This thesis examines how use of the Stanislavski System and Alexander Technique were combined with views on classical mythology and modern psychology to create a layered portrayal of Phèdre, in Ted ...Hughes’ free-verse translation of Racine’s Phèdre.
The ambition of this dissertation is to articulate a theory of affect that works well with the innovative poetics of four important contemporary feminist poets. The introduction, "Reading for Affect ...in Contemporary Feminist Poetry," gives an overview of literary affect studies and proposes a way of reading for affect in poetry. The second chapter, "Black Laughter in the Poetry of Harryette Mullen," approaches laughter as a form of affect and explores the ambiguity of that affect through a reading of Mullen's major collections of poetry, all of which employ puns and other double-meanings to comic effect, even while commenting upon serious issues of race and gender. Chapter three, "Language and Affect in the Poetry of Leslie Scalapino," reads for affect in selected works of this Language poet, arguing that despite semantic indeterminacy, affect flourishes. In the fourth chapter, "Lisa Robertson's Feminist Poetic Landscapes," I argue that in several of her major works, Robertson challenges the figure/ground division to create a poetic subjectivity that is a feminist model of interrelatedness. And finally, in the last chapter, "SAD in the Anthropocene: Brenda Hillman's Ecopoetics of Affect," I further explore the ways an affective poetics can develop an ecological subjectivity that is more sensitive to human interrelations with the land. The chapters are organized to emphasize what I see as a trend toward ecopoetics in these works. The ethics of attention to and respect for difference, highly developed in this feminist writing, lends itself very well to a consideration of affective and ecological interrelations. Together, these chapters apply an affective interpretive method to extended studies of the work of four contemporary feminist poets.
Forgive My Architecture is a collection of poetry that traces the structure of identity, religion, family, adolescence, love, and sexuality, seeking ultimately to renovate or demolish these ...constructs. At the foundation of these poems are women and other marginalized voices who wish to reconcile the anatomy of their desires with a conflicting exterior world. Led by the possibility of acceptance and understanding, these speakers strip their walls to expose the ambiguity ofhistory, the instability of safety, and the forfeiture of faith. Only through the act of dismantling can they relinquish themselves and rebuild.
The Mistress of Ceremonies: A Creative and Cultural Exploration of Contemporary "Madness" is a critical and creative project which interrogates cultural assumptions about the binary between sanity ...and insanity. My novel, The Mistress of Ceremonies, tells the story of Moni Abramowitz and Walter Spinks, two individuals who are suffering from acute mental illness in the fictionalised Umor Springs, Massachusetts. Moni is a nineteenth century hysteric living in the twenty-first century while Walter, plagued by a variety of DSM-diagnosed disorders cultivates his madness against the external factors of contemporary society. Over the course of the novel Moni and Walter explore their madness through an interweaving of temporal and narrative space to meet in a dystopic middle. While Moni’s construction is influenced by a historicized reinterpretation of ‘hysteria’, Walter is a product of the pharmaceutical industry. The novel is followed by a critical overview and assessment of the key sources, concepts and methodologies that informed the work. The discussion touches on the seminal work of Foucault and Freud to understand how terms from mental health such as ‘paranoia’ and ‘schizophrenia’ have become cultural/national metaphors to describe prevailing movements in contemporary American fiction. The thesis ends with a discussion which draws together the critical and creative components of the thesis together to demonstrate the ways in which this project seeks to make a new intervention.
In Be Good, Sweet Maid: The Trials of Dorothy Joudrie (1999), Audrey Andrews recounts the life and trial of Dorothy Joudrie, a so-called wealthy socialite who was arrested in Calgary in 1995 for ...attempting to murder her estranged husband after decades of domestic abuse. Andrews tells Joudrie’s story in the form of a semi-auto/biographical text that quotes other scholarly and creative literary works in an intertextual dialogue about violence against women, post-World War II gender socialization, and the “battered women syndrome” defence. This thesis takes this highly referential dialogue as its starting point, and then extends Andrews’ cultural work by tracing a genealogy of colonialism in Canadian domestic violence laws with the help of selected intertexts – including Yvonne Johnson’s Stolen Life: Journey of a Cree Woman (1998), the trial of Angelique Lavallee, and Lorena Bobbitt’s infamous case. First, I source the epigraphs that Andrews strategically places at the start of each chapter and discern the layer of meaning that these external texts bring to Joudrie’s story in order to raise questions about how Andrews rearticulates the work of others and the politics of such a rearticulation. Second, I similarly frame Joudrie’s 1995 trial as a referential and intertextual discourse based in precedent established by the Supreme Court in 1990 when it ruled that expert testimony on the “battered woman syndrome” was admissible in the R. v. Lavallee case (Shaffer 1). This allows me to consider a consequence of the ruling often overlooked in feminist literature: due to the fact that the original defendant, Angelique Lavallee, was a Métis woman whose identity was erased in the courtroom and in case law, subsequent trials employing the “battered woman syndrome” defence repeat settler relations entrenched in colonial violence. Third, I expose how representations can fail by thinking through what Stephen Couser calls the auto/bio/ethics of life writing, which reveals the limits of Canadian laws and literatures. Ultimately, this discussion generates questions about who is considered human under the law and how life writing might re-imagine the “reasonable” human in more just and compassionate ways.
