English Language and Literature
Permanent URI for this collection
This is the collection for the University of Waterloo's Department of English Language and Literature.
Research outputs are organized by type (eg. Master Thesis, Article, Conference Paper).
Waterloo faculty, students, and staff can contact us or visit the UWSpace guide to learn more about depositing their research.
Browse
Browsing English Language and Literature by Title
Now showing 1 - 20 of 132
Results Per Page
Sort Options
Item Agatha Christie and Dorothy L. Sayers. Detecting Community in their Public, Private, and Fictional Lives.(University of Waterloo, 2023-09-26) Beresford-Sheridan, SallyThis 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 while utilizing the same social and cultural productions which surrounded publishing popular fiction in this interwar period. To consider how these women re-imagined the detective fiction genre, this thesis examines embodied social communities in Christie’s and Sayers’s fiction. It further examines how both of these writers in their representation of women push the gendered expectations of roles for women in their social and cultural settings. Building upon Benedict Anderson’s theory in Imagined Communities, and the role which the cultural artefacts of the newspaper and the novel play in establishing imagined communities, I examine how the rise in popularity of detective fiction also coincided with a r/evolution in a type of print culture, which contributed to the rise of a ‘golden age’ in the British interwar period for both newspapers and popular literature, including detective fiction (Mayhall “‘Indecently Preposterous’: The Interwar Press and Golden Age Detective Fiction”, 145). The Introduction establishes the social, cultural, and critical background to my examination of Agatha Christie and Dorothy L, Sayers, their lives and their fiction, in the interwar years. Providing the social and cultural background, Chapter 2 first examines how women were targeted by the press to become readers, and yet, in turn, how women writers could reach a further reading community through participating in celebrity culture in the press; specifically, the ways in which Christie and Sayers could serialize their novels in the press. Chapter 3 compares/contrasts how Christie and Sayers each dealt with personal trauma and how this was reflected in their public lives and the types of advertisement which they performed for the reading public. Moving into textual analysis, Chapter 4 focuses on Agatha Christie’s 1930s travel novels to show how characters abroad or back home can imagine social communities built upon these cultural artefacts of the newspaper and the novel. Ultimately, these imaginings are forced to be re-examined once murder exposes the anxieties of these communities and social structures. Building upon this, Chapter 5 turns to Dorothy L. Sayers’s Gaudy Night to examine how social imagined communities – academic and professional – can be reconstructed as places which can offer ‘equal citizenship’. Chapter 6 takes the detective fiction trope of the sidekick, and through the characters of Miss Climpson and Harriet Vane, examines how Sayers navigates expanding genre expectations in her conversation surrounding women in the interwar society. Understanding the ways in which Christie and Sayers built these communities – in their lives and in their fiction – allows us to further re-evaluate and assert that Sayers’s and Christie’s writing(s) can be seen as “serv[ing] as the vehicles for the articulation of feminist goals and challenges”, and thus one can find the “compelling evidence of the pluralisation and diversification of interwar feminist discourses” (DiCenzo “Feminist Media and Agendas for Change: Introduction” 313), throughout the interwar period and within the various texts of the newspapers and the novels. Additionally, it allows us to increasingly understand and examine the literary, cultural, social, and lasting impact of these two women detective fiction authors whose contributions extend far beyond their influence on the detective fiction genre.Item Alone Together - Convergence Culture and the Slender Man Phenomenon(University of Waterloo, 2023-01-10) Morton, Robert TravisThis 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 black business suit. The stories take various forms, including text-based narrative, amateur video, doctored images, and games. They are presented with an affectation of folklore, and treat the accounts as true testimonies of encounters they, or others they know, have allegedly had with Slender Man. This is a self-conscious effort on the part of its creators to manifest Slender Man as a real-life legend. Resulting from this effort, several individuals have carried out acts of real-world violence in the name of Slender Man, or with some connection to him. In response to these acts, and the ensuing moral panic, members of the community defensively stated that it was the responsibility of their readers to be able to know the difference between fantasy and reality. Yet, as this dissertation demonstrates, the Slender Man phenomenon itself is predicated on using digital media to blur this distinction. Through readings of Slender Man in various media forms, this dissertation shows how it blends horror aesthetics with the online cultures of trolling—in which individuals intentionally misrepresent themselves in order to mislead and antagonize others, allegedly for the lulz—that is, for the laughs, pranking or joking. Trolling has however produced many serious consequences, from individuals targeted for harassment to bad-faith political movements that disrupt existing institutional