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Hoax, Parody, and Conservatism in Harry Potter
(University of Waterloo, 2002)
This essay examines the ideology or value system implicit in Joanne Rowling's Harry Potter series. Many of the images in the series, despite being fantastic or empirically unprecedented, are minor transformations of ...
The Rhetoric of Silence: John Cage, Exigence and the Art of the Commonplace
(University of Waterloo, 2009-10-02)
This thesis approaches the work of American avant-garde composer John Cage from an unconventional perspective by utilizing rhetorical theory to examine the intellectual history informing his collected writings in the text ...
"Unscrupulously Epic": Examining Female Epic in the Poetry of Felicia Hemans and Elizabeth Barrett Browning
(University of Waterloo, 2007-09-10)
Virginia Woolf once remarked that, “[t]here is no reason to think that the form of the epic ... suit[s] a woman any more than the [masculine] sentence” (Woolf 84). This thesis represents an attempt to explore what the ...
Horticultural Landscapes in Middle English Romance
(University of Waterloo, 2008-09-23)
Gardens played a significant role in the lives of European peoples living in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. By producing texts in which gardens and other cultivated landscapes are used as symbol and setting, ...
Signature Event C*ntext
(University of Waterloo, 2008-01-25)
This thesis examines how context in Derridean signature theory is taboo and underutilized, and calls signature theory to embrace the contaminating mark of context. Signature theory, as proposed by Jacques Derrida and Peggy ...
Ralph Barnes Grindrod's Slaves of the Needle: An Electronic Scholarly Edition
(University of Waterloo, 2006)
This thesis involves both editorial practice and literary analysis. In order to establish an editorial framework for the electronic scholarly edition of Dr. Ralph Barnes Grindrod's pamphlet Slaves of the Needle, I examine current issues in electronic textual editing. In the electronic scholarly edition, approximately twelve of the pamphlet's thirty-five pages are transcribed and encoded using TEI-based code. The second aspect of my master's thesis concerns the depiction of seamstresses in nineteenth-century British literature. Slaves of the Needle provides a non-fiction counterpart to the fictional seamstresses of mid-nineteenth-century literature. Using Slaves of the Needle as a basis for evaluating the accuracy of mid-nineteenth-century characterizations of seamstresses, I show that authors such as Charles Dickens, Elizabeth Gaskell, Ernest Jones, and Charlotte Elizabeth Tonna were familiar with the working conditions of seamstresses. By conducting a close reading of certain representations of the seamstress in both fiction and non-fiction, I develop a theory of why the depiction of some aspects of the seamstress story are more accurate than others....
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 ...
Promotional (Meta)discourse in Research Articles in Language and Literary Studies
(University of Waterloo, 2007-09-21)
Abstract
It is now widely recognized that promotionalism permeates scholarly discourse. Yet a systematic account of rhetorical and linguistic means, which researchers across disciplines deploy to achieve this effect, is ...