This thesis examines William Blake’s conceptions of time and space in the light of the philosophies of Hinduism and Islam. In order to perform this analysis, source material, often from rare and neglected texts, is utilized to examine Blake’s possible unorthodox influences. The analysis of influences takes a three-pronged track: literary, symbolic, and linguistic; Blake’s possible knowledge of Orientalist translations; the symbols in his poetry, prose, and paintings are analyzed; and his potential knowledge of major Orientalist languages is also examined. Once this has been examined in sufficient depth, an excavation of Blake’s views on time and space is then undertaken. This analysis of Blake’s philosophical perspectives utilizes a comparative phenomenological approach in order to show their similarity to the perspectives of the Hindu Vedanta and Ismaili Islam. Throughout this analysis, I aim to demonstrate both that Blake’s views on space are inherently mystical (space as limitless and unbound by the physical universe), and that his view on time, having a similarity to that of the Platonists, views Eternity as the one true reality.

Virginia Woolf once remarked that, “[t]here is no reason to think that the form of the epic ... suit[s] a woman any more than the [masculine] sentence” (Woolf 84). This thesis represents an attempt to explore what the epic genre, as imagined and written by women, might look like in regards to the verse of fellow women poets Felicia Hemans and Elizabeth Barrett Browning. Despite the persistent critical misconception that women’s poetry of the Romantic and Victorian periods is comprised mainly of light, lyric verse and tends to lack that “great effort” – for example, the epic poem – which often appears in the work of their male contemporaries, this thesis will argue conversely that Hemans and Barrett Browning do assume certain aspects of traditional epic poetry – a genre “almost coterminous” with masculinity (Schweizer 1) – in their work, while also managing to transform the genre in order that their work might successfully embody a more feminine perspective. The first chapter of the thesis examines the ways in which these two women poets are able to bridge the private and public spheres by transforming the quintessential role of the female poet as record-keeper into that of the poet as prophet and visionary in their political poetry. The two following chapters will highlight the ways in which both Hemans and Barrett Browning remodel the epic form in order to draw attention to the female voice (chapter two) and to examine new and unconventional prototypes of female heroinism, for example the pioneering female artist and the militant mother (chapter three). With strong ties to a masculine tradition of epic, yet incorporating aspects of femininity hitherto foreign – perhaps even inimical – to the traditional conception of the genre, female epic, while admittedly something of a hybrid, arguably represents a distinctive genre in its own right and one which certainly merits more critical attention in the future.

This thesis examines how context in Derridean signature theory is taboo and underutilized, and calls signature theory to embrace the contaminating mark of context. Signature theory, as proposed by Jacques Derrida and Peggy Kamuf, offers a mere glimpse into Romanticism’s strained relationship with the signature, with a close reading limited to Rousseau. This thesis widens the scope of existing signature scholarship, and expands the context of the signature by focusing on a variety of signatures, events and contexts to reveal that the slipperiness of the signature is a pervasive problem, irreducible to simply just Rousseau. This thesis does not involve a return to the origin, or a search for origins; Part I is a return to the period which Derridean signature theory investigates, in an attempt to interrogate Derrida, Kamuf, and the signature itself; expanding the concept of the signature through its various manifestations of handwork and linework, and weaving together a more complicated, contaminated, and ultimately convincing context for signature theory to begin (again) from. Part II forces signature theory to begin again by putting it into practice. Here, I take Kamuf to task for her failure to fully ‘contract’ the signature. She completely ignores the physical dimension of the word ‘contract.’ Going one step further than simply critiquing her signature practices, I ‘contract’ the signature by having Derrida’s signature tattooed on my body. The tattoo and its location comment on the current limitations of signature theory, and perhaps of academic practice generally; of contracting without touching, and fearing contexts.

Gardens played a significant role in the lives of European peoples living in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. By producing texts in which gardens and other cultivated landscapes are used as symbol and setting, medieval writers provide us with the opportunity to gain insight into the sociocultural conventions associated with these spaces in the late medieval period. By building our understanding of medieval horticulture through an examination of historical texts, we position ourselves to achieve a greater understanding into the formation of contemporary cultivated literary landscapes and their attendant conventional codes. This study provides a map of current medieval garden interpretation, assessing the shape and validity of recent literary criticism of this field. With a focus on the hortus conclusus (the walled pleasure garden) and arboricultural spaces (including hunting and pleasure parks), this study provides an historicist reinterpretation of horticultural landscapes in Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde, Sir Orfeo, and Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, furthering our understanding of the authors’ use of such conventionally-coded spaces in these canonical romances.