functions more broadly. In its origins, trolling began as apocryphal storytelling designed to mislead others into believing they were true and expose the ignorance of newbies. Notably, the sites in which this occurred evolved to become the fora from which the similarly apocryphal stories in the Slender Man text community originate, such as 4Chan. These same pseudonymous fora have acted as safe havens for bad actors that have gone on to become notorious for their promotion of real-world violence, from Erik Minassian’s violence in the name of the incel community to Elliot Rodger’s misogynistic manifesto posed to 4Chan. In short, this dissertation argues that Slender Man texts act as a canary in a coal mine, and that the mechanics of online horror communities lay bare the underlying strategies of trolling or post-truth internet culture more broadly. I undertake a close aesthetic and ideological examination of Slender Man in image, text, video and game, to offer a portrait of the community that shares them. The stories offer a glimpse into the anxieties, tensions, and alienation experienced in life online as a result of hypermediacy, premediacy, and anonymity. While much has been written regarding the potential for collaboration online and the possibilities for grassroots organization and community-building, the positive ends this convergence culture offers are offset to some extent by the kinds of anxieties emerging from a disaffected and alienated community. Ultimately, this project offers an account of the evolving relationship between interactive fiction, trolling, and political disaffection, a media ecology that is becoming ever more urgent to understand in twenty-first century society.Item Alternative Risk: A Diagnostic and Canadian Anti-Vaccine Case Study(University of Waterloo, 2023-08-17) Casey, SarahThis 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 Nadine Scott’s “risk frame” as a Foucauldian “governmentality” and the techniques of the professional writing discipline of “risk communication” with multi-modal rhetorical analysis to show that “risk” is more than a deliberative discussion of statistics and probabilities: it is a multi-dimensional form of argument that has become a topos, or persuasive “place,” in our social discourse, one where we find arguments about preventing catastrophe ... or where we find arguments for all kinds of other purposes. I argue that this complex rhetorical practice is vulnerable to capture by “alternative risk”: risk communications that adopt the conceptual and formal features of risk discourse to exploit their audience’s risk anxieties. In a context of increasing concern about the volume and impact of disinformation, the concept of “alternative risk” offers a framework for diagnosing patterns and structures of disinformation, which I apply in a Canadian anti-vaccine case study, Stop the Shots in Kids. Mapping this anti-COVID vaccine campaign to the “alternative risk” framework reveals (1) how it uses the stylistic and conceptual features of risk communication alongside rhetorical strategies characteristic of the “alt-right” to advance conspiracy theories and other forms of mis- and dis-information in a manner that makes them difficult to distinguish from legitimate COVID-19 risk communications, and (2) how it uses the risk of vaccination as a “place” to argue about COVID-19 restrictions, mitigation practices such as masking, and the trustworthiness of government and other institutions. The case study, and the other examples included in this thesis highlight that alternative risk is not a “fringe minority” issue, but something of mainstream and ongoing importance in our daily lives.Item Ametros: A Technogenetic Simulation Game for Professional Communication Coursework(University of Waterloo, 2014-08-27) Clapperton, RobertThis 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 communication from three perspectives: cognitive, technological, and rhetorical. Cognition and technology are becoming, in many senses, indistinguishable. Technology is extending and augmenting cognitive processes such as memory through databases, spatial awareness through various global positioning technologies, and especially the greater cognitive attention system via the sheer magnitude of media channels. Much of this extension and augmentation is happening beneath, or at least outside of consciousness; in most cases, we are not consciously aware of the cognitive effects of technologies such as SIM cards or databases. They are ubiquitous, deeply embedded, and routine. Katherine Hayles and Nigel Thrift designate this effect of technology on cognition as the “technological unconscious”. I term this increasingly unconscious relationship of cognition and technology as technogenetic. Following Niklas Luhmann, I argue that the autopoietic operationally closed nature of the human biological system forecloses purity; as Luhmann expresses it, “only communication communicates,” not communicators. While machines experience the pure communication of digital code, human beings must rely on cognitive processes, constrained and afforded by mental affinities. This dissertation explores research in a number of disciplines from the work of Sperber and Mercier in cognitive psychology on the argumentative nature of human reasoning to the work of Jeanne Fahnestock, Randy Allen Harris, and others on cognitive rhetoric and figural logic to conclude that argumentation in its many facets is the key rhetorical skill necessary to navigate a technogenetic world. A technogenetic rhetoric engages writing as argumentation within the extra-discursive factors created by the technological unconscious. Technogenetic rhetoric also