Browsing English Language and Literature by Title
Now showing items 6-25 of 128
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Beyond the Boundaries of English: Nonsense Language in Children's Literature
(University of Waterloo, 2018-09-04)This thesis examines the relationship between nonsense language and children’s literature. Nonsense language as a field of study provides linguists with a means of examining language within the bounds of natural languages ... -
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 ... -
Climate Change and Cultural Anxieties: An Exploration of Dystopian Novels from Before and After Global Warming
(University of Waterloo, 2018-08-31)Climate change is one of the most pressing issues of the twenty-first century. However, despite the urgency of the problem, popular political narratives fail to address the issue, suggesting to constituents that climate ... -
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 Collaborative Self: From Collectivity to Individuality and What Blogs Can Teach Us About Identity
(University of Waterloo, 2014-01-23)This paper uses blogs as a starting point for an examination of how identity is constructed collaboratively through a series of linguistically mediated social processes. The goal is to establish a theoretical framework ... -
Collocation in Rhetorical Figures: A Case Study in Parison, Epanaphora and Homoioptoton
(University of Waterloo, 2019-06-19)This paper is a pilot study on the collocation of rhetorical figures, or when more than one figure occurs in a single instance. It examines examples from rhetorical figure handbooks, which only look at figures individually. ... -
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 ... -
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 ...