Celebrating EL&L graduating MA and PhD students 2025-26

In this dissertation, I situate my study in the writings of American and British women in the twentieth century, arguing that, in the development and aftermaths of the stylistic and print practices of transatlantic literary modernisms, one can trace the development of a queer feminist identity and lineage. I base my work on critical excavations of queer modernisms that have occurred over the last thirty years and, specifically, recent re-evaluations of earlier, more circumscribed treatments on the intertwined developments of modernist stylistics and non-normative identity. Moving from this, I use a series of case studies to sketch both the influence of sapphic writing on the development of modernism and the ways in which sapphic modernism, in its stylistic markers, its histories and figures, and its harnessing of specific print and publishing tactics, served as a constructing influence on later-century formations of identity and community. The case studies I employ are deeply personal and individuated: They reflect the specific desires and impulses of their originators and, thus, speak to situated perspectives within a particular time and place. However, each case depends upon a dedication to stylistic homage and thematic citation, a practice in which the high stakes of intergenerational connection and conversation are always at play. Though effectively expanding and exceeding the twentieth century, the tactics and motivations that bring together such temporally, generically diverse authors as Michael Field (Katherine Bradley and Edith Cooper), Renée Vivien, H.D., Nella Larsen, Danzy Senna, Djuna Barnes, and Bertha Harris are strikingly similar. Together, they paint a convincing portrait of both the utopian promise—and the more realistic vagaries—of a coherent, transatlantic, queer literary kinship between women writers in the twentieth century.

Embargoed. The full abstract will be available when the embargo expires after 2027-04-30.

Emerging as one of the fin de siècle’s most influential technologies, the typewriter is a rich device for exploring the physical and rhetorical interplay of bodies and machines. Originally designed as an assistive technology for blind users, across its literary representation the ‘typewriter’ (device) transforms into the ‘type-writer’ (occupation), culturally mapping the experience of women in the nineteenth-century clerical workplace. By unpacking how the type-writer girl lies on the intersection of gender, (dis)ability, class, and race, this thesis is interested in reading the type-writer as a vessel of prosthetic connection and alternative communication that extends past its nineteenth-century origins. More specifically, this thesis will apply pressure to the figure of the type-writer as a nineteenth-century literary and cultural trope for socioeconomic change and demonstrate how it is poised for antinormative intervention in literary studies. This thesis will read Grant Allen’s Type-Writer Girl— one of his few nineteenth-century novels published under the female pseudonym of ‘Olive Pratt Rayner’— in conversation with Kana Akatsuki’s Violet Evergarden— a contemporary work of Japanese steampunk featuring a physically disabled typist, to examine the prosthetic capacity and generic evolution of the type-writer girl. Drawing from disability studies, crip theory, feminist theory, critical race theory, and considerations of gender and sexuality, this thesis foregrounds the prosthesis as a revitalized method for intersectional reading and writing, particularly in relation to deconstructing narrative form and point of view. This thesis theorizes how the typist’s prosthetic literary identity and practice is rich for the development and nurture of crip, queer embodiments belonging to women and people of colour, and their capacities to not only reauthor social, economic, and political structures, but complicate one’s participation in such. By reading Victorian and neo-Victorian literatures side-by-side, this thesis observes the evolution and application of the overlap between their represented anachronistic technology (and by extension, anti-capitalist artistic practice), and the urgency and extension implicated in the cultural dominance of contemporary media and technology.