This study analyzes the techniques that Canadian comics life writers develop to construct personal histories. I examine a broad selection of texts including graphic autobiography, biography, memoir, and diary in order to argue that writers and readers can, through these graphic narratives, engage with an eclectic and eccentric understanding of Canadian historical subjects. Contemporary Canadian comics are important for Canadian literature and life writing because they acknowledge the importance of contemporary urban and marginal subcultures and function as representations of people who occasionally experience economic scarcity. I focus on stories of “ordinary” people because their stories have often been excluded from accounts of Canadian public life and cultural history. Following the example of Barbara Godard, Heather Murray, and Roxanne Rimstead, I re-evaluate Canadian literatures by considering the importance of marginal literary products. Canadian comics authors rarely construct narratives about representative figures standing in place of and speaking for a broad community; instead, they create what Murray calls “history with a human face . . . the face of the daily, the ordinary” (“Literary History as Microhistory” 411). My research finds that contemporary Canadian graphic narratives create mundane personal histories using a medium that is inherently attuned to exaggeration and fragmentation. My reading of graphic narrative is based on “autographics,” a recent field of scholarship that analyzes the interactions between visual and verbal forms of communication in works of life writing. I draw on visual rhetorical studies and communication design in order to describe “the distinctive technology and aesthetics of life narrative that emerges in comics” (Whitlock 965). The medium of comics playfully manipulates the discourses of documentary evidence and testimonial authority. At the same time, it gives Canadian authors tools for depicting the experiences of ordinary individuals through a rich collection of emotional, sensorial, and perceptual information. Focusing on the work of such authors as Chester Brown, David Collier, Julie Doucet, Sarah Leavitt, and Seth, I suggest that Canadian comics authors exploit the unique formal properties of the medium of comics in order to interrogate dominant nationalist discourses. They also develop an alternative method for analyzing narratives about the past.

Virginia Woolf once remarked that, “[t]here is no reason to think that the form of the epic ... suit[s] a woman any more than the [masculine] sentence” (Woolf 84). This thesis represents an attempt to explore what the epic genre, as imagined and written by women, might look like in regards to the verse of fellow women poets Felicia Hemans and Elizabeth Barrett Browning. Despite the persistent critical misconception that women’s poetry of the Romantic and Victorian periods is comprised mainly of light, lyric verse and tends to lack that “great effort” – for example, the epic poem – which often appears in the work of their male contemporaries, this thesis will argue conversely that Hemans and Barrett Browning do assume certain aspects of traditional epic poetry – a genre “almost coterminous” with masculinity (Schweizer 1) – in their work, while also managing to transform the genre in order that their work might successfully embody a more feminine perspective. The first chapter of the thesis examines the ways in which these two women poets are able to bridge the private and public spheres by transforming the quintessential role of the female poet as record-keeper into that of the poet as prophet and visionary in their political poetry. The two following chapters will highlight the ways in which both Hemans and Barrett Browning remodel the epic form in order to draw attention to the female voice (chapter two) and to examine new and unconventional prototypes of female heroinism, for example the pioneering female artist and the militant mother (chapter three). With strong ties to a masculine tradition of epic, yet incorporating aspects of femininity hitherto foreign – perhaps even inimical – to the traditional conception of the genre, female epic, while admittedly something of a hybrid, arguably represents a distinctive genre in its own right and one which certainly merits more critical attention in the future.

This thesis examines how context in Derridean signature theory is taboo and underutilized, and calls signature theory to embrace the contaminating mark of context. Signature theory, as proposed by Jacques Derrida and Peggy Kamuf, offers a mere glimpse into Romanticism’s strained relationship with the signature, with a close reading limited to Rousseau. This thesis widens the scope of existing signature scholarship, and expands the context of the signature by focusing on a variety of signatures, events and contexts to reveal that the slipperiness of the signature is a pervasive problem, irreducible to simply just Rousseau. This thesis does not involve a return to the origin, or a search for origins; Part I is a return to the period which Derridean signature theory investigates, in an attempt to interrogate Derrida, Kamuf, and the signature itself; expanding the concept of the signature through its various manifestations of handwork and linework, and weaving together a more complicated, contaminated, and ultimately convincing context for signature theory to begin (again) from. Part II forces signature theory to begin again by putting it into practice. Here, I take Kamuf to task for her failure to fully ‘contract’ the signature. She completely ignores the physical dimension of the word ‘contract.’ Going one step further than simply critiquing her signature practices, I ‘contract’ the signature by having Derrida’s signature tattooed on my body. The tattoo and its location comment on the current limitations of signature theory, and perhaps of academic practice generally; of contracting without touching, and fearing contexts.

Gardens played a significant role in the lives of European peoples living in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. By producing texts in which gardens and other cultivated landscapes are used as symbol and setting, medieval writers provide us with the opportunity to gain insight into the sociocultural conventions associated with these spaces in the late medieval period. By building our understanding of medieval horticulture through an examination of historical texts, we position ourselves to achieve a greater understanding into the formation of contemporary cultivated literary landscapes and their attendant conventional codes. This study provides a map of current medieval garden interpretation, assessing the shape and validity of recent literary criticism of this field. With a focus on the hortus conclusus (the walled pleasure garden) and arboricultural spaces (including hunting and pleasure parks), this study provides an historicist reinterpretation of horticultural landscapes in Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde, Sir Orfeo, and Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, furthering our understanding of the authors’ use of such conventionally-coded spaces in these canonical romances.

