Browsing by Author "Coates, Donna"

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    Anxious Femininity: Rethinking Womanhood in Modernist Women’s Writing
    (2020-07-08) Lypka, Celiese Tamara; Vandervlist, Harry; Bennett, Susan; Coates, Donna; Hanson, Aubrey Jean; Medoro, Dana
    Affect, as an impersonal force, opens subjects, objects, and spaces to the intensities that surround us. As a future-orientated theoretical approach, affect is often considered in relation to its propensity for engendering “potential liberations, escapes, and freedoms” (Cooppan, “Memory’s Future” 56). But to be open to the future is to be vulnerable in the present, not only to potential positive encounters but also to harmful or dangerous ones. As Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari note in A Thousand Plateaus, the lines of affective relations between bodies and spaces are susceptible to both creation and destruction: “There is a danger that these vibrations traversing us may be aggravated beyond our endurance” (197). But what if these unknown encounters, which produce vibrations that could traverse us beyond endurance, offered space for potentially powerful acts of resistance that could create modes of being that reject hegemonic social orders? What if the politics of bodies that are affected by aggravation, anxiousness, and unease as they move through the world, were to be mobilized into affective confrontations with normative prescriptions of life, happiness, and success? In this reading, sites of potential destruction can generate a movement towards a self-indifference to normative rhythms of life (dictated by gender, race, class, etc.) rather than an act of social (or physical) annihilation. In choosing to ignore, displace, or obliterate the aggravations that saturate the lived experience of existing in conflict with dominant social structures, employing self- indifference reframes the aim of living outside of the pursuit of normative ideals on happiness and success. In this way, the affective impulses of anxious and uneasy aggravations could also push individuals past their endurance under social regulations into resistance and revolt. The focus of this dissertation re-examines early-twentieth-century women’s writing, correlating as a study in the proliferating affect of anxiousness in the formulation of feminine subjecthood after the turn of the twentieth century. Analyzing Nella Larsen’s Passing (1928); Jean Rhys’s After Leaving Mr Mackenzie (1931), Voyage in the Dark (1934), and Good Morning, Midnight (1939); and Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway (1925) and To the Lighthouse (1927), I examine the ways that anxiety as affect transmits between bodies and spaces, focusing on how feelings of unease can either constrain or release feminine potential. I argue that the writers dismantle the overwhelming sense of feminine anxiousness and unease that saturates their texts by creating ambiguous women who come to recognize their position as a misaligned with feminine ideals, exploring different orientations to the world and creating new worlds through their movements. This intervention into feminist scholarship shifts how we approach representations of the feminine, its production as performative femininity, and the potential of womanhood in modernist studies.
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    Booze, Temperance and Soldiers on the Home Front: The Unravelling of the Image of the Ideal Soldier: 1915-1916
    (2016) Wilson, Fay; Marshall, David; Coates, Donna; Brennan, Patrick
    During the Great War, Canadians were swept up in the rhetoric of a Holy War. Leading theologians presented the First World War as the purifying agent that would cleanse Canada and the world from evil influences. All hope was put upon the citizen soldier, who became the embodiment of Christ in the ultimate fight between good and evil. In the collective psyche of Canadians, the soldier was cast as the mirror reflecting the moral character and aspirations of purity. The lived experiences of soldiers stationed in Calgary and Winnipeg are examined under the pressure of being publicly scrutinized with respect to their patterns of alcohol use. Alcohol became the central issue that galvanized various groups in solidarity to move towards Prohibition as the ultimate war measure. However, these efforts directly affected military recruitment. This dichotomy served to alienate the soldier and the reality of his experiences from the home front.
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    Family relationships in the fiction of Mavis Gallant
    (1982) Coates, Donna; Dahlie, Hallvard
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    Horses and Mules of the Canadian Artillery and Ammunition Columns during the First World War
    (2016) Lemna, Samantha; Brennan, Patrick; Colpitts, George; Coates, Donna; Brennan, Patrick
    This thesis develops a narrative for the horses and mules of the Canadian artillery units and ammunition columns, while consequently expanding that of the soldiers serving alongside them. Carrying out mounted, draught, and pack work, these animals played an invaluable role in military operations and greatly impacted daily life. Immense effort was made to preserve the wellbeing of the horses and mules, although casualties were considered inevitable. The evolution of the acquisition, training, and transport practices of these animals and men is examined. This is followed by a general analysis of the labour performed and the working conditions, with specific battles given as case studies. The daily care that went into the horses and mules and the relationship between man and animal is also addressed. Finally, the negligible impact of mechanization is discussed.
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    Local Losses: Experiencing and Commemorating the First World War in Lacombe, Alberta, 1915-1938
    (2019-09-03) Mansell, Paige; Marshall, David B.; Elofson, Warren M.; Coates, Donna
    During the interwar period, many Canadians sought ways to commemorate the experience of the First World War and to cope with the devastation caused by the deaths of soldiers. The ways in which these people made sense of what they had experienced has been widely explored by many scholars. However, others have pointed to the need for further study at the local level, focusing on how people’s understandings of the war developed and were influenced by their communities. This study attempts to begin to fill this gap by systematically examining the experience of and the commemoration of the First World War in the town of Lacombe, Alberta, between 1915 and 1938. Using the personnel records and the war diaries digitized by Library and Archives Canada and the local newspapers from Lacombe, this thesis explores a sampling of the war experience, followed by a detailed examination of the local cenotaph, Decoration Day, Armistice/Remembrance Day, and commemorations revolving around the battle of Vimy Ridge. Through this study, the importance of the local community and the centrality of coping with the grief caused by the deaths of local soldiers is emphasized.
