The thesis titled Putting Chopin and the Rez Together: Multicultural Features in Tomson Highway's Work focuses on the work of renowned Native Canadian playwright, novelist, and musician Tomson Highway. The paper analyses those features of his writing and music that express the idea of multiculturalism and hybridity. It discusses the nature of the characters in his work and the image of the central character of Native mythology, the trickster. The analysis of dramatic techniques and music shows the way Highway combines his Euro-Canadian education and Native sensibility. Highway supports and promotes the notion of multiculturalism by his work. It has helped him to find personal as well as creative independence.

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Taking the works of William Gibson as its point of focus, this thesis considers cyberpunk’s expansion from an emphatically literary moment in the mid 1980s into a broader multimedia cultural phenomenon. It examines the representation of racial differences, and the formulation of global economic spaces and flows which structure the reception and production of cultural practices. These developments are construed in relation to ongoing debates around Japan’s identity and otherness in terms of both deviations from and congruities with the West (notably America). To account for these developments, this thesis adopts a theoretical framework informed by both postmodernism as the “cultural dominant” of late capitalism (Jameson), and orientalism, those discursive structures which produce the reified polarities of East versus West (Said). Cyberpunk thus exhibits the characteristics of an orientalised postmodernism, as it imagines a world in which multinational corporations characterised as Japanese zaibatsu control global economies, and the excess of accumulated garbage is figured in the trope of gomi. It is also postmodernised orientalism, in its nostalgic reconstruction of scenes from the residue of imperialism, its deployment of figures of “cross-ethnic representation” (Chow) like the Eurasian, and its expressions of a purely fantasmatic experience of the Orient, as in the evocation of cyberspace. In distinction from modern or Saidean orientalism, postmodern orientalism not only allows but is characterized by reciprocal causality. This describes uneven, paradoxical, interconnected and mutually implicated cultural transactions at the threshold of East-West relations. The thesis explores this by first examining cyberpunk’s unremarked relationship with countercultural formations (rock music), practices (drugs) and manifestations of Oriental otherness in popular culture. The emphasis in the remainder of the thesis shifts towards how cyberpunk maps new technologies onto physical and imaginative “bodies” and geographies: the figuration of the cyborg, prosthetic interventions, and the evolution of cyberspace in tandem with multimedia innovations such as videogames. Cyberpunk then can best be understood as a conjunction of seemingly disparate experiences: on the one hand the postmodern dislocations and vertiginous moments of estrangement offset by instances of intense connectivity in relation to the virtual, the relocation to the “distanceless home” of cyberspace. As such it is an ever-expanding phenomenon which has been productively fused with other youth-culture media, and one with specifically Japanese features (anime, visual kei, and virtual idols).

<p>The aim of this thesis is to examine the impact that clothing has in Margaret Atwood’s novel <em>The Blind Assassin</em> from 2000. The essay begins with a brief overview of how clothing has been acknowledged in different areas of research. The overview leads up to the conclusion that fashion, as well as clothing in large, has been overly ignored as a potentially fruitful subject of academic status. This is much due to the fact that fashion is traditionally regarded as being a classically feminine subject, as well as it can be said to be a result of fashion’s very elusive character. In the analysis of the novel the text first discusses the role that clothing has in a societal perspective as a means of power, partly in relation to Girard’s erotic triangle, as well as in relation to gender and Atwood’s dystopian parallel story. The essay then focuses on the naked body, which is found to be non-existing in Atwood’s novel, and goes on to discuss the suggestive qualities that clothing is given in the novel. In the concluding part, the results of the research is summed up and I am able to draw the conclusion that clothing has a great significance in <em>The Blind Assassin</em>, together with the notion that literary criticism is in need of a discourse that acknowledges clothing and fashion theory as academic subjects.</p>