This thesis investigates ways to understand transgender medicine outside the existing harmful regimentation of care mandated by biopolitical state apparatuses and capitalist pharmacology. Engaging with Paul Preciado’s Testo-Junkie as both method and foil, the thesis explores the implications of framing transition through the dual psychoses of gender dysphoria and addiction and if/how utility may be gleaned from the framing of the trans person as a drug user. While Preciado upholds the conflation of hormone use and illicit drug use as a site of revolt and possibility, I argue that this move fails to offer coherent revolutionary potential against an already corporatized and precarious order of transgender medical care. Using mixed methodology, pulling from autofiction, historiography, medical literature, and critical theory, this thesis centers on the material dependency of trans existence on un/controlled substances and explores the ways this dependency criminalizes the trans object/subject, particularly through the often-conflicting logics of addiction, care, surveillance, and pharmaceutical governance. Through case studies of anti-androgen prescription, the Drug User Liberation Front in Vancouver, and the conflicting and upheld legacies of Sylvia Rivera and Marsha P. Johnson, the thesis critiques how martyrdom and medicalization obscure trans agency and perpetuate cycles of death for intersectionally marginalized communities. Ultimately, the work critiques contemporary queer theory's retreat from persistent structural issues of trans care and its inability to meaningfully engage with the ongoing death of trans women from carceral logics and the bureaucratization of medical care. By understanding the trans person as inherently a drug user once they medically transition, I argue that any liberatory vision of trans healthcare must begin by recognizing the trans subject as an agent rather than an object. In doing so, this thesis insists that modes of counter-hegemonic trans medical care can only emerge through persistent radical undermining and reimagining of positionality, criminality, and the medical-industrial complexes which govern individuals.

Pro Bernal Anti Bio (PBAB) is the collaborative auto/biography of Filipino filmmaker Ishmael Bernal, begun by Bernal before his death, continued by his lifelong collaborator Jorge Arago, and finished by scholar Angela Stuart-Santiago after Arago’s passing. From the pair’s amassed auto-archive of materials, Stuart-Santiago transformed Bernal and Arago’s words into lines of dialogue, framing the final text as a speculative conversation held between their ghosts. PBAB’s experimental format emphasizes a deliberate divergence from the rigid forms of the neocolonial archive: a structure of narrative-production that enforces and authenticates state control by erasing deviant subjects and alternative histories. While Bernal’s place in the neocolonial archive is marked by his reductive recuperation into state-affirming, normative narratives, PBAB utilizes ephemeral, speculative, and communal methods of memorialization to unearth the aspects of his queer, leftist life that were criminalized under American imperial rule and the dictatorship of Ferdinand Marcos. This thesis analyzes PBAB’s content, format, and methodology to theorize PBAB as an “anti-archive”: a queer, anti-colonial medium that critiques the violences and silences of the neocolonial archive while creating an alternative site of memorialization for queer Filipinx subjects. Chapter One puts PBAB in conversation with Bernal’s 1980 “docufiction” film, Manila by Night (MBN), whose autoethnographic portrayal of a queer, impoverished Manila violently opposed dominant dictatorial visions of nation. This chapter argues that MBN’s appropriation of imperial documentary techniques and dictatorial aesthetics of “beauty” to re-narrativize martial law Manila casts the film as an anti-archive that queers and refigures the visual languages of neocolonial historical narrativization. Chapter Two analyzes PBAB’s methodology of “after-living,” which foregrounds queer Filipinx death to imagine spectral possibilities beyond the limits of queer erasure. Intervening into conversations within queer theory regarding death as the end of queer potential, I examine how PBAB and MBN’s use of (quasi-)auditory modes of record ruptures the silence of the archive to revitalize sites of queer death, presenting Bernal’s voice as loudly still-living even from beyond the grave. My conclusion expands upon these methods of after-living by placing PBAB in dialogue with Reuel Molina Aguila’s poem “Ishma” to identify new mediums for queer Filipinx anti-archival creation.

This thesis investigates how land contributes to Indigenous cultural identity formation in spite of continued land loss and dispossession in what is currently called Canada. A part of this investigation will involve considering the implications of slow violence on cultural identity formation, looking in particular at the lingering impact of climate change on Indigenous cultural practices within communities. The slow violence of climate change hinders cultural continuity, as the process contributes to declines in land-based practices and the transmission of traditional ecological knowledge. This loss compounds preexisting inequities, which further compromises cultural identities and senses of belonging. This thesis will consider the importance of land to maintaining, developing, and nurturing cultural identities as discussed in poetry collections and personal memoirs by Métis writers Maria Campbell, Marilyn Dumont, and Katherena Vermette. The inclusion of these literary forms is critical to understanding the cultural significance of land to identity formation, as this kind of literature provides thoughtful insights into past and present lived experiences. This kind of writing contextualizes land loss in a way that makes the pain visible, with the perspectives woven into this literature helping guide contemporary conservation efforts in Canada.

