Browsing by Author "Lai, Larissa"

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    Allegory and Apocatastasis: Walter Benjamin and the Image of Neoliberalism
    (2023-08) Groh, Benjamin; Xie, Shaobo; Camara, Anthony; Lai, Larissa
    This dissertation argues that Walter Benjamin’s image of allegory as at once an encounter with a “ruin” and “a petrified, primal landscape” can only be analysed through the prism of a wider critical program that takes into consideration a larger aggregate of his key concepts. The term apocatastasis does not appear often in his writings, but it refers to a sudden intensity of recognition wherein “the entire past is brought into the present.” Rather than a mythic moment of total knowledge, this dissertation argues that Benjamin uses apocatastasis to conceptualize the recognition and preservation of dialectically (i.e., historically) cancelled values. This moment of recognition, or Jetztzeit, corresponds to an authentic political experience—an understanding that the present is not a repetition of previous historical events, but a unique string of values that requires unique, political actualization. Apocatastasis, as this dissertation conceives of it, is a mode of reading that places three key terms in tension: allegory, image, and secularization. These three terms contain a multitude of others that all contextualize the scene of an encounter with some ruined, historical phenomenon (allegory). This dissertation will then use this reading method to critique the ruin of neoliberalism—an allegorical scene par excellence. Through Benjamin’s unfinished writings about the allegorical nature of the commodity form, this dissertation argues that the unique value that emerges in neoliberalism is display value. Display value enables the reification of—and the continuing commodification of—language itself, in ways that were still developing in classical liberalism. With the origins of this value emerging in Baudelaire’s Paris, this dissertation will also attempt to contextualize the extent to which display alters the scene that is still unrecognizable as anything but liberalism to the majority of readers today.
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    "as memory permits": Chasing the Spectre of the Indian Agent through Kin and Archive
    (2023-08-17) Brown, Christopher David Paull; Mayr, Suzette; Lai, Larissa; Prud'homme-Cranford, Rain; Janoviček, Nancy; Geller, Danielle
    “as memory permits”: Chasing the Spectre of the Indian Agent through Kin and Archive is a dissertation in two parts: a mixed-form memoiristic work of creative writing prefaced by an exegesis. The exegesis begins with an historical overview of the elusive figure of the Indian Agent, coupling the extensive historical work of John Steckley and Beth Piatote’s theoretical deconstruction of figure to shape an archetype of colonial power within the greater structure of settler colonialism in Canada. I then delve into the scholarship of archival studies, drawing from Antoinette Burton, Saidiya Hartman, Cystal Fraser, and Zoe Todd (among others) to outline limits of and spaces of potential within the colonial archive. In drawing upon the work Margaret Kovach and Willie Ermine, I consider the ethics of engagement for a settler scholar like myself within spaces like the colonial archive. Finally, the exegesis offers a literature review of biotexts and archival writing which serve as frameworks for my own “archive story” (Burton 6), including Daphne Marlatt’s Ana Historic, Fred Wah’s Diamond Grill, and M. NourbeSe Philip’s Zong!. The creative text which follows is a reflection of my process of searching for traces of my grandfather – and in particular, evidence of his role as an Indian Agent – within various modes of archive, ranging from the national archives in Ottawa to the disappearing archive of my grandfather’s memory towards the end of his life. “as memory permits” necessarily interrogates the elusive “voice” of the Indian Agent in its exploration of my grandfather’s role as District Supervisor for the Department of Indian Affairs and Northern Development Canada. While this project is foremost a work of nonfiction, the manuscript also blends elements of fiction, poetry, and found archival text, ultimately shaping a narrative that complicates its genre. Above all, the text is a self-reflexive inquest of my own position as a settler and a descendant of a primary colonial agent in Canada’s long-baked system of settler colonial oppression.