assumes the visuospatial aspects of technologically enframed communication. As a pedagogy, technogenetic rhetoric follows a constructivist model; in this dissertation, realized by a contextually authentic online simulation game that I call Ametros: A Professional Communication Simulation Game. Ametros is a Greek word that means “without measure” that I use to represent the complexity of contemporary technogenetic systems of communication. Ametros organizes and deploys the elements of discursive, extra-discursive, and visuospatial rhetoric in a ludic environment that provides a combination of human and artificial intelligence driven feedback superior to both existing online solutions and most large classroom settings. The artificial intelligence, in turn, develops recursively through the creation and of corpora of student communication using an annotation interface based on ontologies of argumentation and figuration. These annotations will engage natural language processing algorithms that will, over time, allow the machine to provide real-time feedback on communication skills of the student. Ametros provides an experiential and ludic environment that moves pedagogy of composition, in all of its forms from one of delimited process to a procedural logic of iteration better able to navigate complex systems where audiences as assemblages of human and technological actors determine and are determined by, interactions of cognition and technology.Item Aural, Ocular, and Sequential Rhetoric in Two Contemporary American Stories, in Prose and Film: Patterns of Anxiety in Fight Club and The Road(University of Waterloo, 2017-02-21) Sabzian, SaeedThe dissertation rhetorically examines anxiety and fear in Fight Club and The Road, in their both cinematic and prose versions, texts that reflect a mood of contemporary American society that has been characterized by humanities scholars with terms such as a “culture of fear” and a “culture of anxiety.” In dialogue with these scholars, I argue that literary and rhetorical criticism need additional strategies to make this culture, and the affect of texts more generally, more generative of critical knowledge. In this context, I advance two critical readings, in a triangulating methodology that leverages sound, image, and sequence. Fight Club I read as a modern-day psychomachia—a war of, for, and by the soul, in which a schism of the psyche glosses itself as divine or authentic and motivates a suffering subject to struggle for transformation or recovering to identity. The Road I read as a quest narrative to regenerate a blasted world. Quests, too, are centered on conflict and struggle, not for supremacy over threatening forces, but toward a goal of regeneration. Both patterns, as mythoi of strife and contention, serve a storyteller dealing with the anxieties of a culture at crisis. My hybrid methodology brings insights from several disciplines together to study the suasiveness of anxiety and fear materialized in sound, image, the sequence of these two media, and their roles in cultural depictions. Texts colonize the audience’s consciousness through aural and visual dimensions, as well as through the sequential arrangement of their trajectories. I argue that literary and rhetorical criticism can reveal fuller meaning through a hybrid methodology that accounts for the three dimensions. With my ‘sound’ enquiry, using a strategy I call ‘Aural Rhetoric,’ I contribute to the turn in humanities towards the epistemological significance of sounds and offer an analytical framework that brings out meanings lost to 'unhearing' criticism. With my second strategy, ‘Ocular Rhetoric,’ I further argue that film and novel imprint their audiences through input from the sense of sight or symbolic means that are visual. I scrutinize cinematic and prose scenes for auditory and visual implications of anxiety and fear, for ways that soundscapes, cinematography, and scenography manage an audience’s engagement with a story. With ‘Sequential Rhetoric,’ my third analytical regime, I argue that the arrangement of the aural and visual constitutes a logos, or sequential argument, in which pathos, or affective response, is induced and fostered.Item Beyond the Boundaries of English: Nonsense Language in Children's Literature(University of Waterloo, 2018-09-04) Brennan, MarthaThis 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 by drawing attention to linguistic structures and properties and opening them up to examination. Because of its affinity for oral storytelling and linguistic playfulness, children’s literature provides an ideal genre for nonsense authors. This thesis will look closely at three nonsense authors within the field of children’s literature: Roald Dahl, Dr. Seuss, and Shel Silverstein. By examining the work of these authors, this thesis will demonstrate that there is a strong connection between nonsense language and children’s literature, and that by reading children’s literature we are able to gain an awareness of our own understanding of how language works.Item Black Frontiers: Race, Region, and Myth in African American Westerns, 1854-1954(University of Waterloo, 2021-10-04) Gallagher, SaraUp 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 on the most romantic figures” (Gardner, Jennie Carter, xii). The challenge faced by recent scholarship in Western studies has not only been to recover the works of authors who have remained understudied or unpublished, but also to develop interpretive frameworks that consciously push beyond Anglo-centric visions of the West. One such method is New Regionalism. Espoused by Gardner, New Regionalism emphasizes the role of place and location in the production