With its perennial interest in the seemingly ordinary lives of small-town people, Alice Munro’s fiction displays a deceptively simple surface reality that on closer scrutiny reveals intricate levels of unexpected complexity about the fundamentals of human experience: love, choice, mortality, faith and the force of language. This study takes as its main purpose the exploration of Munro’s stories in terms of the intricacy of emotions in the face of commonplace events of life and their emerging possibilities. I argue that the ontological levels of fiction and reality remain in the realm of the real; these levels exist and merge as the possibilities of each other. Munro’s realism is explored in terms of its connection to possibilities that arise out of a particular type of fatality. The phenomenon of possibility permeates Munro’s stories. An investigation of this phenomenon shows a curious paradox between possibility and necessity. In order to discuss the complexity of this paradox I introduce the temporal/spatial concept of possibility-space and notions of the fatal. I describe the space that materializes in the phenomenal field between text and reader, and where the constitution of possibility becomes visible. This is typically seen in the rupture that is the event, where the event in itself offers a moment of release and epistemic certainty to the characters. I argue that through this release and certainty the characters obtain a radical, audacious sense of freedom and intensity of life. The stories examined have been grouped in a conceptual order that brings into view the central qualities of Munro’s fiction such as lightness, newness and sameness. These qualities are related to the act of recognition; they are elaborated through readings of a large number of stories from all the collections, including three stories published recently in The New Yorker. The dissertation concludes by highlighting these qualities in the tour de force “Post and Beam.” I argue finally that Alice Munro’s fiction recognizes life as possibility in a moment when it shows itself in its own remarkable sameness.

The aim of this thesis is to examine the impact that clothing has in Margaret Atwood’s novel The Blind Assassin from 2000. The essay begins with a brief overview of how clothing has been acknowledged in different areas of research. The overview leads up to the conclusion that fashion, as well as clothing in large, has been overly ignored as a potentially fruitful subject of academic status. This is much due to the fact that fashion is traditionally regarded as being a classically feminine subject, as well as it can be said to be a result of fashion’s very elusive character. In the analysis of the novel the text first discusses the role that clothing has in a societal perspective as a means of power, partly in relation to Girard’s erotic triangle, as well as in relation to gender and Atwood’s dystopian parallel story. The essay then focuses on the naked body, which is found to be non-existing in Atwood’s novel, and goes on to discuss the suggestive qualities that clothing is given in the novel. In the concluding part, the results of the research is summed up and I am able to draw the conclusion that clothing has a great significance in The Blind Assassin, together with the notion that literary criticism is in need of a discourse that acknowledges clothing and fashion theory as academic subjects.

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This thesis explores contemporary (post-1980) British constructions of Canada or "Canadianness" as these have been conceived through the reading and reception of English-Canadian literary texts in Britain. I am arguing that in recent years Canada has been construed in Britain as an ideal, and furthermore, that this idealization has taken place in response to a perceived cultural and socio-economic malaise within contemporary British society. I use a combined postcolonial and object-relations approach to discuss the psychic investment involved in this construction of Canada as a post-imperial role model. These readers engage with the Canadian object as a sort of phantasy space, projecting onto Canada a self-image which expresses the British desire for postcolonial diversity. Canada thereby enables the dodging of the quagmires of imperiled national identity (and personal subjectivity), for its diffuse and decentralized makeup is balanced by an essentialized notion of cultural and national uniqueness. Throughout I take issue with the ways Canada tends to get celebrated in these writings as a postmodern ideal of unproblematized pluralism and endless diffusion, knowable by the sheer extent to which it seems to defy collective identity. These celebrations of Canada as a new (postmodern) Eden succeed only in emptying the Canadian domain of anything remotely contestatory or political. Indeed, this vision of Canada utilizes a limited version of postmodernism as an idealistic play of pluralities without any sense of accompanying political strife or contradiction.

Key studies of apocalypse in previous years have consciously and unconsciously understood the genre in terms of its paradigmatic consistency across examples. This emphasis points out valuable similarities among a wide range of texts, but also diminishes the significance of a text’s locally and historically rooted ways of depicting experience. This study reflects an effort to rebalance the meaning of apocalypse by looking at a specific locale – the North American West Coast. I examine popular, critical, and literary representations of the West Coast to trace out the unique ways that they configure regional identities. Ultimately, I make the case for site-specific criticism, which values provisional, locally rooted terminologies and tropes for analyzing cultural problems. / Thesis (Ph.D, English) -- Queen's University, 2011-01-26 14:00:17.35