Abstract This doctoral dissertation discusses constructive mythopoetics in J. R. R. Tolkien’s legendarium, the mythopoetic logics and elements on which Tolkien’s texts and his fantasy world are constructed. My aim in this research is to create a reading of Tolkien’s fiction that shows that it is possible to discern a mythopoetic code in Tolkien’s legendarium. My hypothesis is that Tolkien’s mythopoetic fiction aims to be coherent on the levels of languages, myths, and inter- and intratextual background. This coherence can be found throughout the various texts and fragments of Tolkien’s fiction. From the cosmogonical creation myth of The Silmarillion, to the fairy-story lightness of The Hobbit and the quest fantasy of The Lord of the Rings, Tolkien’s fiction has its roots in the mythopoetic logics of his theory of creative writing (or myth-making). Tolkien is the sub-creator; he is creating myths and building his own world. For Tolkien, God is the primary creator, but the author is the (sub-)creator of his own creation. This is consistent throughout Tolkien’s legendarium, despite the fact that whilst creating his fiction, Tolkien is “pretending” to be a translator of mythical pseudo-historical documents. In the main chapters, my research logics trace the inner timeline of Tolkien’s legendarium. Starting from the creation of the world, I move onto the long fall and struggle and to the end of the world. When discussing the theme of creation, I focus on the concept of creation on the intratextual level of Tolkien’s legendarium as well as on Tolkien’s aesthetics of creative work. In the end of the dissertation, I turn my attention also to the creative work of the reader. My theoretical approach is influenced by both Northrop Frye’s constructive theory of literature and Benjamin Harshav’s theory of constructive poetics. I discuss the creative methods of speculative historical epic and the dichotomies of beginning and end, good and evil, mortality and immortality, spiritual and physical, and visibility and invisibility, as well as how these elements are manifested in Tolkien’s mythopoetic vision. The structure of Tolkien’s constructive mythopoetics is illuminated through the grand concepts of the Creation, the Existence, the Fall and the Struggle. / Tiivistelmä Väitöskirjani käsittelee konstruktiivista mytopoetiikkaa J. R. R. Tolkienin legendaariossa. Työ keskittyy ennen kaikkea mytopoeettiseen logiikkaan ja elementteihin, joiden kautta Tolkienin tekstit ja hänen luomansa fantasiamaailma rakentuvat. Tutkimukseni muodostaa Tolkienin fiktion luennan, joka osoittaa, että Tolkienin legendaariolle voidaan löytää mytopoeettinen koodi. Tämä koodi havainnollistaa, että Tolkienin mytopoeettinen fiktio luo koherentin ja uskottavan kokonaisuuden kielen, myyttien sekä inter- ja intratekstuaalisten vaikutussuhteiden kautta. Tämä yhteenkuuluvuus ja koodi on nähtävissä, vaikka Tolkienin legendaarion osat ovat keskenään perin erilaisia, eri kirjallisuuslajeihin kuuluvia ja vaikka osa on julkaistu vain fragmentteina hänen kuolemansa jälkeen. Tolkienin mytopoeettinen logiikka ja luovan kirjoittamisen teoria näkyvät aina Silmarillion-teoksen kosmogonisesta luomismyytistä kevyen satumaiseen Hobittiin tai aina seikkailufantasiaan Taru Sormusten Herrasta. Tekijänä Tolkien näyttäytyy teoksissaan “alempana luojana” (sub-creator), joka kehittää myyttejä ja rakentaa fantasiamaailmaansa. Tolkienille Jumala on “ylempi luoja”, johon kirjailija vertautuu fiktion tasolla. Väitöskirjani tutkimuslogiikka seuraa Tolkienin legendaarion aikajärjestystä. Aloitan työni maailmanluomisesta, siirryn tämän jälkeen ns. pitkään tappioon ja haipumiseen sekä aina maailmanloppuun saakka. Luomisen teemaa käsitellessäni päähuomioni on sekä Tolkienin legendaarion teosten sisäisessä kertomuksessa että hänen kirjallisen luomisensa estetiikassa. Väitöskirjan loppupuolella käännän huomiotani myös lukijan “luomistyöhön” teoksia lukiessa. Käyttämääni teoreettiseen näkökulmaan ovat vaikuttaneet erityisesti Northrop Fryen konstruktiivinen kirjallisuusteoria sekä Benjamin Harshavin konstruktiivinen poetiikka. Käsittelyssäni ovat myös spekulatiivisen historiallisen epiikan metodit sekä hyvän ja pahan, kuolevaisuuden ja kuolemattomuuden, henkisen ja fyysisen sekä näkyvän ja näkymättömän vastakkainasetteluparit, ja ennen kaikkea se, kuinka nämä vastakkainasetteluparit ja elementit näyttäytyvät Tolkienin mytopoeettisessa visiossa. Tolkienin fiktion konstruktiivinen mytopoetiikka havainnollistuu metafyysisten ja temaattisten käsitteiden Luominen (Creation), Olemassaolo (Existence), Lankeamus (Fall) ja Ponnistelu (Struggle) kautta.