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    The Cure for Plastic
    (2019-11-21) Forestell, Peter; Van Herk, Aritha; Sullivan, Rebecca; Lai, Larissa; Sumara, Dennis J.; Williams, Ian
    The Cure for Plastic explores a gay man’s relationship to effeminacy through his attempts to adopt traditionally feminine roles, particularly those of the spinster and the homemaker. More specifically, when faced with the primary care of an infant, Lawrence, the narrator, mines his memory to answer the question of why he agreed to adopt the baby in spite of his own reluctance and lack of support from his husband. The uncomfortable, unsatisfactory answer lies with stories of Lawrence’s female role models, his relationships with women, and his own desire to put his house in respectable order. Rooted in his love for women and, at the same time, his misogynistic caricaturing of them, Lawrence’s narration explores the many, and often problematic, ways in which white gay men envision women, femininity, and their own effeminacy. In a time of climate panic, environmental crisis, and the emergence of a vibrant, increasingly intersectional queer community, Lawrence’s inward turn also marks a desire for the privilege of safety, literally the comforts of home, even as they fall away. The critical afterword explores Lawrence’s taciturn narration in light of his troubled adoption of these opposing, yet traditionally feminine roles. This problem is considered from historical, literary, stylistic, and personal perspectives. First, The Cure for Plastic is considered in light of the history of the novel, asking whether this novel, with Lawrence at the helm, constitutes a novel at all. Second, the detritus of the ocean becomes a metaphor for the impulse to tell stories. Third, Lawrence’s resistance to narrative strategies that transform spinsters into mothers is explored through a reading of Anne of Green Gables. Fourth, narratives of gay vanity, especially that of Gaëtan Dugas, often mislabeled the AIDS Patient Zero, are explored to root out the effemiphobia of gay men. Fifth, the literary landscape of New Brunswick is considered against the work of Antonine Maillet, and her ear for orality. Sixth, Lawrence’s relationship to women and traditionally feminine roles are critiqued in light of the misogyny and transmisogyny of gay men through a reading of Peter Wildeblood’s Against the Law and E.M. Forster’s Maurice. Finally, Alice Munro’s distaste for literary “tricks” becomes the basis for a style.
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    Dispersal: A Novel
    (2020-04-27) Delaney, Trynne; Mayr, Suzette; Lai, Larissa; Moss, Michéle; Srivastava, Aruna
    Dispersal follows moments in the lives of Harbour, LaVon, Kaya, and an alien who live on an Atlantic Canadian landscape that is deteriorating due to climate change. As their lives and relationships intersect they find their understandings of the landscape that they live on changing and their understanding of their “selves” as unstable, malleable, and sometimes transferable. Dispersal asks what our relationships mean to each other, our pasts, presents, futures, when our worlds and our planet seem to always fall apart and reemerge as something new and strange.
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    Figuera: Traversals of Gender in Interactive Fiction
    (2017-12-15) Osborne, Heather; Forlini, Stefania; Lai, Larissa; Camara, Anthony; Shepherd, Tamara; Mohanraj, Mary Anne
    Figuera, a speculative interactive fiction game, uses the digital authoring system Twine to build a multilinear narrative. This work emerges from a tradition of feminist and queer authors, including New Wave science fiction writers Samuel Delany and Ursula K. Le Guin, and Twine digital game creators Anna Anthropy and Porpentine. Figuera acts as a critical fiction by joining what bell hooks terms a community of resistance: the Twine revolution, a school of queer and trans digital game creators who express their lived experiences of marginalization through digital games. Playfully transgressing the connection between the material body and gender identity/expression, I work to decenter dominant narratives by disrupting default novel-reading strategies. My game depicts a secondary world in which families assign their children’s gender at age fifteen, a world inspired by Judith Butler’s theories of gender performativity. Three narrative strands follow young people whose queered gender expression clashes with their families’ wishes. In contrast with the non-linearity of postmodern hypertext fiction, Figuera uses digital constraints to maintain continuity and promote narrative closure. Unlike traditional interactive fiction, Figuera guides readers with links rather than text input. The work’s visual design echoes the aesthetic of the Twine revolution, while my invitation to readers to intervene creatively with the text matches the Twine revolution’s goals of accessibility and open expression. Readers may perform multiple traversals of the text; the different narrative strands act as motifs for the work’s themes. The text offers the reader meaningful choices: the reader can navigate to discrete endings. Each narrative line contains deliberate gaps, such that multiple readings are required for a richer understanding of the characters and the world; the game’s structure rewards playful, explorative, and repeated readings. In form and content, Figuera expresses a feminist and queer politics through creative intervention.
