http://hdl.handle.net/1974/773 2013-06-19T13:53:53Z http://hdl.handle.net/1974/8082 Title: Compassion and its Contiguities: Witness Poetry and Metonymic Reponse Authors: Tracy, DALE Abstract: I read witness poetry as a model of response to suffering. Compassion is feeling together with another. Compassion is, then, opposed to empathy’s feeling as another. Compassion can be better understood through the witness poetry that privileges metonymical relationships in which readers are contiguously positioned in relationship to a speaker. This emphasis on relationship can be contrasted to the collapse of relationship in identification in which a reader reads as though he or she is the lyric I, the poetic voice, rather than a listener. I discuss this reader-as-listener in contrast to the trauma studies-influenced discourse surrounding witness poetry, a discourse which focuses on indexical poetic evidence of a poet’s wounds and the transferability of the poet’s trauma to readers. Compassionate response, as demonstrated by this poetry, is premised on a recognition of one’s intimacy with or distance from that which one witnesses. Distance is not synonymous with disengagement, but rather with the space of relationship through which connection and consideration is possible. All intimacy involves some distance; the two are not opposites, but a continuum. Witness involves waiting: response derives from the time of relation through which it might form. This waiting has reflection as its retrospective partner. Together, they form commemoration, which brings reflection into future and communal celebration and remembrance. Com-memoration is linked to com-passion in this communal element. My project engages witness poetry as a communal form inviting feeling in community, response to widespread suffering, and the establishment of relationship and connection. Description: Thesis (Ph.D, English) -- Queen's University, 2013-06-18 10:21:39.793 2013-06-18T04:00:00Z http://hdl.handle.net/1974/8076 Title: Animals, Animality, and Violence: Reading Across Species in J. M. Coetzee's Writing Authors: Denike, Jaime Abstract: This thesis examines the writings of Nobel Laureate J. M. Coetzee in order to explore pressing issues that have emerged in literary, philosophical, and theoretical approaches to animal studies. These include animals as disputed objects in claims to territorial, national, and cultural belonging; and the use of animality to manage cultural difference and mobilize identity-based violence. I investigate the roles that hierarchical discourses of species, and the rhetorics of animality that mobilize them, play in cultural and social inscription, cross-cultural conflict, and cultures of violence in the writing of J.M. Coetzee. My dissertation provides historical, material, and cultural context and specificity to the entanglements of race, gender, and culture with the rhetoric and hermeneutics of species, by demonstrating how colonial, Enlightenment, and traditional humanist thought mobilizes speciesism for the cultural work of violence. Intervening in assumptions about the irreconcilability of animal- and human-endorsing approaches to animal studies, I demonstrate that human and non-human animals alike are mutually implicated in conceptual economies that employ animality as a trope; and in the material logistics that mobilize discourses that surround nonhuman animals to do violence to human and nonhuman animals. Coetzee embeds questions about what nonhuman animals mean, or more precisely are made to mean, firmly within the broader politics of interpreting and recognizing alterity, regardless of species, while asking how animals might have a place—in our worlds, in our thought, and in our interventionist strategies—as more than means to human ends. Coetzee’s fictional and critical engagements with nonhuman animals, I argue, comprise a major reassessment of the codes of, and struggles concerning, human and nonhuman animal correspondence and difference. Highlighting the complex interrelations between the cross-cultural violence that mobilizes the rhetoric of species and its attendant violations of nonhuman animal life, Coetzee challenges speciesist schemata that give nonhuman animals symbolic and material currency by imagining how we might read across species differently, in ways that affirm, rather than master, nonhuman animal life. Description: Thesis (Ph.D, English) -- Queen's University, 2013-06-04 16:52:47.618 2013-06-12T04:00:00Z http://hdl.handle.net/1974/7851 Title: Colonial Anxiety and Primitivism in Modernist Fiction: Woolf, Freud, Forster, Stein