of a creative text. This approach interrogates the Western genre outside of previous canonical constructions that limit Black presence in literary and cultural history to certain geographic locations (i.e. the South and the Mid-Atlantic) and genres (i.e. the slave narrative). Examining Black textual communities in the West allows scholarship to move beyond acknowledging historical presence, to analyzing how African Americans represent themselves through the Western genre and, perhaps more pointedly, in relation to how they “cite/site under acknowledged Black geographies” (Katherine McKittrick, Demonic Grounds, 111). Each of the texts that I analyze involves migration to a frontier space on the edge of white society, a place where African American authors and cultural producers adapt to race-based restrictions and limitations, sometimes by challenging these restrictions and other times by assimilating into the white society. By revising a narrative structure that is associated with white American culture, they also claim a place in a society that refuses to acknowledge African American participation in and contribution to frontier history and mythology. The body of works examined in this dissertation analyzes a diverse set of stories to show the ways African American authors and producers of Western texts have participated in the revision of the Western genre in a full range of imaginative forms.Item Broadcasting a Performance of Caring: Social Justice and Migrant Narratives on the CBC's Canada Reads(University of Waterloo, 2022-01-24) Cronin, KeelyMy 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 literature to form a reading community that models affective reading practices and solicits reader responses to social justice themes in Canadian literature. The ideal of the ‘caring’ Canadian nation implies that it is accepting of diversity, welcoming to refugees and migrants, and inclusive of a wide variety of languages and cultural traditions. As I argue in this dissertation, however, this ideal is professed but often not substantiated in Canadian culture. This is evident in the ways in which migration and social justice are discussed on Canada Reads. I analyze how the ideals of Canadian nationhood, multiculturalism, and the ‘good migrant’ are constructed and disseminated in Canadian culture and media. Focusing on panelist Samantha Bee’s 2014 defense of Rawi Hage’s Cockroach and panelist Cameron Bailey’s 2015 defense of Kim Thúy’s Ru, I assert that the migrant narratives on Canada Reads are often not fully or honestly represented. Instead, these texts are used to maintain the Canadian performance of caring and uphold the illusion of successful multiculturalism.Item Canadian Literatures Beyond the Colour Line: Re-Reading the Category of South-Asian Canadian Literature(University of Waterloo, 2011-03-18T14:47:48Z) Lobb, Diana FrancesThis 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 texts to be read within a framework of South Asian diasporic subjectivities situated specifically at the Canadian location. Shifting from the idea that “Canada” names a particular national identity and national literary culture to the idea that “Canada” names a particular geographic terrain at which different cultural, social, and historical vectors intersect and are creolized allows for a more nuanced reading of South Asian-Canadian literature, both in terms of its relationship to the complex history of the South Asian diaspora and in terms of the complex history of South Asian encounters with the Canadian space. Reading prose, poetry, drama, and theatrical institutions as locations where a specifically South Asian-Canadian diasporic subjectivity is reflected, I am able to map a range of individual negotiations among the cultural vector of the “ancestral” past, the cultural vector of the influence of European colonialism, and the cultural vector of this place that demonstrate that the negotiation of South Asian-Canadian diasporic subjectivity and its reflection in literature cannot be understood as producing a homogenous or “authentic” cultural identity. Instead, the literary expression of South Asian-Canadian diasporic subjectivity argues that the outcome of negotiations between cultural vectors that take place in this location are as unique as the individuals who undertake those negotiations. These individual negotiations, I argue, need to be read collectively to trace out a continuum of possible expressions of South Asian-Canadian diasporic subjectivity, a continuum that emphasizes that the processes of negotiation are on-going and flexible. This dissertation challenges the assumption that Canadian literature can be contained within the limits of a Canadian nationalist mythology or ethnography. Instead of the literature of the Canadian “nation” or the Canadian “people,” Canadian literature is best understood as the literature produced in this location by all the “minority” populations, including the dominant “minority.” Reading Canadian literature, then, is reading the differential relationships to history and community that occur in this place and which are inscribed in these collectively Canadian texts.Item Christopher Nolan and the Art of Anamorphosis(University of Waterloo, 2017-07-20) Kolahjooei Alvar, FarzadThis 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 (2010), and Interstellar (2014). In its chronological critique of Nolan’s cinema, this project explores subjectivity, to use Lacanian terminology, as a distorted vision provided by the desire for the impossible objet petit a. It records a shift of perspective in Nolan’s later characters, which endows them with a better understanding of their relationship