My dissertation focuses on a set of Anglo-American novels that deal with the events of 9/11. Identifying thematic and stylistic differences in the fiction on this topic, I distinguish between novels that represent directly the jolts of trauma in the wake of the attacks, and novels that, while still holding the events as an underlying operative force in the narrative, do not openly represent them but envision their long-term aftermath. The first group of novels comprises Lynne Sharon Schwartz’s The Writing on the Wall (2005), Don DeLillo’s Falling Man (2007) and Jonathan Safran Foer’s Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close (2005). The second one includes Lorrie Moore’s A Gate at the Stairs (2009), John Updike’s Terrorist (2006) and Joseph O’Neill’s Netherland (2008). Drawing on concepts from trauma theory, particularly by Cathy Caruth and Dominick LaCapra, and combining them with the ethical philosophies of Levinas and Heidegger, I argue that the constructions of 9/11 in Anglo-American fiction are essentially twofold: authors who narrate 9/11 as a tragic human loss in the city of New York turn it into an occasion for an ethical dialogue with the reader and potentially with the “Other,” whereas authors who address 9/11 as a recent sociopolitical event transform it into a goad toward a bitter cultural indictment of the US middle-class, whose ingrained inertia, patriotism and self-righteousness have been either magnified or twisted by the attacks. Considering processes of meaning-making, annihilation, ideological reduction and apathy that arose from 9/11 and its versions, I have identified what could be called, adapting Peter Elbow’s expression from pedagogical studies, the “forked” rhetoric of media and politics, a rhetorical mode in which both discourses are essentially closed, non-hermeneutic, and rooted in the same rationale: exploiting 9/11 for consensus. On the contrary, in what I call the New-Yorkization of 9/11, I highlighted how the situatedness of the public discourses that New Yorkers constructed to tell their own tragedy rescues the Ur-Phaenomenon of 9/11 from the epistemological commodification that intellectual, mediatic and political interpretations forced on it. Furthermore, pointing to the speciousness of arguments that deem 9/11 literature sentimental and unimaginative, I claim that the traumatic literature on the attacks constitutes an example of ethical practice, since it originates from witnesses of the catastrophe, it represents communal solidarity, and it places a crucial demand on the reader as an empathic listener and ethical agent. Ethical counternarratives oppose the ideological simplification of the 9/11 attacks and develop instead a complex counter-rhetoric of emotions and inclusiveness that we could read as a particular instantiation of an ethics of the self and “Other.” As much as the 9/11 “ethical” novels suggest that “survivability” in times of trauma depends on “relationality” (J. Butler), the “cultural” ones unveil the insensitivity and superficiality of the actual US society far away from the site of trauma. The binary framework I use implies that, outside of New York City, 9/11 is narrated neither traumatically (in terms of literary form), nor as trauma (in terms of textual fact). Consequently, on the basis of a spatial criterion and in parallel to the ethical novels, I have identified a category of “cultural” fiction that tackles the events of 9/11 at a distance, spatially and conceptually. In essence, 9/11 brings neither shock, nor promise of regeneration to these peripheral settings, except for Joseph O’Neill’s Netherland, a story in which we are returned to a post-9/11 New York where different ethnic subjects can re-negotiate creatively their identities. The cultural novels are ultimately pervaded by a mode of tragic irony that is unthinkable for the ethical novels and that is used in these texts to convey the inanity and hubris of a politically uneducated and naïve America – one that has difficulties to point Afghanistan on a map, or to transcend dualistic schemes of value that embody precisely Bush’s Manichaeism. The potential for cultural pluralism, solidarity and historical memory set up by the New York stories does not ramify into the America that is far away from the neuralgic epicenter of historical trauma. This proves that the traumatizing effects and the related ethical calls engendered by 9/11 remain confined to the New York literature on the topic.

Using a close textual and contextual analysis, I trace themes of gender and race in the Matrix trilogy, arguing for the presence of a parallel, embedded filmic narrative, one that neatly aligns with African-American critical traditions affirming subjugated ideologies, knowledges, communities and forms. Decoding the films through the lenses of race, womanist, film studies and cultural studies theories, I explore this signified, covert storyline through phenotypes, casting choices, plot twists, and extra filmic events. In this dissertation project, I argue that their preponderance, consistency, and coherence are evidence of deliberate commentary. I further claim that that the trilogy can be reasonably understood as a historically motivated critique of Whiteness and White supremacy, offering references to American slavery and ideologies, as well as to cross-racial ideological domination and collective, coalitional and revolutionary change. Since long standing racial and gender understandings (along with their attendant domination and oppression) persist, examining popular films with transformed constructions is useful in supporting frameworks for conceptual change.