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This dissertation contains two parts: Part I, "Self-Elegy as Self-Creation Myth," which discusses the self-elegy, a subgenre of the contemporary American elegy; and Part II, For the Ruined Body, a collection of poems. Traditionally elegies are responses to death, but modern and contemporary self-elegies question the kinds of death, responding to metaphorical not literal deaths. One category of elegy is the self-elegy, which turns inward, focusing on loss rather than death, mourning aspects of the self that are left behind, forgotten, or aspects that never existed. Both prospective and retrospective, self-elegies allow the self to be reinvented in the face of loss; they mourn past versions of selves as transient representations of moments in time. Self-elegies pursue the knowledge that the selves we create are fleeting and flawed, like our bodies. However by acknowledging painful self-truths, speakers in self-elegies exert agency; they participate in their own creation myths, actively interpreting and incorporating experiences into their identity by performing dreamlike scenarios and sustaining an intimate, but self-critical, voice in order to: one, imagine an alternate self to create distance and investigate the evolution of self-identity, employing hindsight and self-criticism to offer advice; two, reinterpret the past and its role in creating and shaping identity, employing a tone of resignation towards the changing nature of the self. This self-awareness, not to be confused with self-acceptance, is often the only consolation found.

<p>The situation of male subjectivity in North America has become problematic and this is reflected in current popular culture The ways of looking at men have changed, and with them, the ways of becoming and being a man. Since its appearance, the cover of the June 1978 edition of Hustler magazine, which depicts a woman in a meat grinder up to her torso, has been regarded by many as the worst example of the patriarchal view of women, both literally and metaphorically It is a sign of our times, then, that this image was echoed in a recent Toronto Star montage of a man being melted in a pot of wax up to his torso (15 June 2000, J1). These visceral images frame a period of significant debate and political negotiation over gender roles and the second calls our attention to major shifts in how masculinity is seen The image of masculine diminishment makes us ask-since masculinity may be in decline, but the actual numbers of men are not-how men learn how to be men.</p> <p>The diminishment of masculinity has not come without significant costs. Pulitzer Prizewinner Susan Faludi's books, Backlash: The Undeclared War against American Women (1991) and Stiffed: The Betrayal of the American Man (1999) attempt to detail these costs In her research, Faludi finds that in an age in which corporations are constantly downsizing and outsourcing in order to increase profits, men can no longer look to these traditionally patriarchal institutions for paternal acceptance and confirmation of masculine success The image of the boss or company as a fatherly provider has been replaced by the pink slip. Indeed, "there is no passage to manhood in such a world" (Stiffed 39). Yet, men are told that they are the masters of their world-by the men's movement, by advertisers, by the media. It is important, then, to produce increasingly sophisticated work that elucidates recent shifts in male subjectivities, through a discourse that is conversant with feminist theory since the ultimate goal is the same the elimination of the patriarchal enforcement of rigidly defined gender roles. Without such work, the backlash against women and the betrayal of men that Faludi documents will be perpetuated and a void between males and females will continue to widen Moreover, victimized or oppressed persons will be trapped between competing discourses.</p> <p>Given the shifting ways in which men are represented in popular media, my dissertation will examine three general areas: 1) how shifts in the location of masculine endeavours are conveyed by shifts in media genres, 2) how the roles of spectators or participants in certain new media actually reshape gender roles and relationships, and 3) how exclusions of men from certain roles in popular media circumscribes potential points of coalition between pro feminist activism and masculinity studies. In the first area, I examine the lone hero fighting an oppressive state system, a type Paul Smith finds in 1970s westerns (Clint Eastwood, 1993) and William Warner finds in 1980s action films (Rambo, 1992). As an example, this figure now fights a corporate power, or even his boss, in professional wrestling storylines. Similarly, the father-son narrative that Susan Jeffords traces in action films from the 1980s (The Remasculinization of America, 1989) and which she claims had disappeared by the early 1990s (Hard Bodies, 1994), has in fact been taken up by the sports film genre, but now it is the father-figure rather than the son who is searching for redemption. The second section considers shifts in masculine identification such as the cross-gender identification Carol Clover suggests is possible in horror films (Men, Women, & Chainsaws, 1992). This can now occur for players of virtual reality video games typified by Tomb Raider and Dino Crisis. These feature female protagonists in traditionally male roles. Female wrestlers such as Chyna and the recent film, Girl Fight, provide similar opportunities for cross-gender identification in the earlier cited genres. As well, Laura Mulvey's critique of the "male gaze," a critical commonplace for over twenty years, cannot account for the viewing of these productions ("Visual Pleasure," 1978). In the words of Robert Connell, these media once portrayed "competition and hierarchy among men, exclusion or domination of woman [producing] social relations of gender both realized and symbolized in bodily performances" (Masculinities, 1995 54). Now men's bodies are objects of the gaze and of domination, nurturing supersedes violence, and instead of excluding women, men are encouraged to identify with them. The final area considers one of Faludi's conclusions, that being a man is less about dominating than about not being dominated, in terms of the media treatment of men who have been victimized. The TV movies depicting former NHL.player, Sheldon Kennedy, who was abused by his coach, provide excellent examples of how men are silenced by a society that refuses to accept that men can be victims. This chapter is a fitting end to the work since it combines previous discussions of body image, gender stability, and gender performance in a pressing area of commonality between feminism and masculinity while providing a discursive link between the two.</p> / Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

<p>This dissertation interrogates the ways in which the ethical rhetoric following September 11th, 2001 (particularly that of the administration of U.S. President George Bush) and contemporary globalization (which Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri have called "Empire") implicate one other, as well as the ways in which these interlinked discourses are currently shaping the post-9/11 global "ethical climate" and its universalized human subject. Drawing upon Jacques Derrida's concept of "hauntology" which he introduces in Specters of Marx (1994), the main argument of the thesis is that the dominant post-9/11 ethical rhetoric is a specter of Empire, such that it is both a symptom of and a particularly influential force-of-law shaping the "Spirit" of contemporary globalization/Empire. The thesis claims that in their shared universalism, neo-Hegelian remainders of idealism, and theocratic impulses to contain and ethicopolitically manage the entire world, globalization/Empire and its most serious recent symptoms-Bush's post-9/11 ethical rhetoric and the global war on terror--contain suicidal auto-deconstructive tendencies that threaten to destroy themselves from within in spite of their utopic visions of themselves. Finally, the dissertation investigates some of the key spectral remainders of "9/11" and contemporary ethical thought which contradict and/or corroborate the dominant post-9/11 discourse of Empire and its universalized ethico-political human subject.</p> / Thesis / Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)