Orientation Device is a tool for understanding the other towards recognizing alternative possibilities, for care and compassion, for expanding our culturally and politically bounded mindset, a tool of vital nausea and questioning compulsory heterosexuality. The work is a series of augmented reality (AR) experiences for mobile device that allow the audience to participate in documentary queer performances in any private or public setting. These immersive experiences challenge our perception of space. The LGBTQIA+ community is often disoriented within heteronormative spaces, and this work reverses that dichotomy by disorienting the audience. As a cisgender creator, I invite queer performers, artists, poets, and thinkers who express their identity in their creative practices. As the AR medium is widely distributable, I want to give the participants the potential opportunity to present themselves to a wide international audience through the poetics of augmented reality and documentary video holograms. / Master of Fine Arts / ORIENTATION DEVICE: poiesis of documentary volumetric video for augmented reality; location-aware interactive mise-en-scène; applied queer phenomenology; the potential of procedural worldmaking in the future

The non-fiction introduction to The Wyvern’s Tale: A Thought Experiment in Bakhtinian Dual Chronotope Occupation documents the evolution of the novel, The Wyvern’s Tale, from the ideas that inspired it to its current incarnation as a full-length novel intended for an adult audience. It comprises an explanation of the novel’s main concept, Bakhtinian dual chronotope occupation, as well as an idea-focused account of the creative-writing process. Detailed in the introduction’s theoretical premise is the relationship between Mikhail Bakhtin’s theories of chronotope and the carnivalesque and the ideal of the divided union in Chalcedonian Christology. This relationship revolves around the state of existing in two time-spaces at once. The novel, The Wyvern’s Tale, explores this dual existence imaginatively using the setting of parallel worlds – the every-day world and a fictional world called Wyvern – as well as a protagonist, who functions in the fictional world as a Christ-figure. Particular thematic emphasis is placed on differing perceptions of truth and reality, and on the transformative power of costumes. The novel’s outcome, dependent on the reader’s decision as to whether dual chronotope occupation is possible or impossible, is respectively either hopeful or tragic. It attempts to reflect the outcome of the life and death of Christ depending on whether his co-existence as God and man was real or imagined.

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What can 15th century France and heavy metal have in common? In Heavy Metal Humor, Gary Powell explores metal culture through the work of Mikael Bakhtin‘s “carnivalesque theory.” Describing the practice of inverting commonly understood notions of respectability and the increasing attempts to normalize them, Bakhtin argues that carnivals in Francois Rabelais’ work illustrate a sacrilegious uprising by the peasant classes during carnival days against dogmatic aristocrats. Powell asserts that Rabelais’ work describes cartoonish carnivals that continue in as exaggerated themes and tropes into other literary styles, such as comedy and horror that ultimately inform modern-day metal culture. To highlight the similarities of Bakhtin’s interpretation of Rabelais’ work to modern-day metal culture, Powell draw parallels to between Bakhtin’s carnivalesque theory and metal culture with two different, exemplary “humorous” metal performances, GWAR and Anal Cunt. Powell chooses “humorous” metal groups because, to achieve their humor, they exaggerate tropes, and behaviors in metal culture. To this end, Powell explores metal culture through GWAR, a costumed band who sprays their audience with fake body fluids as they decapitate effigies. He points out examples of Rabelais’ work which Bakhtin uses to describe carnivalesque tropes, and threads them to modern-day metal culture. Powell then indicates how carnivalesque performances amplify with Anal Cunt, a “satirical” hateful, grindcore group. In the band’s performance which is both serious and humorous at once, Anal Cunt draws on several carnivalesque behaviors. To dissect this band’s performance, Powell augments Bakhtin’s carnivalesque theory with Richard Schechner’s theory of “dark play” and Johan Huizinga’s “play communities” to more describe and illustrate why some aspects of modern-day metal culture do not match Bakhtin’s theory based on medieval French literature. However, carnivalesque humor becomes ambiguous and social and political problems arise as it escalates. As disrespectability is promoted, social and political tensions surface. Countering Bakhtin’s utopian notion of carnivalesque uprising, Powell highlights how socio-political turmoil presents itself in carnivalesque performance by referring to examples of confusion and concern regarding racism and sexism, something left unexplored in Bakhtin’s work. Powell suggests expanding and modernizing Bakhtin’s carnival could open pathways toward solutions to carnival culture’s socio-political ills.