The literary production of Jews, Christians, and Muslims of medieval and early modern Spain has received attention from numerous scholars. However, research on the religiously affiliated minority varieties of Ibero-Romance Ladino and Aljamiado often examines each variety only in comparison to Early Modern Spanish (Castilian). As a result, there are few studies which compare Ladino and Aljamiado directly. I will argue that these varieties are closer to each other than they are to Early Modern Spanish (Castilian). The first chapter recounts the shared history and uses of these varieties and their communities in and out of Spain. The second chapter is a linguistic analysis of three translations of the Moses narrative in Exodus 2 in the Ladino Biblia de Ferrara and the Castilian Reina-Valera, and in Surah 28 in the Aljamiado Corán de Toledo, which shows the relation between each through the metrics of orthography, verbal system, and syntax. The findings reveal that each source text is similar to each other to different degrees and has a varying level of adherence to the original and accommodation to Ibero-Romance grammar. Ladino and Aljamiado are most similar in terms of syntax when employing calque translation, the Castilian and Aljamiado are closer in their translation of verbs, and the Castilian is closer to the Ladino and Aljamiado than they are to one another regarding spelling. This suggests translation strategies differ between Ladino, Aljamiado, and Castilian and that there are further factors such as language change, language contact, or change in translation methods over time affect the translation of scripture.

Despite having no prior political experience and much less funding than many of his opponents, during the 2016 American presidential election, Donald Trump dominated the Republican primaries before proceeding to win the general election. This thesis seeks to examine the rhetorical strategies of Trump’s campaign and his debate tactics through the conceptual framework of ancient Chinese military thought, articulated in texts such as the Art of War and more broadly in The Seven Military Classics of Ancient China. Instead of treating Trump’s rhetoric as merely erratic and politically incorrect, this project attempts to understand the strategic efficacy of Trump’s rhetoric by using principles such as tao (the way) and shih (the strategic configurations of power). Drawing on game theory, media studies, and classical texts on rhetoric, the project situates Trump’s campaign within our modern attention-scarce media environment where speed and virality outweigh coherence and specificity. In this context, Trump’s reductive and compressive rhetoric, through, for instance, his use of nicknames and hyperbolically simple narratives allows him to dominate the attention-scape of our media. This thesis uses classical Chinese military philosophy to construct a framework in which political campaigns can be viewed as a game of resource management and logistical planning that is expressed through rhetorical battles. Ultimately, it proposes that Trump’s communicative style exemplifies a form of rhetorical warfare that is oriented towards efficiency, resourcefulness, innovation, adaptability, and the momentum of public energy.

This thesis analyzes the digitally mediated forms and aesthetics of contemporary Asian North American poems, performance, and internet art on/about glitchy or non-performing feminine Asiatic cyborgs. Situated at the intersection of Asian American studies, posthumanism, and new media studies, it posits that the cyborg, as an enduring techno-Orientalist trope, continues to index the West’s anxieties about an Asianized future at the same time that it focalizes longer histories of Asian racialization emerging lockstep with shifting im/migration, aesthetics, and labor arrangements. Such arrangements, I argue, are reflexively tied to legacies of Western cybernetic history, US imperialism and Cold War militarism in Asia, as well as the global restructuring of capital engendered by the rise of information and communications technologies. To that end, this project traces how the feminine cyborgs in Chia Amisola’s poetic manifesto, “How to become a cyberfeminist” (2025), and performance art piece Himala (2024), as well as Franny Choi’s and Margaret Rhee’s poetry collections, Soft Science (2019) and Love, Robot (2017), respectively, come to instantiate the “real-life cyborgs,” or, the contemporary feminine Asian subjects discursively and materially shaped by enduring techno-Orientalist scripts and imperialist histories across multiple scales and geographies. I contend that Amisola’s, Choi’s, and Rhee’s turn to intentionally impractical or ornamental glitchy aesthetics and digitally mediated forms––manifest as broken codework poems, non-executable algorithms, lagging sounds, and corrupted graphics––as both mode and method, might, in turn, configure a feminist Asian diasporic cyborg poetics that critically maps and resists the ways in which contemporary feminine subjects come into being or legibility through digital objects. Ultimately, this project examines how strategic glitchy embodiments of the cyborg might enable us to imagine alternative relationalities or more capacious modes of being for Asian diasporic women dis/placed by the multiplicities of empire in increasingly intimate and de-territorialized ways.