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    Mixed Race Asian Subjectivities and Genres of the Self
    (2019-04-29) Mah-Vierling, Jade Aliya; Lai, Larissa; Srivastava, Aruna; Janoviček, Nancy; Prud'homme-Cranford, L. Rain
    Through the work of life writing, this thesis examines representations of mixed race Asian subjectivity. Although the idea of “race” is a social construct with no biological essence, race continues to be enacted through racism and racialization, making it “real” through embodied experiences and systemic inequalities. Through my exploration of genres such as memoir, biotext and documentary, this thesis sheds light on the disruptive potentials of multiracial discourse when it comes to ideas of race, identity and nation. The mixed race subjects depicted in these texts create ruptures in these settled categories of belonging by transgressing their boundaries and in doing so, pointing out their constructedness. However, in other moments, these constructs remain intact, holding the mixed race subject inside a particular category that may not align with her or his self-identity. In All Our Father’s Relations, for example, the Musqueam-Chinese Grant siblings are forced out of the racial category of “Indigenous” and into that of “Chinese” due to the gendered, patriarchal language of the Indian Act. Differently, for Diamond Grill’s narrator, he is able to let moments of racial misrecognition “ride” by choosing to slip beneath normative configurations of race and nation while he attempts to understand his racialized experiences. Finally, in Hapa Girl: A Memoir, May-lee and Jeff Chai slip in and out of particular racial and cultural spaces as they internalize the labelling of their bodies. Ultimately, these racialized experiences inform how the mixed race subject sees and produces her or his “self” through the work of life writing.
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    Penetralia
    (2017) Nelson, Brandon; Lai, Larissa; Clarke, Michael; Janovicek, Nancy; McGillivray, Murray
    Penetralia is a short fiction collection that occupies the fissures between the minds and bodies of its protagonists. Each story involves an uncanny disruption of identity that results in personal, social, and sexual convulsion and collapse. The convulsions are many: a man finds wisdom in silence when he is numbed and unable to speak during a tooth extraction, a woman uses cuddle parties to escape her anxiety and obsessive rituals, Marlene Dietrich converses casually with a marketer licensing her image posthumously, a confused revolution strikes its first blow after a fertility clinic refuses to inseminate across racial lines, a renowned writer plagiarizes from a schizophrenic homeless man, and a stand-up comedienne listens for echoes of herself from the other side of the spotlight. The mundane combines with the bizarre to disorient and unnerve bodies that have palsied in the grip of a modernity circling back to feed on itself.
