This thesis is a case study of the 1989 closure of the Inglis Ltd. plant in Toronto, Ontario. The purpose of the study is to examine worker-ownership as a labour strategy in a period of economic restructuring. In the Inglis case, Local 2900 of the United Steelworkers of America developed a response to closure comprised of three elements: negotiating improvements on the terms of closure specified by contract and by legislation; participation in a state-sponsored Labour Adjustment Committee; and a study of the prospects for worker-ownership as an alternative to plant closure. Through document analysis and interviews with union members, officials, and consultants, the relation between these three strategic elements is outlined. Gramsci's concept of "passive revolution" is employed to analyze the role of the state in economic restructuring and in the plant closure. It is argued that the state's role in economic restructuring has fostered forms of worker-ownership which are difficult to translate into effective labour strategy. State reforms embodied in plant closure legislation and adjustment programs have simultaneously channelled labour responses away from worker-ownership and towards severance negotiations and adjustment activities. / Thesis / Master of Arts (MA)

The Beating of Wings is a polyphonic novel comprised of multiple interior monologues, inspired by the historical development of the fairy tale as a literary genre. Characters are based upon key writers within this movement: Charles Perrault, Rabbi Nachman, Flora Annie Steel, and J M Barrie; as well as associated figures, including the Franco-Scottish miniaturist and calligrapher, Esther Inglis, the Duchess of Polignac, and Edwina Mountbatten. The subject of this vocal fugue is an ostensibly authorless fairy tale, The Golden Tree and the Moth, handwritten in a seventeenth-century miniature manuscript. Within an omniscient frame modelled after the ancient Indian collection of fables, the Panchatantra (circa 200 B.C.), a succession of first-person narrators chronicle the passage of the fairy tale through time, via the 'beating wings' of its woven narrative threads, back to its source. As each narrator ventriloquises the voice of a previous owner, the matryoshka doll narratives engage concurrently with questions of adaptation and appropriation, narratology, paratext, the Barthesian concept of the 'death of the author', and literary ventriloquism. Ultimately, the novel aspires to culminate in a fictional rebirth of a defining voice, founded upon gynocritical theory and the silencing of women within the patriarchal canon during the early modern period. This origin of the tale that was neither 'already written', nor 'already read', is borne of Esther Inglis (1571-1624). My critical essay considers specific theoretical influences of the novel: predominantly literary ventriloquism, as well as Inglis's corpus. A marginalised figure in the context of early modern women's writing, prior to recent academic enquiry Inglis was dismissed as a skilled copyist, whose manuscripts were notable only for her virtuoso calligraphic replication of religious verse in miniature. To this discussion, I introduce Gérard Genette's concept of paratext as a viable means of interpretation. I argue that this strand of literary analysis is imperative to our understanding of how Inglis sought to materialise an authentic authorial voice through the paratextual space of her manuscripts, mobilising the trope of literary ventriloquism to facilitate her complex construction as a literary icon. By applying Genette's taxonomy, I suggest that Inglis emerges as an incisive, progressive, and ingenious publisher and author, who successfully manifested Her word upon the patriarchal page during an era when women writers were silenced or forced to write anonymously.

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Critical examination of gendered and racialized encounters between people and landscapes highlights the varied ways in which individuals respond to complex and multifaceted discourses. By analyzing an archive of letters and photographs generated by a single individual (David Inglis McDowell) I reveal the relationship between experience and discourse in the Skeena region of northwestern British Columbia at the turn of the twentieth century. I examine McDowell's representations of people of various origins and class backgrounds and his portrayal of both the natural and created environments through which he travelled and how these shaped the way he saw himself and others. This work contributes to the growing scholarship which views everyday lives as key sources of knowledge concerning broader social processes. I uncover the process of mythmaking and reveal that the story told by Skeena region settlers was one of conquering the wilderness and promoting progress-a frontier myth that still endures.