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published_or_final_version / English Studies / Master / Master of Arts

published_or_final_version / Literary and Cultural Studies / Master / Master of Arts

This dissertation examines the reaction of many post-WWII American authors against the modernist privileging of form. These authors predicate their response upon what I call "blissful realism," a term which reflects an unlikely conflation of the critical work of Roland Barthes and Georg Lukács. I argue that Saul Bellow and John Updike are exemplars of a larger post-war contingent, including Flannery O'Conner, Bernard Malamud, Joyce Carol Oates, and John Cheever, to name a few, who use the liminal space between the waning of modernism and a burgeoning postmodern sensibility to complicate and critique modernist formalism while exploring (and often presciently critiquing) the nascent ontological inclinations of postmodernism. The characters within their novels endeavor to declare and maintain their autonomy by, through, and against their contact with a cold reality and defining ideological structures. This tension is mirrored in the aesthetic project of the authors as they work by, through, and against modernist strictures. This dissertation also offers a comparison between Bellow and Updike and the work of Ralph Ellison and Vladimir Nabokov in an effort to distinguish and delineate blissful realism from "late modernism." The concluding chapter posits that recent "post-postmodern" work draws heavily on its blissful realist predecessors. Many contemporary authors' concerns with subjective autonomy, authenticity, and notions of transcendence, in spite of postmodern declarations to the contrary, offer different sensibilities and political possibilities that turn away from irony, play, and image toward agency, meaning, and morality.

In Canada, writers of long fiction have recently begun to employ representations of science and to use scientific theories to construct narratives that investigate issues of class, race, sexuality, faith, truth and the ontological understanding of human existence. This turn towards science in creative works of art suggests that scientific discourse in the early twenty-first century has become a space from which to respond to questions about the search for truth after the rise of poststructuralist theory and postmodern culture. My work investigates this recent turn towards science in contemporary Canadian literature as a way of reevaluating the idea that science is associated with a teleological movement towards human progress, and to analyze how scientific representations re-imagine faith and ethics from a secular perspective. The recent shift towards science in the literature of Canada in English suggests a questioning of social conditions which place the human within epistemological spectrums between truth and fiction, faith and reason, and the individual and the universal. In my dissertation questions related to belief and truth are bound up in a cross-textual study that looks at how Canadian literature reevaluates important debates among theology, art, and science in order to access a humanist interpretation of different possible realities. My dissertation investigates: The Bone Sharps (2007) by Tim Bowling; Curiosity: A Love Story (2010) by Joan Thomas; The Origin of Species (2008) by Nino Ricci; The Memory Artists (2004) by Jeffrey Moore; Player One: What is to Become of Us (2010) by Douglas Coupland; Atmospheric Disturbances (2008) by Rivka Galchen, and The Evolution of Inanimate Objects: The Life and Collected Works of Thomas Darwin (1857-1879) (2010) by Harry Karlinsky. / Thesis (Ph.D, English) -- Queen's University, 2012-01-26 11:50:12.999

This thesis examines, from a feminist perspective, conceptions of the body proposed by poststructuralist philosophy and postmodernist art practice. Within both feminist and postmodern critiques of the humanist subject, the body has come to be understood as a site of cultural inscriptions. In tracing the relationship between postmodernism and feminism, the thesis addresses specifically the shift from celebratory, affirmative female imagery typical of feminist art in the seventies, to the semiotic analysis of images of women which, in the eighties, problematized the question of sexual difference as one of representation. During the eighties women artists generally eschewed figurative representations of the female body in recognition of its over-determined socio-sexual status. Within this historical framework, the tension between the "de-materialized" body of postmodernity and the insistently present body of gendered experience is explored both in the work of feminist theorists and contemporary women artists. In conclusion, three corporeal sites--the cultural, the epistemological and the psycho-sexual--are analysed in the postmodern practices of Jana Sterbak, Nell Tenhaaf and Kati Campbell.

The following thesis is a work of cultural psychoanalysis in an era properly defined as "post-Holocaust". It begins with an extensive working through of Lacanian concepts, followed by an examination of fantastical appropriations of the trauma of the Holocaust---fantasies that serve as the very frame of our reality, or rather, hyperreality. After a further working through of the relations between the crypt and the unconscious (partially through a reading of Hamlet), the thesis then brings in Marshall McLuhan and Jean Baudrillard to help further elucidate some of the key arguments.

This thesis considers the ways that critical reflection on normalizations of social meaning and structures can provide sites for learning and transformation in a pluralist, divided, and destructive world. It investigates five recent "uncanny" works of art, in order to illustrate the value of critiquing closed frames of reference and attending to theories of hermeneutics, ideology critique, and aesthetics. The thesis explores the elements of postmodern consciousness which raise questions about self, identity, and agency in an era of fragmentation, difference, and challenges to master narratives. Using a dialogue between theory and text, history and fiction, it outlines part of an interpretive project, in which art provides one site for curriculum and public debate regarding a participatory and inclusionary society, thus contributing to a postmodern pedagogy of transformation.

This project offers a multifaceted, interdisciplinary approach to understanding the contemporary post-Soviet Internet bride phenomenon and the rationales, motives, and aspirations of the industry's participants. As international marriage services have incorporated information and communications technologies (ICTs) to assist in the marketing of women of post-communist nations for correspondence courtship with Western men, the industry has furthered the globalization of marriage markets and the opportunities for communicative exchange among disparate nations and cultures. By way of case study, the project takes a special focus on the Belarusian/American segment of the industry, turning to personal interviews with participants and employing qualitative techniques to dissect marketing methods. The study gives primary consideration to processes and elements of globalization, postmodern consumer culture, and aspects of human sexuality (particularly sexual exchange theory), recognizing their interactive and mutually-constitutive nature that calls for their analysis through a Baudrillardian lens.