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    Refractions: Queer History Cast Through Experimental Poetry
    (2024-01-16) Meunier, Paul; Sullivan, Rebecca; Lai, Larissa; Sullivan, Rebecca; Lai, Larissa; Prud'homme-Cranford, Rain L.; Mason, Derritt; Leblanc, Jean-René; Crawford, Lucas
    Refractions, the creative manuscript in this dissertation, presents a long-form poetry narrative of the figurative being Thousand, born through refracted light in future Calgary, Alberta, that follows their search for family in an unfamiliar space. Divided into five “Movements” that emulate a symphony, Thousand’s search for their parentage reveals a familial fabric of queerness and kinship, beyond the nuclear family unit, as they slowly learn of the community network that surrounds them. In this future space, mothers and aunts create worlds like gods, characters forge bonds across thresholds of life and death, and queer parents represent a space for love, creation, and generative capacity, outside of traditional notions of progeny. Refractions is a story of queer kinship, chosen family, and ontological awakening. As Thousand learns where they come from, authorial memoirs are stored, illuminated, and shared within the site of the queer and future archive. By exploring multidirectional conduits between past and future, Thousand not only learns of where they come from and the formative powers of chosen family, but they discover their own language for queer identity, agency, and the capacity to pursue an undefined future. The critical exegesis presents a lineage of creative foundations and theoretical examinations that influence this manuscript. These include the short stories that weave antinarrative together in Wayde Compton’s The Outer Harbour, and the speculative fiction and mythmaking in Catherynne M. Valente’s Silently and Very Fast. Theoretical reflections underscore the importance of writing as community-situated, the politics of cultural appropriation, ethics and accountabilities. Refractions also considers the charge in José Esteban Muñoz’s pursuit for queer utopia, mindful of how Joan Retallack’s “The Poethical Wager” challenges writers to explore ethically and responsibly. In this way, Refractions considers how Thousand might hold their own space, agency, and limitless potential to pursue a Queer Poethics.
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    Smutty Alchemy
    (2021-01-18) Smith, Mallory E. Land; Sigler, David; Lai, Larissa; Jenkins, Jacqueline; Camara, Anthony
    Sina Queyras, in the essay “Lyric Conceptualism: A Manifesto in Progress,” describes the Lyric Conceptualist as a poet capable of recognizing the effects of disparate movements and employing a variety of lyric, conceptual, and language poetry techniques to continue to innovate in poetry without dismissing the work of other schools of poetic thought. Queyras sees the lyric conceptualist as an artistic curator who collects, modifies, selects, synthesizes, and adapts, to create verse that is both conceptual and accessible, using relevant materials and techniques from the past and present. This dissertation responds to Queyras’s idea with a collection of original poems in the lyric conceptualist mode, supported by a critical exegesis of that work. “Smutty Alchemy,” the poetry collection, navigates lyric and conceptual traditions and forms to discuss scientific subject matter, taking as a focal point the work of Margaret Cavendish, a writer at the start of the seventeenth-century scientific revolution. The exegesis aims to situate the collection, “Smutty Alchemy,” within the intellectual context both of contemporary Canadian poetry and of creative-scientific writing. Stylistically, “Smutty Alchemy” speaks to the concerns of lyric conceptualism by blurring the lines among lyric, conceptual and language poetry traditions, playing with such recognized forms as sonnets, triolets, epic poems, and free verse, as well as refigured poetic shapes, such as the element poems, the cursed sonnets, and invented poetic shapes, such as the tardigrade-shaped poems, which specifically reference concrete poetry. Feminist writers and critics can both refuse to limit subject matter or style based on the autobiographical and confessional modes of the lyric poets and still discuss the mark of the personal upon even the most process-intensive poetics and “objective” voices. Additionally, they refuse to adhere strictly to any stringent rule-making of the conceptualists, or to choose exclusively a focus on language moments as do the language poets. My project explores this impetus towards the understanding of poetic forms, coupled with the impulse to delimit and expand the range of those forms by creating a poetry collection that pairs scientific subject matter with experiential knowing and the synthetic and invented poetic shapes of lyric conceptualism.