Over the past few decades, scholars of videogames have increasingly turned to phenomenological theories to explicate the situated, material qualities of videogame play. In this thesis, I aim to reflect on my experiences playing the survival games They Are Billions and Don’t Starve, paying close attention to the phenomenological qualities of these encounters and how I bodily adapted to the challenges each game offered. I first outline the existential phenomenology of Maurice Merleau-Ponty, followed by an introduction to Vivian Sobchak’s phenomenology of cinema and Don Ihde’s phenomenology of technology. I then explore the ways in which videogame scholars have applied these theories in their own work, noting how the focus has shifted from avatarial control and mastery to the player’s physical real-world body as it interfaces with the game, the game hardware, and input devices, as well as the importance of diversity and representation within gaming spaces. These insights served as a lens through which I interpreted my time playing They Are Billions and Don’t Starve. Whereas They Are Billions allows players to view the world from afar and requires an intuitive knowledge of how far to explore, Don’t Starve limits the player’s access to the world to the perspective of an avatar, and the avatar’s survival needs drive the player forward. Both games possess flexibility in terms of how difficult a game world players wish to generate, as well as the ability to be modded by tech-savvy players. An issue that remains however is that the cast of characters available in Don’t Starve adhere to the default white and male bodies found in mainstream videogames and who continue to be considered as the normative audience of games.

The late medieval romance poem Sir Gawain and the Green Knight has long been a text of interest for medieval ecocritics. Scholarship on the subject frequently rehearses a framework of difference, most locatable in the poem’s narrativization of conflict between the cultural world of Arthur’s court and the natural world of the Green Knight. Though these are interesting considerations of the poem’s ecology, they also reproduce anthropocentric perspectives that pit a cultural “inside” against a natural “outside,” which makes nature an inevitably threatening space. Adapting the scientific premise of ecotones to a literary framework, this thesis argues for the importance of transitional ecologies in SGGK. My approach is in keeping with the principles of fourth wave and material ecocriticism, which increasingly looks at the interconnectedness of human affairs and the natural environment. Using Jacques le Goff’s nature/culture framework, Eleanor Johnson’s writing on wastelands, and Robert Pogue Harrison’s account of medieval forests, this thesis examines the natural landscapes of SGGK and how they intersect, overlap, or stand in for cultural spaces. I argue that the borders between nature and culture are ecotonal, meaning that they are permeable and unfixed. Next, I extend this reading to argue that the animals, humans, and creatures in SGGK also display similarly ecotonal characteristics by reflecting, embodying, or infringing upon one another. I conclude that SGGK presents a complex medieval perspective on the environment, with a particular interest in the subversive possibilities of ecological transition. This thesis proposes that alternative sites of focus for literary ecocritics can generate fuller understandings of medieval relationships with the environment.

This thesis attempts to theorize racial substitution as a form of Asian American critique which expresses both a desire of seamless representation and the impossibilities of this seamlessness. Contextualizing the definition in seamlessness in terms of Asian American racialization, whiteness, and as a product of digital and textual editing, racial substitution emerges as an expression of the “intermediary position” of Asian Americans in North American racial politics, as defined by Susan Koshy. Racial substitution builds on José Esteban Muñoz’s theory of disidentification and Tina Chen’s theory of Asian American impersonation to interrogate how Asian American artists, writers, and critics interact with the performances of popular culture to replace white actors or characters with Asian Americans to advocate for visibility, and how this act also destabilizes the terms of inclusion in these representational regimes. The first chapter analyzes William Yu’s social media campaigns, #StarringJohnCho and #SeeAsAmStar, to explore how he uses digital tools to curate and rework posters and film clips to replace white actors with Asian Americans. Though Yu turns to these software for their editing capabilities to create images and videos as seamless as the original, his substitutions reveal their own seams through juxtaposition, estrangement, and uncanniness, gesturing to the impossibility of seamlessness. The second chapter departs from digital editing to literary, examining how, in Superfan, Jen Sookfong Lee employs literary editing, an aspect of which is her tendency to substitute pieces of popular culture into her own life or her own image into popular culture, in order to disrupt the genre of memoir and autobiography and its traditional convention of constructing a seamless self. Analyzing how racial substitution operates in these projects reveals a limiting preoccupation with whiteness and the complicity of this mode of critique in racial hierarchies, but it also highlights the impossibility of seamless replacement, opening up possibilities to alternate modes of Asian American imagining.