Authors: Kalkhove, MARIEKE Abstract: From W.H. Auden’s The Age of Anxiety to Sigmund Freud’s Civilization and Its Discontents, modernists have frequently attested to the anxiety permeating members of modern civilisation. While critics have treated anxiety as a consequence of the historical circumstances of the modernist period—two World Wars and the disintegration of European empires—my aim is to view anxiety in both a psychoanalytical and political light and investigate modernist anxiety as a narrative ploy that diagnoses the modern condition. Defining modernist anxiety as feelings of fear and alienation that reveal the uncanny relation between self and ideological state apparatuses which themselves suffer from trauma, perversion, and neurosis—I focus on the works of four key modernist writers—Sigmund Freud, Virginia Woolf, E.M. Forster, and Gertrude Stein. These authors have repeatedly constructed the mind as an open system, making the psyche one of the sites most vulnerable to the power of colonial ideology but also the modernist space par excellence to narrate the building and falling of empire. While the first part of my dissertation investigates the neurosis of post-war London in Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway, the second part of my thesis discusses the perverse demands of the colonial system in Forster’s A Passage to India and Woolf’s The Waves, arguing that Woolf and Forster extend Freud’s understanding of repetition compulsion by demonstrating that the colonial system derives a “perverse” pleasure from repeating its own impossible demands. The concluding section of my dissertation discusses Woolf and Stein’s queer primitivism as the antidote to anxiety and the transcendence of perversity. My dissertation revives Freud’s role in the modernist project: Freud not only provides avant-garde writers with a theory of consciousness, but his construction of the fragmented psyche—a construction which had come to dominate modernist renditions of internality by the early-twentieth century—functions as a political stratagem for an imperial critique. Description: Thesis (Ph.D, English) -- Queen's University, 2013-03-11 16:48:57.865 2013-03-13T04:00:00Z http://hdl.handle.net/1974/7680 Title: Ethics and Love in the Aesthetics of Alice Munro Authors: McIntyre, Timothy Abstract: Whether classified as realist, modernist, or postmodernist, the fiction of Alice Munro combines a strong mimetic impulse with a recognition of the limitations of mimesis. This dissertation examines the ethical dimensions of the balance between mimesis and the recognition of its limits. Chapter one provides an overview of Munro scholarship and brings particular attention to the manner in which this balance between mimesis and metafictional self-reflexivity has been analyzed since the earliest days of Munro criticism. Chapter two draws on the Munro scholarship of Naomi Morgenstern, Robert McGill, and Robert Thacker to argue that Munro’s fiction is connected, though not reducible to, her experience of reality. This connection, however imperfect, gives her aesthetics its ethical weight, particularly when the subject of her writing is the human Other. Munro’s combination of a sense of alterity with a powerful feeling of reality reflects a desire to understand and represent the Other without compromising the Other’s radical alterity. The tension that arises from this desire can find a resolution in an aesthetics of love akin to eros as described by Emmanuel Levinas and refigured by Luce Irigaray: a representation, inscribed in each story’s form, of the possibility of a subject-to-subject relationship that preserves difference and ends in mutual fecundation. Chapter three compares the ethical vision in “The Ottawa Valley,” which ends on a moment of continuing, uncompromised alterity, with the feeling of love and catharsis produced in “The Moons of Jupiter.” Chapter four reads “Material” as an oblique gesture at the possibility that literature can open a relationship to the Other that is a kind love. Chapter five examines “Deep-Holes” as an attempt to reconcile the ethical tensions inherent in writing by representing a collaborative mode of meaning-making linked to love and fecundity. This dissertation also, however, follows Derek Attridge and Munro herself in observing some distinction between the self-Other dynamic as a face-to-face relation and this dynamic as a problem of literary representation, even if the two cannot be neatly separated. Description: Thesis (Ph.D, English) -- Queen's University, 2012-12-04 20:14:50.513 2012-12-06T05:00:00Z