Thoughts on Affect: Reading Harold Innis, Donald Creighton, and Sylvia Van Kirk

Date
2016
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Abstract
This thesis focuses on three fur trade history texts: Harold Innis’s The Fur Trade in Canada, Donald Creighton’s The Empire of the St. Lawrence, and Sylvia Van Kirk’s Many Tender Ties. Using the works and concepts of theorists Donna Haraway, Gilles Deleuze and others, it is argued that each text, through its subject matter, reveals an element of more-than-humanness. The condition of more-than-human calls into question the conception of a human as a stable and singular subject, and the pre-eminent position of the lone human agent within the study of history. This post-humanist analysis allows for a re-reading of these fur trade histories by challenging how the intentional human agent in history is perceived and reproduced in text. In order to initiate a re-reading, each text is re-cast into a different genre in order to prompt the reader into thinking about these history texts in radically different terms. By accentuating the literary nature by which these three historical works operate, the inherent aesthetic and ethical weaknesses imbued in history’s representation and production of the subject and agency are revealed. By putting forth the Deleuzian conception of repetitional thinking as an alternative, this thesis hopes to subvert and ease the grasp of representational thinking on the study of history.
Description
Keywords
History, History--Modern, History--Canadian
Citation
Turner, D. (2016). Thoughts on Affect: Reading Harold Innis, Donald Creighton, and Sylvia Van Kirk (Master's thesis, University of Calgary, Calgary, Canada). Retrieved from https://prism.ucalgary.ca. doi:10.11575/PRISM/28432