This thesis examines the non/representation of selfhood in Sarah Kane’s plays Blasted (1995), Crave (1998), and 4.48 Psychosis (2000), in relation to themes of death and desire. In her works, selfhood is dispossessed within precarious diegetic and theatrical geographies, alienated from one’s own corporeal reality and disembodied speech, and dissipated together with stable dramatic character. Kane stages an active disintegration of identity, yet the self’s desire to be rid of self-consciousness remains a construct of consciousness. Similarly, on the level of theatrical representation, Kane’s experimentation with language’s “pure” phenomenality is also inevitably obstructed by its signifying power. The desire for death thus becomes a relentless process of dying and survival; theatrical gestures towards pure experientiality are always already mediated; and invocations of impersonal, citational speech are always embodied and spoken by bodies on stage. Drawing on Theodor W. Adorno’s aesthetics of negativity, Maurice Blanchot’s self-annulling literary practice, and the lineage of crisis in the text-performance relationship from Antonin Artaud’s Theatre of Cruelty to postdramatic theatrics, I argue that Kane’s works stage failures of vision, identity, immediacy, and transcendence both as a continual deferral of possibility and hope and as an invitation to an ethical spectatorship that endures collectively in the absence of the object and understanding. The nihilistic images of ontological nothingness, in turn, intimate an ethics of perseverance and survival – one in which the subject persists not by affirming its own coherence, but by always inhabiting indeterminacy and remaining vulnerably exposed to what exceeds and unsettles it.

This thesis compares representations of artificial intelligence in the texts Erewhon (1872) by Samuel Butler and The Age of Spiritual Machines: When Computers Exceed Human Intelligence by Ray Kurzweil (2000). Through comparative analysis as a method of investigation, I argue that together, these works demonstrate hyperstition, a process where fictional concepts are manifested in cultural realities, by mythologizing machine intelligence as an all-powerful force that will overtake humanity. The key finding of my research is that despite their respective differences in time period and genre (late nineteenth versus cusp of twenty-first century, science fiction versus speculative non-fiction), the rhetorical modalities in Erewhon, involving a melange of evolutionary theory, religious metaphors and technological determinism, are also present in The Age of Spiritual Machines. Works like Kurzweil’s, despite their roots in science fiction, continue to influence contemporary perceptions and discourses on artificial intelligence. Kurzweil is not the first nor last to imbue machines with spiritual significance, but only one example of this larger cultural phenomenon. Thus, my research explores the extent to which hyperstition can explain the ways in which speculative representations of machine intelligence have shifted from their precursory imaginings in Erewhon to Ray Kurzweil’s The Age of Spiritual Machines. In the first chapter, I outline the broader theoretical and historical foundations of my work. Chapter 2 examines how the texts use rhetorics related to technological determinism, humour, religion, and evolution to contribute to the mythologization and elevation of artificial intelligence to an almost godlike (or daemonic) entity. Finally, the concluding chapter discusses the wider societal implications of the belief in AI superintelligence as a hyperreal, hyperstitional phenomenon.