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    Making the Call: Reflections on This Is War
    (2020-04-28) Knight, John Milton; Brubaker, Christine; Farfan, Penelope; Coates, Donna; Balkwill, Peter
    This Is War by Hannah Moscovitch was produced by the University of Calgary Drama Division in the School of Creative and Performing Arts. It was presented in The University Theatre from October 18th to 26th, 2019. This artist statement is a critical reflection of the creative process leading up to the production, the production itself, and the audience response to the production. Chapter One describes how I first came to be aware of the play, what drew me to be interested in directing it, and what major themes and questions I explored throughout the creative process. The second chapter contextualizes the play within my research, detailing my focus on trauma as a central element to understanding the script. Chapter Three analyzes my working relationship with the production’s designers and explores the decision-making processes that led to our final designs. The fourth chapter outlines the approach from preparation for rehearsal, auditions, rehearsals, and into performance. Chapter Three and Chapter Four also detail in-process discoveries and learnings. The fifth chapter summarizes the audience response to the production as captured through post-show surveys and forum discussions. The final chapter reflects on the primary lessons of the overall process.
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    Nation-Building and Myth-Making in Contemporary Writing About the Canadian Experience of the First World War
    (2019-08-19) Nguyen-Sears, Hong Thi; Coates, Donna; Mayr, Suzette; Brennan, Patrick
    Pierre Berton’s 1985 account of the Canadian memory of Vimy Ridge begins: “It is probably that with the exception of the Krakatoa explosion of 1883, in all of history no human ears had ever been assaulted by the intensity of sound produced by the artillery barrage that launched the Battle of Vimy Ridge on April 9, 1917” (Berton 14). Thirty-three years later, Tim Cook’s begins: “The Vimy Memorial, with its white, almost luminescent stone, stands on the ramparts of a ridge in northeastern France, a site of mass killing and myth-making” (Cook 1). These two works considering Vimy Ridge, its memorial, and its legacy begin from two very different perspectives: Berton is grounded in the morning of the battle, which carries the significance of the most powerful volcanic eruption in known history; Cook begins his study immediately before the iconic memorial with an awareness of the century-long distance between his writing and the battle itself, and of all the weighty remembrance that distance has accrued for the Canadian memorialization of the event. Considered side-by-side, these two Vimys highlight the changes (and lack thereof) in popular and historical commemoration of the First World War. This project investigates the memorialization of the First World War and Vimy Ridge in through investigative readings of Timothy Findley’s The Wars, Jane Urquhart’s The Stone Carvers, and both Berton and Cook’s Vimys in the hopes of understanding possible nationalist drives creating and recreating the nation-building myth of the First World War in Canada.
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    Sharon Pollock : first woman of Canadian theatre
    (University of Calgary Press, 2015-10) Coates, Donna
    As playwright, actor, director, teacher, mentor, theatre administrator, and critic, Sharon Pollock has played an integral role in the shaping of Canada's national theatre tradition, and she continues to produce new works and to contribute to Canadian theatre as passionately as she has done over the past fifty years. Pollock is nationally and internationally respected for her work and support of the theatre community. She has also played a major role in informing Canadians about the "dark side" of their history and current events. This collection, comprised entirely of new and original assessments of her work and contribution to theatre, is both timely and long overdue.
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    The Sounds They Associated with War Came from Pianos, Not Guns: Anglo-Canadian Sheet Music and the First World War
    (2016) Wedel, Melanie; Marshall, David B.; Brennan, Patrick; Coates, Donna
    The study of wartime popular sheet music produced by Anglo-Canadians is vitally important, as it illustrates what was popular in society and demonstrates how Canadians reacted to the world around them. During the First World War, the medium of patriotic sheet music catalysed the management of morale during on the home front, as it offered an emotional outlet for thousands of people in desperate need of a diversion from the grim reality and toll of the war overseas. The cover illustrations, lyrics, and musical scores of hundreds of patriotic songs offer a useful lens into contemporary Anglo-Canadian society in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, as composers immortalized popular conceptions of war, identity, and responsibility on the pages of their songs. Patriotic sheet music therefore demonstrates the popular trends that led so many young boys to war in 1914, and helps to explain how Canadians reacted to the war on the home front.
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    Writing Alberta: Building on a Literary Identity
    (University of Calgary Press, 2017-05) Melnyk, George; Coates, Donna
    Alberta writing has a long tradition. Beginning with the pictographs of Writing-on-Stone, followed by Euro-Canadian exploration texts, the post-treaty writing of the agrarian colonization period, and into the present era, Alberta writing has come to be seen as a distinct literature. In this volume Melnyk and Coates continue the project of scholarly analysis of Alberta literature that they began with Wild Words: Essays on Alberta Literature (2009). They argue that the essays in their new book confirm that Alberta's literary identity is historically contingent with a diverse, changing content, that makes its definition a work-in-progress. The essays in this volume provide contemporary perspectives on major figures in poetry and fiction, such as Robert Kroetsch, Sheila Watson, Alice Major, and Fred Stenson. Other essays bring to light relatively unknown figures such as the Serbian Canadian writer David Albahari and the pioneer clergyman Nestor Dmytrow. Writing Alberta: Building on a Literary Identity offers a detailed discussion of contemporary Indigenous writers, an overview of Alberta historiography of the past century, and the fascinating autobiographical reflections of the novelist Katherine Govier on her literary career and its Alberta influences. This Collection demonstrates that Alberta writers, especially in the contemporary period, are not afraid to uncover, re-think, and re-imagine parts of Alberta history, thereby exposing what had been lain to rest as an unfinished business needing serious re-consideration.