English Language and Literature: Recent submissions
Now showing items 1-20 of 128
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The Intimate Fandoms of Men’s Hockey Real Person Fanfiction
(University of Waterloo, 2024-01-15)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 ... -
Representational Queerness Within Marvel’s Loki: Liminality through Identity, Genre, and Medium
(University of Waterloo, 2024-01-02)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 ... -
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 ... -
Sounds of the Land of Promise: Listening to Ralph Ellison’s Metaphors of Memory in Invisible Man
(University of Waterloo, 2023-10-12)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 ... -
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 ... -
Idle No More: A Rhetorical Analysis of a Movement
(University of Waterloo, 2023-08-29)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 ... -
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)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 ... -
Alternative Risk: A Diagnostic and Canadian Anti-Vaccine Case Study
(University of Waterloo, 2023-08-17)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 ... -
The mad manifesto
(University of Waterloo, 2023-08-15)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 ... -
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 ... -
Rhetorical Figures in Music
(University of Waterloo, 2023-04-01)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 ... -
Fictocritical Cyberfeminism: A Paralogical Model for Post-Internet Communication
(University of Waterloo, 2023-03-13)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 ... -
Masks and Caricatures: Prosopopoeia, Ethopoeia, and the Effect of Social Media on Canadian Political Leaders’ Debates
(University of Waterloo, 2023-01-20)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’ ... -
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 ... -
Queen of the Academy: Academic Drag as Pedagogy and Praxis
(University of Waterloo, 2022-11-22)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 ... -
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 ... -
Some Mysterious Resonance Between Thing and Language: On Contradiction and the Materialist Theologies of Cormac McCarthy and Marilynne Robinson
(University of Waterloo, 2022-08-24)At first glance, the works of the contemporary American authors Marilynne Robinson and Cormac McCarthy look so distinctly unlike that they seem to represent opposing poles on a hypothetical literary spectrum. The fundamental ... -
The Pivot of Athwartedness: Roy Kiyooka's "Pacific Windows"
(Guernica, 2020)Published as a full issue of The Capilano Review in August 1990, Roy Kiyooka’s “Pacific Windows” exists on the periphery of Kiyooka’s canon. Despite the various ways in which this text could be considered the culmination ... -
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 ... -
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 ...