This thesis traces themes of desire, in/completeness, queer selfhood, and historical allusion in John Cameron Mitchell’s 2001 film Hedwig and the Angry Inch and Ocean Vuong’s 2019 novel On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous. Both works depict queer protagonists who relish in what Vuong describes as the “deep purple feeling,” a feeling that is “not good, not bad, but remarkable simply because you didn’t have to live on one side or the other” (Vuong 122). I use Lacanian psychoanalytic thought to contextualize the ways in which this is a specifically queer feeling, and I draw a connection between the abstraction of these emotional binaries and the experience of desire as an agent of solving a queer self-impression of incompleteness. I also explore the film’s and novel’s allusions to Plato’s Symposium as a method of articulating the incomplete feeling that motivates the protagonists’ erōs, finding that gnōstic production functions as a substitute for the acquisition of the “lost” Other. I discuss the Lacanian “mOther tongue” as a representation of the heterosexual matrixial rules internalized by both protagonists and their objects of desire, and frame the oppressive nature of the mOther tongue as a function of internalized homophobia. I am interested in understanding whether contemporary queer experiences of desire and incompleteness can be made sense of using classical frameworks of queer life. References to Plato’s Symposium and Ancient Greek homosexual life suggest that the act of reckoning with a complex queer subjectivity can be simplified by the privilege to relate to classical depictions of queerness.

This thesis examines video game story construction through a cognitive linguistic approach, specifically questioning how meaning emerges in video games where there is a participatory player within the narrative. Dancygier’s (2012) theory of the emergent story argues that stories are created within the reader’s mind through the interaction of the reader with a novel. I propose that a similar process occurs when players interact with a video game, creating an emergent story and experience. This conclusion is supported by my analysis of video game design, particularly mandatory versus non-mandatory player actions and player-playable character relationships. This discussion illuminates how the video game treats the player as a separate entity from the playable character. Thus, I argue that a conjoined viewpoint is created between the player and playable character, allowing players to participate in a set sequence of narrative events while maintaining gameplay agency. When extending this theory to player enjoyment, I theorize that the emergent experience is integral to player retention and repetition, but players must also be restricted to some degree to maintain narrative cohesion. With the focus on meaning construction, this thesis provides a foundational work for approaching video games as a unique storytelling device.

This thesis considers queer fan readings of the television series The X-Files (1993-2018), arguing that the series’ use of episodic and serialized storytelling both enables and challenges such readings. Rooted in my personal experience with the series’ fandom, I draw upon queer theory, television studies, and film history in my analysis of the show’s form and of its protagonists, FBI agents Mulder and Scully. In my first chapter, I examine the varied forms of queer fan engagement with the series, considering how some read diverse sexual and gender identities onto the characters, while others identify an underlying queerness within Mulder and Scully’s heterosexual relationship. I take up the latter notion in my second chapter, arguing that the series implicitly queers Mulder and Scully by depicting their relationship as non-normative and emphasizing their lack of interest in heteronormative familial structures. Mulder and Scully’s subversive skeptic-believer dynamic, intellectual sparring, and frequent flirtation align them with the relationships depicted in screwball comedy films of the 1930s and 40s, a parallel which highlights their non-normativity. My analysis considers how the series’ use of episodic storytelling in both conventional and experimental episodes highlights and heightens the queer dynamics in Mulder and Scully’s relationship. I also consider, however, how The X-Files’ serialized episodes limit the queer potential of its episodic storytelling. In particular, I examine how the series’ overarching mythology becomes increasingly intertwined with narratives of family, heterosexuality, and reproduction. The series demonstrates an obsession with the family, repeatedly reconstituting the nuclear family only to destroy it. I suggest that the series is fundamentally unable to reconcile normative family structures with Mulder and Scully’s queer relationship dynamic, yet persistently attempts to do so. Considering Judith Roof, Lee Edelman, and Gary Needham’s writings on narrative, futurity, and linearity, I ultimately argue that the series’ commitment to serialization—and by extension, commitment to normative familial structures—inhibits the queer potential of its episodic storytelling.