In the prison society of Circadia, the Jury doesn’t need chains or locks to keep citizens tame, only routine—but Valerie and Brennan break the routine. Valerie allows a hospital patient who hurt her in the past to die from cardiac arrest. Her twelve-year term will be reset if anyone finds out she didn’t try to save him; she’ll start over in the dangerous Twelfth Circle. With 455 days left in Circadia, she must lie not only to the authorities but also to her family. And she’s a terrible liar. Most conversations halt near Brennan, the Warden’s son, but even he catches the whispers after a police officer attempts to escape from Circadia. When Brennan learns that his mother and a Juror are rigging the officer’s public trial, they give him a choice: side with the Circadians and lose his safety, or side with the Jury and lose his self-respect. Structured in chapters that alternate between Valerie and Brennan, this novel—influenced by George Orwell, Suzanne Collins, and Michel Foucault—suggests that the best prison makes you comfortable. It makes you want to stay.

Speculative fiction is a genre that is gaining urgency in the contemporary Canadian literary scene as authors and readers become increasingly concerned with what it means to live in a nation implicated in globalization. This genre is useful because with it, authors can extrapolate from the present to explore what some of the long-term effects of globalization might be. This thesis specifically considers the long-term effects of globalization on communities, a theme that speculative fictions return to frequently. The selected speculative fictions engage with current theory on globalization and community in their explorations of how globalization might affect the types of communities that can be enacted. This thesis argues that these texts demonstrate how Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri’s notion of “cooperative autonomy” can be uniquely cultivated in the conditions of globalization – despite the fact that those conditions are characterized by the fragmentation of traditional forms of community (Empire 392).

There is a growing recognition of the interconnectedness of the crises of food, water, democracy and climate change as stemming from the capitalist hunt for modernity and progress. As climate change is thus not only so complex, but urgent, the question of a successful portrayal of it for an enhanced understanding and subsequent action becomes vital. The name of the Capitalocene functions to highlight the intersectional origins of climate change - as the Global North has done violence upon nature in the quest for monetary value, so has it also done violence upon people in the process. The Kingston Cycle is part of a fast-rising wave of speculative fiction with the potential to successfully communicate not only an encompassing picture of the acknowledgedly incomprehensive totality of the current crisis, but also the solution in the form of an egalitarian society founded on the value of community instead of capital. As writers are thus beginning to discover the suitability of speculative fiction to depict the Capitalocene, especially spatiotemporal combinations of genres such as historical steampunk fantasy, it is necessary for scholars to follow in order to breach the hitherto persisting view of speculative fiction as simply an escape from reality, and to investigate how it can be used to create not only an understanding of the current crisis, but an incentive to action.

My project attempts to nuance the bodies of knowledge produced in relation to processes of natural resource extraction in Norrbotten, Sweden. Operating between fact and fiction, I have presented the project as a speculative video narrative. The protagonist is the Lule River, where the implications of its domestication and agency is explored.  This territory can be understood as a wilderness, a cultural landscape, the Sami homelands and a place of extraction. Prior to Vattenfall’s acquisition of Porjus, the estate belonged to Erik Abraham Olofsson Rim (1844-1920). Olofsson Rim was Forest Sami with background in Sjokksjokk sami village. Speculative fiction is a powerful tool to contemplate societal issues and grapple with complex realities. The result lies in the audience’s reading of the project, where the goal is to spark discussion and reflection. In the aesthetics of the proposed post-fossil world, I have ventured into the playfully surreal. The playful in terms of unexpected elements and color palette. The surreal is expressed through composition, scale and juxtaposition. Dealing with such huge infrastructure objects, which are surreal and abstract in themselves, I have attempted to make the line between the real and the unreal fluid, to evoke the audience’s reflection of the possibilities at hand.