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    Spirits in the Gutters: The British Invasion and the Haunting of the Twentieth Century
    (2023-01-27) Sewel, Tom; Beaty, Bart; Xie, Shaobo; Lai, Larissa; Mason, Derritt; Murray, Chris; Beaty, Bart
    In this dissertation, I analyze the significant artistic and literary shifts initiated in mainstream US superhero comics by the British Invasion authors Alan Moore, Grant Morrison, Warren Ellis (among others), and argue that their restless curiosity in exploring how the comics page can come to make meaning is part of a tradition of literary production whose roots run back through the disruptive US/UK modernisms of the early twentieth century, the fragmented spiritual affects of Romanticism, and the dissonant overcomplications of Baroque art. I argue that that the impact of this group of writers instigated a sea change of generational proportions in the direction of American comics writing from the late 1980s to the early 2000s. This change began with an increased focus on textuality and the tropes of literary storytelling (such as unreliable narrators, non-linear narratives, and biting political allegory) but was always accompanied by and generative of an innovative and experimental approach to the mechanics of visual storytelling in terms of the manipulation of layouts, panelling, guttering, and other concrete elements of the comics page. US superhero comics written and illustrated by US creators published subsequent to the British Invasion and up to the present day, continue to reflect the deep shifts in aesthetic and literary preoccupations inaugurated by the authors of the British Invasion, with Moore, Morrison, and Ellis chief among them. At stake in this sea change is the figure of the unreconstructed, all-American superhero as a symbol of hope, justice, morality, and honour. I argue that the British Invasion authors brought a critical, intellectualized cynicism to their own superhero writing, which worked to create and sustain new audiences of more mature comics readers whose taste for overtly political or philosophical comics remains a powerful market force in the comics industry today. The Invasion writers changed the way that stories could be told in superhero comics, and while they may not have been successful in recouping the radical potential of the superhero as a figure of collective liberation, they heralded an enduring shift in the kinds of stories that mainstream comics were allowed to tell.
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    When a Body Sprouts: On BIPOC Bodies and Alternative Futurities in the Anthropocene
    (2024-01-11) Gowralli, Maryam; Lai, Larissa; Prudhomme-Cranford, Rain; Janovicek, Nancy; Umezurike, Uchechukwu
    When a Body Sprouts is a novel of speculative fiction and body horror. Set in the fictional city of Eden Prairie, the novel follows the protagonist, Telli—a transracial adoptee, who lives with a fictional autoimmune disease known as phylloderma: a condition which causes plants to grow outside of her body, generating various symptoms from hallucinogenic behaviours to the tightening of connective tissues. Used to a life of chronic-pain and living paycheck to paycheck, Telli works as a waitress at The Rhino. But when an encounter with her estranged adoptive mother and a Suit causes her symptoms to accelerate, Telli struggles to find meaning in her life as the structural powers that be continue to exploit her labour. Unable to control the constant sprouting of vegetal life and her dreams of faceless workers, Telli copes through cutting, collecting and preserving the very things which harm her. Delving into race, gender, class and environmental complexities, When a Body Sprouts focuses on the painful ripple effect of colonialism on racialized bodies and the more-than-human, while showcasing the capacity for renewal and patching together a fragmented life into something akin to a whole.
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    Where We Come From: A Fictional Study of Shame
    (2017) Stephen, Michaela; Mayr, Suzette; Lai, Larissa; Exner-Cortens, Deinera
    Where We Come From: A Fictional Study of Shame is a creative writing thesis that investigates family dynamics revolving around addiction, family shame, and rehabilitation. Taking place in modern day in the year of 2016, the novel alternates between two perspectives: China Rose Lewycka and her father Alek Lewycka. The novel begins with China Rose’s story as she checks into rehabilitation for alcoholism and sex addiction in Arizona, while her father encounters his personal failings back home in Nanaimo, BC. As the novel progresses, the setting shifts to Myanmar where Alek has traveled under the deluded belief of finding salvation through religion. Later, China Rose follows him fearing he seeks self harm. Where We Come From is a study of shame moving within and between bodies, a commentary on the prevalence of cultural tourism, and a glance at cultural dynamics. The novel asks the reader what it means to be rehabilitated. Religious discomfort is a common theme that is brought up by the discussion of healing and rehabilitation. The critical afterword, “Hungry Ghosts: Pursuing Shame in Where We Come From,” uses affect theory and addiction studies to deconstruct the novel’s approach to communication, relationships, and travel. With the help of theorists including Elspeth Probyn, Eve Sedgwick, and Gabor Maté among others, the exegesis narrows in on the prevalence of awkwardness, abjection, shame, and humour within the novel.