with the object cause of desire. The dissertation studies the relationship between the subject and the objet petit a through the encounter with the anamorphotic gaze, which reveals the impossibility of fantasy at the heart of desire. In doing so, this project provides several ways through which anamorphosis proves to be a point that exposes the limitations of what Lacan calls the Symbolic Order. This dissertation proposes the term structural anamorphosis to introduce the Lacanian gaze as a temporal point in the film’s narrative. Structural anamorphosis is what retroactively uncovers the futility of fantasy and reveals the distorted views of the spectators. In its discussion of subjectivity, this dissertation shows that the quest for the objet petit a, which is the essence of desire, is similar to capitalism’s obsession with objects. In his films, Nolan shows how the subject’s desire is shaped by ideology unconsciously. By doing so, Nolan dismantles ideology and provides a space for rethinking the surrounding world: the spectators who watch the films of Christopher Nolan understand that they need to reconsider what they have taken for granted as normal.Item Climate Change and Cultural Anxieties: An Exploration of Dystopian Novels from Before and After Global Warming(University of Waterloo, 2018-08-31) Hawkes, JessicaClimate 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 change is less important than the economy. With this in mind, my research examines whether the public can meaningfully engage with climate change through other popular mediums; namely the novel. In order to gauge concern about climate change, I compared dystopian novels written before and after the year “global warming” was first coined (1975), with the expectation that dystopian novels written after the widespread recognition of global warming would engage more deeply with environmental concerns than their earlier counterparts. This research revealed that there is not a clear-cut difference in environmental representations between pre- and post-1975 dystopias. Rather, the novels fall along a continuum of environmental engagement, with newer novels being more likely to engage with Ursula Heise’s “triple allegiance” of ecocriticism. The greatest difference between novels written before and after “global warming” is their treatment of technological solutions to the climate crisis; newer dystopian works demonstrate how such techno-utopian solutions ultimately fail to address the root causes of the climate crisis, and will do little to mitigate the problems of climate change unless accompanied by social change.Item Cognitive Constellations: Neurodivergent Aesthetics in 20th Century Experimental Poetries(University of Waterloo, 2023-12-19) Watts, Hannah“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 or cognitively disabled people from fully participating as valued members of society. For literary scholars, “inaccessible” refers to strategies used by authors to estrange readers. Inaccessible techniques necessitate strenuous close reading, and may either in- crease or decrease the absorption and investment a reader experiences. Inaccessible strategies are often present in texts labelled “experimental” or “conceptual.” However, some of the techniques modern and post-modern authors use in order to estrange readers mimic or perform disabled pat- terns, practices, and aesthetics. Ironically, the cultural value assigned to famous inaccessible texts often separates poetic techniques from disabled people’s embodied experiences; scholars may praise representations or metaphors of disability while rejecting disabled perspectives as valuable critical lenses for reading literature. In this way, inaccessible texts may also become inaccessible literary spaces that perpetuate ableist academic systems. For example, even if a literary scholar identifies as neurodivergent (a person with a cognitive disability) they are still expected to write in neurotypical forms, and interpret literature using neurotypical methodologies: they still must “access” ability to be academically successful. This project joins interdisciplinary scholarship that refuses to categorize CDS and English Literature as discrete areas of study, but suggests that physically and cognitively disabled aesthetics illustrate important reading values. This is especially true for scholarship that already acknowledges the presence of disability in inaccessible poetic texts without naming or engaging with disabled perspectives. This dissertation tracks some of the ways that readers have reacted to disability aesthetics in experimental texts like James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake, Gertrude Stein’s Tender Buttons, and Hannah Weiner’s Code Poems. It traces how ableism, specifically ideas associated with the pseudoscience of eugenics, is connected to “inaccessible” labels bestowed on these texts. This project then offers readers creative interpretive modes that will help them engage with and explore disabled aesthetics in the text instead of dismissing such poems as too difficult, or diagnosing them as symptomatic of a disabled writer and therefore not worth reading. This dissertation is also written using the form of my own neurodivergent expressive practice, ADHD, as one example of how literary scholarship might encourage scholars to celebrate their neurotype instead of leaving it behind in favour of the exceptional level of ability expected in academic spaces.Item The Collaborative Self: From Collectivity to Individuality and What Blogs Can Teach Us About Identity(University of Waterloo, 2014-01-23) Hagenah, NathanThis 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 