English Language and Literature: Recent submissions
Now showing items 61-80 of 128
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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 ... -
“That’s Gold, Jerry, Gold!”: The Sophisticated Contradiction at the Heart of Stand-Up Comedy
(University of Waterloo, 2016-12-15)This dissertation examines the word “sophisticated” by re-situating it within the Greek tradition and explicating how such a move informs a study of humor and amusement. In regard to “techniques and theories,” the OED ... -
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 ... -
Heroism "at a Pinch:" The Story of the Structures of Middle-earth
(University of Waterloo, 2016-09-15)Discussions of the heroic element in J.R.R. Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings generally focus on Frodo and/or Aragorn. But Sam Gamgee is in some ways the best representative of the sort of heroism that Tolkien most admired, ... -
The Interdependency of Myth and Magic in the Fionavar Tapestry
(University of Waterloo, 2016-09-15)Guy Gavriel Kay's high fantasy trilogy, The Fionavar Tapestry, contains an intricate system of mythological and magical interdependencies. Myth and magic are presented in the light of a traditional interaction, with a ... -
Fostering the Feral in Civilization: Reading Animal Characterization in Ken Kesey's "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest"
(University of Waterloo, 2016-08-31)Representations of the animal, although prominent in literature, are often overlooked as sources for rigorous analysis. When acknowledged, their interpretation is restricted to the realm of archetypal significance and ... -
"My Name Is Lizzie Bennet": Successfully Adapting Jane Austen's 'Pride and Prejudice' (1813) for the Twenty-First Century with 'The Lizzie Bennet Diaries' (2012-2013)
(University of Waterloo, 2016-05-03)This thesis argues that The Lizzie Bennet Diaries (or the LBD), the 2012 transmedia YouTube webseries adaptation of Pride and Prejudice, is a successful adaptation of Jane Austen’s novel because – like its source text – ... -
Uncommon Places: The Multimodal Art of Embodied Invention
(University of Waterloo, 2016-05-02)This dissertation develops the concept of embodied invention, an epistemology and design philosophy that treats multimodal media—such as comics and videogames—as heuristics for translating knowledges between bodies, ... -
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 ... -
Sympathetic Imagination: Posthumanist Thought in Electronic Literature and Games
(University of Waterloo, 2016-02-19)Martha Nussbaum insists on the power of “sympathetic imagining” for considering the lives of nonhuman animals. Literature, for Nussbaum, is a powerful site for imaging the lives of animals. This study extends Nussbaum’s ... -
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 ... -
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. ... -
Games with Words: Textual Representation in the Wake of Graphical Realism in Videogames
(University of Waterloo, 2016-01-21)Much of the videogame industry is based around a model of technological progress, whereby developers, individual videogames, and videogame platforms are lauded as superior based on their engagement with the latest, cutting ... -
Private People in Public Places: Contemporary Canadian Mennonite Life Writing
(University of Waterloo, 2015-10-14)This study examines the autobiographical writing of five contemporary Canadian Mennonite authors in order show how these texts, when read collectively, work to disrupt conventional ways of thinking about life writing. Life ... -
Posthumanist Medicine: Participatory Healthcare, Medical Humanities, and Digital Media
(University of Waterloo, 2015-08-24)This dissertation explores the construction of illness in the context of two interrelated processes that both propose a more empowered patient role and a whole person model for healthcare. Specifically, these contexts are ... -
Outre Aesthetics
(University of Waterloo, 2015-04-20)Since the revolutionary period in America, aesthetics has played a crucial role in political formation, social improvisation, and cultural imagination. Aesthetic contemplation offered a rich and evocative language for ... -
Foucault and Literature: Finitude, Feigning, Fabulation
(University of Waterloo, 2015-04-13)The dissertation is composed of two related parts, each applying aspects of Michel Foucault's thought to contemporary American avant-garde writing. Part One brings together Foucault's neglected early essays on ... -
Transposition of Joy in C.S. Lewis
(University of Waterloo, 2015-02-09)C.S. Lewis’s lifelong pursuit of ‘Joy,’ in addition to being the focus of two autobiographical texts (Surprised by Joy and The Pilgrim’s Regress) is also manifested throughout his fiction writing. His earliest poetry ... -
Rethinking Maritime Literary Regionalism: Place, Identity, and Belonging in the Works of Elizabeth Bishop, Maxine Tynes, and Rita Joe
(University of Waterloo, 2014-10-08)In this dissertation I argue that the dominant concept of Maritime literary regionalism is informed by a Euro-settler definition of belonging, one that prescribes an author’s long-term residency and family history in a ... -
Marriage and the Social Contract in British Romantic Discourse
(University of Waterloo, 2014-09-29)This thesis investigates non-domestic discourses of British Romanticism to argue that there is no “outside” of the domestic; its key constituents, family and the marriage that legitimizes that family, are absent presences ...