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While most research in King studies focuses on Stephen King’s contribution to the horror genre, this thesis approaches King as a participant in American popular culture, specifically exploring the role the author-protagonist plays in his writing about writing. I have chosen Bourdieu’s theoretical construct of habitus through which to focus my analysis into not only King’s narratives, but also into his non-fiction and paratextual material: forewords, introductions, afterwords, interviews, reviews, articles, editorials and unpublished archival documents. This has facilitated my investigation into the literary field that King participates within, and represents in his fiction, in order to provide insight into his perception of the high/low cultural divide, the autonomous and heteronomous principles of production and the ways in which position-taking within that field might be effected. This approach has resulted in a study that combines the methods of literary analysis and book history; it investigates both the literary construct and the tangible page. King’s part autobiography, part how-to guide, On Writing (2000), illustrates the rewards such an approach yields, by indicating four main ways in which his perception of, and participation in, the literary field manifests: the art/money dialectic, the dangers inherent in producing genre fiction, the representation of art produced according to the heteronomous principle and the relationship between popular culture and the Academy. The texts which form the focus of the case studies in this thesis, The Shining, Misery, The Dark Half, Bag of Bones and Lisey’s Story demonstrate that there exists a dramatisation of King’s habitus at the level of the narrative which is centred on the figure of the author-protagonist. I argue that the actions of the characters Jack Torrance, Paul Sheldon, Thad Beaumont, Mike Noonan and Scott Landon, and the situations they find themselves in, offer an expression of King’s perception of the literary field, an expression which benefits from being situated within the context of his paratextually articulated pronouncements of authorship, publication and cultural production.

Mémoire numérisé par la Division de la gestion de documents et des archives de l'Université de Montréal.

La rencontre du théâtre et du carnaval est aussi ancienne que le carnaval lui-même. D’une part, les cérémonies et les comportements collectifs possèdent, en propre, une dimension spectaculaire ; d’autre part, les jeux dramatiques font partie intégrante du rituel. Dans la France d’Ancien Régime, les réjouissances du carnaval sont un temps fort du calendrier, qui occupe toute la société pendant plusieurs semaines, des Rois au Carême. Les comédies créées pendant cette période, au Théâtre-Italien, à la Comédie-Française, à la Foire Saint-Germain, se rattachent explicitement à la coutume et s’insèrent dans son cycle cérémoniel. Plus largement, tirant parti de cette proximité calendaire, les dramaturges recourent au langage symbolique du carnaval, à celui du charivari, pour inventer un système de représentation du réel qui en offre un mode d’intelligibilité spécifique. Une langue pleine d’équivoques scabreuses et de saillies ordurières, des lazzis outrés et obscènes, un univers fantaisiste et bouffon, des personnages extravagants et burlesques : les modèles comiques qui se développent, de 1680 à 1720, sont à rattacher à la culture carnavalesque et à son imaginaire mythico-rituel. Les croyances et les pratiques symboliques innervent la création dramatique et participent à la construction de son sens, en lien étroit avec le contexte historique dans lequel s’inscrivent les œuvres. Il convient de restituer à ce théâtre la dimension anthropologique qui est la sienne, si l’on veut accéder à sa raison esthétique. La comédie de mœurs offre alors un nouveau visage : représentant la société contemporaine comme un monde à l’envers sur lequel règnent des souverains parodiques, elle revêt des enjeux idéologiques et possède une portée politique. Parallèlement, c’est aussi le concept critique de « carnavalesque » qui apparaît sous un jour inédit. / The meeting of theatre and carnival is as old as carnival itself. On the one hand, ceremonies and collective behaviour have a spectacular dimension in themselves; on the other hand, dramatic performance is an integral part of the ritual. In the early modern France, celebrating carnival was a key moment of the year, and kept the whole society busy for several weeks from Epiphany (or Twelfth Night) to Lent. The comedies created during that period at the Théâtre-Italien, at the Comédie-Française or at the Saint-Germain Fair, are explicitly related to the custom and fit into its ceremonial cycle. More generally, playwrights took advantage of the calendar proximity and used the symbolic language of carnival, that of charivari, to invent a system of representation of reality that offers a specific mode of intelligibility. A language full of lewd ambiguities and bawdy sallies, offensive, obscene lazzi, a fanciful, farcical universe, extravagant and burlesque characters: the comic models that developed, from 1680 to 1720, are to be related to the carnivalesque culture and to its mythical and ritual imaginary world. Symbolic beliefs and practices pervade the dramatic creation of that time and partake in the construction of its meaning, in close connection with the historical context within which the works are framed. It is necessary to restore their anthropological dimension to these plays to grasp their aesthetic purpose. The comedy of morals after Molière then offers a new face: as the plays represent the contemporary society as a world that has been turned upside down and that is ruled by parodic monarchs, they tackle ideological issues and have a political significance. It is also the critical concept of "carnivalesque" that appears in a new light.