for understanding individual identity as rooted in media, language, and society and the result of collective social processes as opposed to their genesis. It draws together conceptual models from theorists in sociology, media studies, and genre theory to explore how selves are created in the online contexts of blogs and how those concepts relate to wider cultural concerns and anxieties related to the construction of individual identity. By examining issues of privacy, anonymity, and authenticity as they relate to blogs and bloggers, this paper aims to provide a view of individual identity as contextually situated yet continuous across social contexts and which is the result of collaborative, collective social processes.Item Collocation in Rhetorical Figures: A Case Study in Parison, Epanaphora and Homoioptoton(University of Waterloo, 2019-06-19) Tu, KatherineThis 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. Detection algorithms for parison, epanaphora, and homoioptoton are developed and run against the handbook examples to check for collocation. The findings suggest that figures of parallelism are more cognitively salient than lexical repetition, but that marked figures like antimetabole, polysyndeton, and asyndeton are more salient than figures of parallelism.Item The Comics Other: Charting the Correspondence Between Comics and Difference(University of Waterloo, 2010-07-21T20:18:23Z) Deman, JonathonMy 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 to the low cultural status of comics throughout the better part of the last century. In recent years, however, comics artists have cultivated revisioning techniques that challenge the use of Othering practices in comics. These efforts represent an important step in the push toward what is now known as the comics-as-literature movement, which Scott McCloud believes will allow the next generation of comics readers and artists to accept the idea that “comics can yield a body of work worthy of study and meaningfully represent the life, times and world-view of its author” (Reinventing 10). Even as Othering practices in comics create negative perceptions, these same practices, ironically, provide comics artists with the necessary mechanisms to undermine or revise these negative perceptions and to move comics into the literary arena. The primary mechanism that I focus on in this project is the denotation/connotation relationship. In “Rhetoric of the Image,” Roland Barthes -- speaking about advertising images -- suggests that “the denoted image naturalizes the symbolic message, it innocents the semantic artifice of connotation” (“Rhetoric” 45). Building on Barthes’ work, I demonstrate how the comics image uses the denotative component in visual representations of minorities to naturalize symbolic messages (connotations) that project inferiority. This is how comics create and perpetuate Otherness. At the same time, by interrogating the denotation/connotation relationship, contemporary comics artists have been able to undermine this naturalization process and expose the misconceptions that are inherent within representations of the Other in comics. When comics commonly adopt Othering practices, they create what Charles Hatfield refers to as “encrusted connotations” (4), where the reader’s experience of a comics work is deeply affected by the social perceptions that surround comics in general. When the treatment of minorities in comics is based upon outdated stereotypes, for example, readers may assume that comics are a popular art form without literary aspirations, and the readers then treat these comics accordingly. Conversely, when comics artists challenge the encrusted connotations of the form, they undermine these connotations and open the comics readers’ eyes to the possibility that comics can indeed yield a body of work worthy of study. As I demonstrate, this revisioning work of contemporary comics artists is an important component of the comics-as-literature movement. In order to prove this, my work isolates three distinct forms of Othering that comics speak to in a prominent way. By studying the manner in which comics represent women, racial minorities and geeks, I develop the pattern by which Othering practices contribute to the cultural status of comics art. Each chapter isolates touchstone texts with regard to minority representation (Wonder Woman as gender representation, Happy Hooligan and Luke Cage as racial representation, Clark Kent as geek representation, etc.) in order to establish the formation of encrusted connotations that can then be seen across the medium as a whole. I then show how some of the most prominent and critically acclaimed comics literature of the past twenty years (Maus, Jimmy Corrigan, Persepolis, etc.) enters into a self-reflexive dialogue with these encrusted connotations in order to move beyond them and to help transition the form toward a higher cultural status.Item Contextual Complexities and Nelson Mandela's Braided Rhetoric(University of Waterloo, 2019-05-21) Ofili, PatriciaThis 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 manner in which Nelson Mandela deploys a braided rhetoric that is a combination of the African and Western rhetorical traditions for spearheading the anti-apartheid struggle in South Africa is investigated. Mandela draws upon the African rhetorical tradition through which his identity, selfhood, and ethos were forged, while appropriating the Western rhetorical tradition through which he attained his education and training as a lawyer. Also examined is the complexity of inter-ethnic strife among Black South Africans; a situation that was exploited by the apartheid regime and which made