English Language and Literature: Recent submissions
Now showing items 81-100 of 129
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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 ... -
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 ... -
Years Between Stations: The Dream of America in Steve Erickson
(University of Waterloo, 2014-09-04)Steve Erickson is an author so worried about the meaning of his country that his thematic obsessions influence and dictate the form and content of his writing. This project follows his thematic fixations over the course ... -
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 ... -
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 ... -
Plain, but not Simple: Plain Language Research with Readers, Writers, and Texts
(University of Waterloo, 2014-05-01)Plain language is defined in a variety of ways, but is generally understood to refer to language and design strategies that make texts easier for target audiences to understand and use. Research has helped demonstrate that ... -
Shakespeare, Youth, and Comic Books
(University of Waterloo, 2014-04-29)This thesis examines how Shakespearean play-texts are adapted into comic books in order to appeal to young readers. By analyzing four different adaptations including two comic book series and two manga series, it seeks to ... -
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 ... -
Life of the Woods: A Study of Emily Dickinson
(University of Waterloo, 2013-10-24)Beginning with T.W. Higginson, the poet’s first public critic and posthumous editor, the prevailing view of Emily Dickinson has been of a maker of “wonderful strokes and felicities, and yet an incomplete and unsatisfactory ... -
Drawing on the Margins of History: English-Language Graphic Narratives in Canada
(University of Waterloo, 2013-09-26)This study analyzes the techniques that Canadian comics life writers develop to construct personal histories. I examine a broad selection of texts including graphic autobiography, biography, memoir, and diary in order to ... -
The Zombie in American Culture
(University of Waterloo, 2013-09-13)My research explores how the oft-maligned zombie genre reveals deep-seated American cultural tendencies drawn from the nation's history with colonization and imperialism. The zombie genre is a quintessentially American ... -
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 ... -
How We Became Legion: Burke's Identification and Anonymous
(University of Waterloo, 2013-08-19)This thesis presents a study of how identification, according to Kenneth Burke's theory, can be observed in the media-related practices promoted by the cyber-activist collective Anonymous. Identification is the capacity ... -
Heroism, Gaming, and the Rhetoric of Immortality
(University of Waterloo, 2013-08-08)This dissertation examines rhetorics of heroism and immortality as they are negotiated through a variety of (new) media contexts. The dissertation demonstrates that media technologies in general, and videogames in particular, ... -
"Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand And Eternity in an hour": William Blake's Visions of Time and Space in the Light of Eastern Traditions
(University of Waterloo, 2013-07-23)This thesis examines William Blake’s conceptions of time and space in the light of the philosophies of Hinduism and Islam. In order to perform this analysis, source material, often from rare and neglected texts, is utilized ... -
Resisting Transculturation: The European Woman in English Travel Writing
(University of Waterloo, 2013-01-25)Comprised of four separate case studies – one on the Eastern novels of Penelope Aubin and Eliza Haywood written in the 1720’s, one on Lady Mary Wortley Montagu’s Turkish Embassy Letters, one that features female castaway ... -
Philosophy in Pieces: The Aphorisms of Nietzsche's Human, All Too Human and Wittgenstein's Philosophical Investigations
(University of Waterloo, 2012-09-28)This thesis considers the philosophical importance of the literary form of two aphoristic works of philosophy: Nietzsche’s Human, All Too Human and Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations. Though both these German-speaking ... -
The Modern Alice: Adaptations in Novel, Film and Video Game from 2000 - 2012
(University of Waterloo, 2012-09-19)Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass and What Alice Found There have and continue to inspire many adaptations since their publication. The purpose of this thesis is to compare the ... -
Till We Have Faces: C. S. Lewis's Textual Metamorphosis
(University of Waterloo, 2012-09-12)C. S. Lewis’s novel, Till We Have Faces, has been misunderstood by both scholars and readers alike. This paper seeks to read the text through the lens of Lewis’s own literary criticism. It begins by presenting Lewis’s ... -
Securitizing Systems
(University of Waterloo, 2012-09-07)Securitization is the process by which subjects move from the mundane to “worth securing”. What a group of people consider to be “worth securing” reflects how they understand that subject’s value in relation to their lives. ...