This creative project’s ambition is to craft an original novel called The Dreams of Metanoia: The Advent Foreigner. The Dreams of Metanoia is initially influenced by The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, a true narrative by Rebecca Skloot. Henrietta and her family were subjected to Jim Crow scientific racism. Henrietta, a black woman with cervical cancer, had her cells removed and cultivated by John Hopkins doctors without any consent. The doctors discovered that Henrietta’s cells continued to divide relentlessly outside her body. They then sold them to other researchers without their knowledge. However, the gap in literature occurs within a mysterious hallucination that happened within the nonfiction narrative. Henrietta’s cousin, Hector Henry, had a hallucination that may be connected to the obscure Philippine-American War and Filipino Folklore. The Philippine-American War was a somber conflict of racism and white American imperialism from 1899-1902. It is a war shrouded from most American textbooks; it was a war that tested American soldier’s ethical morality and allegiance to a 20th century Jim Crow United States. It is a war where enemies found a common strife within their woes. Because of how unknown these narratives are in today’s racial and politically divided world, it is essential to review and learn from these tragedies that united races as humans rather than individual racial identities. This research aims to repurpose these narratives to craft an original story relevant to modern America’s racial strife. Thus, The Dreams of Metanoia: The Advent Foreigner is an original piece that seeks to find the intersectionality in the meaning of being human.

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In this dissertation I think-with figures of #AnthropoceneChild in speculative texts that story the end of the world through some form of climate catastrophe. In these post-apocalyptic tales, the child-figures do different things. Firstly, child-figures reflect problematics of the contemporary world without interrupting dominant patterns of thought, materiality, and governance. In these stories, the child is the future and the future is the child. Secondly, some child-figures are tasked with protecting a world in which they have been made disposable. This incites critical questions about distributions of racialized harm and also exposes the limits of survivalist logics. Thirdly, a few child-figures refuse current arrangements of existence and set in motion new worlds, even if the contours, forces, and politics cannot yet be fully described. These are speculative worlds of not this, what if, and not yet. Different aspects of this assemblage are centred at different moments in this dissertation. The looseness of the framework allows me to move between the unsettled complexities of bionormative childhoods, anthropogenic climate change, reproductive futurism, and structures of anti-blackness, settler colonialism, and white supremacy in relation to (1) child-figures at the end of a world, (2) child-figures who save their world, and (3) child-figures who destroy the world. This dissertation is organized into two main sections: Part I provides the theoretical background for the speculative arguments developed over Part II. In Part I, I unpack my proposal that #AnthropoceneChild bookends the Anthropocene. By this I mean that the language of birth, origin, and innocence finds repetitious form in scholarly discussions of Anthropocene beginnings, and that child-figures are pivotal to playing out the end of the world in pop culture performances of Anthropocene pedagogy. Part II consists of three chapters that engage with speculative child-figures that inherit and inhabit a damaged planet. This includes grappling with racialized technologies of care and abandonment, folding parent-child relations into environmental discourses of stewardship, and gesturing towards imaginaries of what might be possible after the end of the (white) world. The conclusion pulls the ideas and figures of previous chapters together in a queer-kin consideration of geos-futurities for #AnthropoceneChild wherein the end of the world might not be a cause for mourning but a possibility for an otherwise. / Graduate

Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis (IUPUI) / Through an analysis of the depiction of female protagonists in young adult dystopian and speculative works of fiction, this thesis establishes leadership studies as a theoretical framework for literary study. Leadership studies is a relatively young branch of academic inquiry, using interdisciplinary approaches to investigate the phenomenon of leadership. From psychology, sociology, and philosophy, to education, business, and history, leadership studies has both drawn from and provided insight into a variety of disciplines; however, these theories have not yet found their way into conversations about literature. My thesis pulls leadership studies away from its corporate connotations to establish it as a valid and valuable addition to our literary analysis repertoire through a demonstration of its potential to further conversations about texts. This analysis is positioned within the contexts of children’s literature, feminist theory, and practices of reading for ideology, anchoring leadership studies in already-established modes of inquiry while demonstrating how this field offers valuable insight into them. My focus on dystopian and speculative young adult novels reflects the recent surge in dystopic/postapocalyptic texts that feature strong female protagonists, presenting potential leadership strategies for young girl readers during an important stage of development. Thus, this thesis uses leadership studies to further our analysis of how agency, power, and gender are represented within children’s literature.

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