the western rhetorical tradition inadequate for addressing apartheid domination. The dissertation also studies Mandela’s dynamism as he navigates the murky waters of apartheid policies, which were not only smoke screens for veiling their racist intent but were enactments that kept morphing for the purpose of crushing any form of dissent. The complex situation produced an audience that was very diverse; and to appeal to these local and international audiences, Mandela required a rhetoric that was nuanced and effective enough to dismantle the apartheid racist order. Mandela employs narratives, which are performed in keeping with the African oral tradition - to unify, organize, and inspire his people; to call on the world beyond the borders of South Africa to account for their support of Apartheid; and to call out whites South Africans for their implicit and explicit consent to the evils of a racist social, political, and economic order. Mandela’s rhetoric is strengthened particularly because, even as he speaks and writes in service of a struggle against systemic racism, he rises above the reification of essentialism and thus resists complicity.Item "Covetous to parley with so sweet a frontis-peece": Illustration in Early Modern English Play-Texts(University of Waterloo, 2010-09-28T14:20:27Z) Jakacki, DianeThis 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 the period 1600 to 1660, provide scholars with an opportunity to better understand the discursive power of theatre and subjects associated with drama in seventeenth-century London. This work offers a set of case studies that demonstrate how title page imagery and its circulation can contribute to our understanding of contemporary theatre culture, and addresses questions of intention, production and distribution. As well, it offers insights into early modern modes of constructing visualization. These artifacts served not only as visual reminders or interpretations of the dramatic works they represented, but were also used as powerful marketing tools that enhanced the cultural capital of the plays throughout London. The title pages were used as posters, tacked to the walls of the booksellers’ shops; the woodcuts were also repurposed, and incorporated into other popular publications such as broadside ballads, which retold the plots of the plays in musical form and were sold on city street corners. These connections raise questions about early modern forms of marketing used by publishers, and challenge the widely accepted belief that images held little value in the society and in the culture of print of the period. In addition, the distribution of these illustrations challenges the widespread conviction that early modern English culture was iconophobic, and suggests that seventeenth-century English society embraced rather than spurned visual media. Methodologically, this study is built on the foundations laid by scholars of English theatre and print culture. Within those fields, however, it has been customary to view these title page illustrations as inferior forms of representation, especially in comparison to their continental counterparts. By using tools from visual rhetoric to expand on how and what these images communicate, I am able to show the important functions they performed, and the distinct and playful way they represent complex relationships between stage and page, audience and performance, reading and spectating. These readings, in turn, enrich our historical understanding of the cultures of print and theatre, and build upon our knowledge of the interactions between these rich and important fields. Each chapter explores theoretical and contextual questions that pertain to some aspect of each illustration, as well as examining whether individual illustrations can inform us further about early modern theatrical performance practices. The introduction surveys the relevant field and introduces the theoretical resources that will be used in the subsequent chapters. Chapter Two examines the 1633 edition of Arden of Faversham and the question of whether the action in the illustration pertains to the play or to a broadside ballad that appeared in the same year. The third chapter provides a theoretical analysis of the performance of violence in the woodcut for The Spanish Tragedy, and how emphatic elements in the image may demonstrate the influence of theatrical performance upon the artist. Chapter Four explores the relationship between the title page of Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay and the concept of celebrity in relation to the Tarltonesque clown character who dominates the action of the image. Chapter Five considers the problematic relationship between theatre, politics and satire in the competing engraved title pages for A Game at Chess. The conclusion draws together the findings, and points to other aspects of early modern print and theatre cultures to which they pertain.Item Critical Techno-dramaturgy: Mobilizing Embodied Perception in Intermedial Performance(University of Waterloo, 2016-02-16) Fernandez, StephenThis 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 and technology. Drawing upon the work of scholars in the fields of new media, performance studies, and the philosophy of technology, I argue that intermedial performance artists reinvigorate the role of the human body in performance by mobilizing embodiment as a techno-dramaturgical strategy for shaping the audience members’ perception of human-machine interaction. Chapter One surveys the history of performance and technology from the ancient Greek theatre to twentieth-century performance, with particular emphasis on the conceptual significance of techne and