Monique Truong’s southern gothic novel Bitter in the Mouth and Catherine Hernandez’s migrant novel The Story of Us are Southeast Asian narratives that reimagine narratives about the Vietnamese refugee and the Filipina domestic worker. They not only detail the common struggles that the Southeast Asian subject experiences but also examine the overlooked moments and temporalities of rest, intimacy, and agency nestled in Southeast Asian life. Within these novels, the affective force of indifference disrupts the conventions of gratitude and subservience expected from Southeast Asians in the US and Canada. In Truong’s novel, indifference carves out ways and worlds for the refugee to feel refuge marvelously beyond the assimilationist logics set by the nation-state. In Hernandez’s novel, indifference carves out ways and worlds for the Filipina domestic worker to endure the confines of work as a full-time live-in caretaker and ekes out more expansive imaginings of the domestic. My thesis turns to indifference, as both a state of being and style, to examine what inexpressiveness affords the Southeast Asian subject. Through indifference, I conceive of a different notion of carework that is situated in tending to the self, relations, and well-being of the Southeast Asian. Chapter One analyzes Truong’s Bitter in the Mouth for how the Vietnamese refugee’s indifference ruptures the linear and neat temporality of refuge. Through its unexpectedly indifferent narrator Linda, Truong rethinks what it means for the refugee to experience refuge, the received temporality of the “good life” and the obligations that come with it, indifferently. Chapter Two examines how indifference emerges within the Filipina migrant domestic worker’s experience of work time in Hernandez’s The Story of Us. MG’s indifference to the temporality of work time emerges as a practice to survive work, as opposed to life as a whole, and limns the excesses of selfhood and relationalities within the domestic that fall outside of the transactional exchange of labor and capital. My conclusion leaves the reader with a notion of home that is built by the affective blocks of memory and kin, a home whose warmth and love can be felt again and again within oneself.

This thesis straddles literary criticism, poetics, musicology, sound studies, esthetic and affect theory, as well as modernist, Caribbean and Black studies to perform musically inflected literary analyses of non-representational poetry: the portrait of Jacque Lipschitz by Gertrude Stein and the conceptual long poem Zong! by M. NourbeSe Philip. I argue that both authors use sonic-literary spectral voice-loops as devices to bridge and generate disparate states of consciousness inaccessible by semantic referentiality of a language operating within oppressive systems of power. Primarily a phenomenological study, the thesis analyzes how literary loops generate in readers states of threaded focused and unfocused attention which open their consciousness to a more robust passing of affect that is then mobilized to reshape hierarchies by transforming subjectivity into a force of esthetic, socio-political and ontological change. Following a theoretical introduction (chapter 1), chapters 2 and 4 combine critical and poetic registers of language to lay out my main ideas and the scholarship I mobilize to textual analyses in chapters 3 and 5. In chapter 3, I close-read Stein’s portrait of Lipschitz through, formally, the Nāṭyashāstra esthetic theory, Indian raga and American musical minimalism, and, conceptually, the musical quality of timbre: which, I argue, Stein operationalizes to embed “esthetic flavours” of the objects of her acts of portraiture in herself and then the reader in an impressionist synchronization of affects, instituting an “erotics of difference.” I propose “spectral reading” and “subjective correlative” as new devices for poetic analysis. In chapter 5, I close-read multiple fragments of Zong! through fugue, calypso, polyvocularity and the Sufi religious practice of dhikr whirling to argue that the poem metaphorically apprehends the necessity of counterpoints becoming subjects as opposed to being subjected, in Philip’s politico-spiritual project of restoring dignity and justice to the victims of slavery and the violence of colonialism. I explore how Zong! turns its readers into surrogates that presence and revive the souls of Africans murdered on board the British slave ship Zong, making each act of reading—loud and silent alike, through loops of attention and words that revolve to the point of blurring—a ritual of creation.

