 ...