poiesis in dramatic theatre. Chapter Two examines the theories of intermediality in performance as well as the co-evolutionary relationship between human beings and technicity in order to delineate the analytical and dramaturgical potential of an original conceptual framework known as critical techno-dramaturgy. Chapter Three explores the interplay between embodiment, technology, and space in intermedial performance and its effects on the audience members’ awareness of their embodied existence as they navigate the cityscape with bicycles, handheld computers, and mobile phones. Chapter Four investigates the intersection of performance and techno-anxiety by looking at how intelligent machines that appear to perform autonomously might affect the audience members’ perception of these anthropomorphic technological agents in relation to their own bodies. Chapter Five examines how the construction of the “cyborg” as both a conceptual metaphor for and a material instantiation of human-machine “fusion” could impact the prosthetic relations between persons with disabilities and the technological devices that they employ in intermedial performance. Finally, Chapter Six looks at my involvement in the production of an original creative project that uses critical techno-dramaturgy as a strategy for shaping the audience members’ perception of the complicity between digital media (particularly video technology) and the mediation of death.Item Critical Tools: Using Technology to Augment the Process of Literary Analysis(University of Waterloo, 2016-09-29) Bradley, AdamWhen 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 with the reason; the unstabilizing subject is normally called the imagination”. Since the nineteen eighties, with the institutionalization of Humanities Computing research, there have been attempts at combining humanistic questions with technological innovations, and by extension, scientific concerns. Within the digital humanities there is a tension between these two positions that often results in the neglect of the human analyst and an elevated use of technology when applied to tool design. This can be seen in the current trend of distant reading, which is the batch processing and analysis of text corpora using machines. This approach stands in stark contrast to close reading which traditionally in English studies has entailed looking at individual words and their relation to a text as a whole in terms of not what the text means, but how it means. In this thesis I argue that the bridge between technology and literary criticism can be built using digital tools as long as those tools allow access to both the reason of science and the imagination of art. I present four digital projects that each investigate this problem in a novel way: (1) I use an algorithmic approach to investigate T.S. Eliot’s own theoretical position in terms of his diction, (2) I designed and developed a visualization of the English language, LDNA, that can be recovered back into the original text, (3) I conducted a study with 14 expert literary critics to analyze their current methods and used these results to design a tool, MetaTation, that can be integrated into the literary critical process, and (4) I also demonstrated how evidence-based testing of literary theory can be done in the context of Engineering writing by conducting a study that tests the feminist theory of false universals in human-computer interaction literature. I use these projects to present a hybrid approach that answers the question: How do we reconcile the specificity and human dependent nature of an unstable and imaginative close reading with the historic breadth and reason of a distant reading approach?Item Debasing Dissent: The Role of The News Media in the Devaluation of Black Canadian Activism(University of Waterloo, 2020-10-28) Irwin, AshleyMy 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 the discourse used to frame three instances of Black Canadian uprising, the 1969 Sir George Williams Affair, the Yonge Street Uprising of 1992, and the 2016 Black Lives Matter sit-in at the Toronto Pride parade, in the Toronto Star, the Montreal Gazette, the Globe and Mail, and the National Post. Using critical discourse analysis as a methodology and critical race theory as a theoretical lens, I argue that these newspapers utilize racist discourses by attributing the presence of activism to Black cultural and biological deficiencies. The journalists covering the Sir George Williams Affair use xenophobic discourse and raise moral alarm in order to blame the uprising on West Indian students as well as international communist organizations and the Black Panthers. These discourses situate activism as a foreign import in order to disavow the existence of racism on Canadian soil. The coverage of the Yonge Street Uprising utilizes the discourse of the minimization of racism and the discourse of dichotomies to deny the existence of racism by blaming activism on the supposed Black predisposition toward criminality. Those covering the Black Lives Matter sit-in at the Toronto Pride parade utilize devolutionary discourse, the discourse of irrationality, and the discourse of immorality to devalue activist endeavours. These discourses portray Black activists as evolutionarily inferior, unintelligent, and immoral. I historicize, conceptualize, and analyze the discourses listed above arguing that Canadian journalists recycle racist ideology that once justified and sustained the transatlantic slave trade. Exposing these ideologies will force a necessary revision of the harmful national narratives that perpetuate the oppression of Black Canadians by disavowing the existence of racism.