This thesis investigates the relationship between the vertical space, the poetic forms, and the revolutionary ideas in W. H. Auden’s and Eugene Jolas’s aeronautical writings in the interwar period. The air assumed unique metaphorical significance after WWI: the apocalyptic vision of airstrikes made the air an augury for danger, but apart from military implications, the spirituality of vertical ascension still attracted Neo-romantic authors to restore the mythological power to the air. The poetic perspective from the air, “the hawk’s vision,” also became problematic, since it translated not merely into the social concerns of the airminded intelligentsia, but the elitist and individualist detachment from the earthbound masses. I argue that such internal polysemy of the aeronautical tropes enabled interwar poets to incorporate their social and political leanings into their imaginative engagement with the air. In the second book of The Orators – “Journal of an Airman,” Auden shapes the protagonist as a neurotic pro-fascist revolutionary, and creates a “verbal anarchy” through the juxtaposition of multiple linguistic and literary forms. Jolas, on the other hand, envisions the messianic refiguration of human society in a series of aerial fantasies, which relies on the revolution of language through techniques like neologism and polyglotism. This thesis follows the New Formalist approach to these formal designs and considers them as of a political nature. The first chapter probes into the forms of obscurity and esotericism in Auden’s “Journal,” reading his linguistic chaos as the symptom of his ideological vacillation and political probabilism. The second chapter introduces the formal features of Jolas’s cosmopoetics as a curative scheme in response to the defeatist depiction of the sky as Auden’s. The third chapter inspects the idea of revolution in these formal experiments and reveals three underlying pairs of binary structures as the genuine meaning-making mechanism, namely the dialectics between collectivity and individuality, artistic leadership and social spontaneity, and ascent and descent.

This thesis close reads Larissa Lai’s long poem Iron Goddess of Mercy (2021) and Jin-me Yoon’s videography and photography exhibit About Time (2022) as Asian Canadian cultural productions that critique the settler colonial state through positioning the Asian settler of color and their histories in relation to those of Indigenous peoples. This project is motivated by the overarching question of: What frameworks can open up Asian-Indigenous relations of solidarity and disrupt settler colonial impasses? Contextualizing the term “settler of color,” specifically in relation to Asian settlers, Chen Kuang-Hsing’s concept of “inter-referencing” is joined with frameworks of non-linearity as methodology for opening up possibilities for Asian and Indigenous coalition and orienting towards each other as reference points, rather than centering the West. The first chapter examines Larissa Lai’s inter-referencing of non-linear frameworks through the Taoist I Ching and Stó:lō practices of remembering with direction as a starting point that produces an alternative inventory of empire and further generates potential points for Asian and Indigenous inter-referencing. The second chapter focuses on the imagery of digging across Jin-me Yoon’s works as a framework of “vertical time” that uncovers overlapping histories of empire and shared reference points through place-based methodology, as well as her imagery of mound-building as an honoring of the excavated histories and as a Korean and Coast Salish reference point in itself. Ultimately, this thesis argues that non-linear reorganizations of time can alchemize our different but always interconnected positions and histories into overlapping genealogies of empire and foster Asian-Indigenous practices of inter-referencing that produce alternative epistemologies and methodologies and, in turn, disrupt colonial impasses.

This thesis examines representations of human and nonhuman bodies in techno-saturated, late capitalist urban cityscapes in two contemporary works of speculative fiction, Kazuo Ishiguro’s "Klara and the Sun" (2021) and Roy Miki’s "Mannequin Rising" (2011). In its reading of "Klara and the Sun," the thesis argues that the first-person narration, perceptual framework, and empathetic decision-making of Klara, an android programmed to be an "Artificial Friend," gestures toward a speculative form of posthuman subjectivity that nonetheless resists established posthumanist paradigms, such as those of N. Katherine Hayles. The novel's quasi-dystopian setting further emphasizes the "mechanisation" of human life juxtaposed with the anthropomorphisation of Klara. Turning to Mannequin Rising, the thesis examines how Miki's experimental poetry reconfigures subject-object relations within consumerist urban spaces. Through both visual and textual imaginaries, Miki's mannequins emerge as self-aware, reflexive figures that mirror the commodification of human bodies. At the same time, Miki's narrator is characterised as a poetflâneur, who uses acts of observation to destabilise the posthuman logics that structure the poems' cityspaces. Finally, the thesis brings both works into dialogue with one another, focusing on the shared image of the robot/mannequin behind the storefront window. In this configuration, how does narrative subjectivity for nonhuman figures promote a defamiliarising, speculative form of empathy in readers of these texts? And to what extent does it renegotiate the social and ontological boundaries between human and nonhuman?