Anxious Preoccupations: Unearthing the Affective Dimensions of Settler Anxiety in Canadian Literature
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Authors
Skrynsky, Hannah Mclean
Date
2024-10-24
Type
thesis
Language
eng
Keyword
Canadian literature , Indigenous literature , Settler colonial studies , Affect theory , Nationalism , National mythologies , Belonging , Identity
Alternative Title
Abstract
This dissertation proposes that settler anxiety is a founding feature of Canadian literature and its criticism. Combining twentieth-century theories of anxiety with contemporary theory from settler colonial studies, I test this proposition by locating settler anxiety within the literary nationalism of 1970s Canada, demonstrating that anxiety about unbelonging on Indigenous lands undergirds, but is simultaneously obfuscated by, Northrop Frye’s conception of the garrison mentality and Margaret Atwood’s survivor/victim paradigm in The Bush Garden: Essays on the Canadian Imagination (1971) and Survival: A Thematic Guide to Canadian Literature (1972), respectively. Deploying relational approaches to questions of settler identity and belonging, I complicate Frye and Atwood’s containment of indigeneity within the realm of the symbolic by contextualizing their interventions alongside contemporaneous writing by sovereigntist activists George Manuel (Secwepemc) and Harold Cardinal (Cree). I then apply this critical rethinking to a close reading of settler anxiety in Margaret Laurence’s novel The Diviners (1974).
The project argues for the necessity of returning to Frye and Atwood’s theories of Canadian identity because they have proven foundational to the development of Canadian literature as a field of study and its pedagogical engagement across secondary and postsecondary curricula, thereby registering significant impact that, I contend, reproduces the power dynamics of settler colonialism through Canadian literary studies. By returning to anxieties that undergird these theories, this dissertation rethinks settler affect both historically and in the present moment of supposed reconciliation to interrogate cultural processes that normalize settler attachments to colonial structures of power. In doing so, I endeavour to activate the settler anxieties of today in the direction of social justice and decolonial change.
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ProQuest PhD and Master's Theses International Dissemination Agreement
Intellectual Property Guidelines at Queen's University
Copying and Preserving Your Thesis
This publication is made available by the authority of the copyright owner solely for the purpose of private study and research and may not be copied or reproduced except as permitted by the copyright laws without written authority from the copyright owner.
Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International