Abstracts

Abstracts appear in alphabetical order according to the presenters first name.
*Please note abstracts have not been edited.

Anita Buick
University of Alberta, Comparative Literature Master’s
Mutuality in Transnationalism: Relational Feminism and Poland in the Age of Transnationalism
With the porousness of borders and the multi-faceted and fluid conception of national identity, one is unable to escape issues of transnationalism.  Transnationalism and transnational feminism both have been criticized for perpetuating Euro-American assumptions and universalizations about those who are not of the West by assuming a homogenous and universal understanding of ‘nation,’ one that does not apply to Poland and other countries of Central and Eastern Europe (CEE), where nations are conceptualized ethno-culturally and, therefore, not restricted by state borders.  Transnational (Western) feminism is also accused of homogenizing and essentializing feminists whose ideologies do not fit what it has been deemed the mainstream in several ways, from using essentializing terminology to assuming a universal patriarchal framework, an ineffective approach in Poland and other CEE countries where oppression has been a matter of class/politics.  However, transnational feminism should not be dismissed as nothing other than a vehicle for the perpetuation of Euro-American ideologies.  The main goal of feminism is to help improve women’s lived situations and by introducing relational feminism into both transnational feminism and issue-focused engagements with other societies, the standard problems of homogenization, universalization, and essentialization should be resolved.  Relational feminism on a transnational level applied to national (civic or ethno-cultural) issues would bypass the ideological indoctrination inherent in current transnational processes and remain within the realm of the lived experience, which is where those whom feminism claims to want to help are struggling, resisting, or just trying to survive.

Banan AlJahdali
University of Alberta, Comparative Literature Master’s
Hayy Ibn Yaqzan: A Philosophical Work
Ibn Tufail’ Hayy Ibn Yaqzan is considered the most important and influential work in the philosophy of being (Ontology). In this work, Ibn Tufail reconciles religion with philosophy.  This paper is an attempt to show how Ibn Tufail was a medium between Ibn Sina and Al-Ghazali; how he succeeds in proving the existence of thing empirically, and whether his background as Muslim has influenced his philosophical approach. 
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Bindu Bhatia
University of Alberta, Comparative Literature Master’s
It's a Girl!:  An Insight into the Empowering of Woman by Sexual Abuse
Mary Wollstonecraft (1759-1797) and Shashi Deshpande (b. 1938) are two important revolutionary writers of great consequence in the history of woman’s rights movement of their respective societies. Mary Wollstonecraft, also called the mother of Western Feminism, has played a key role in shaping and identifying the potential of the women of her times. She defies the position acquired by women in her society by not disparaging them but by pointing to them their true vocation. One such writer involved in uplifting the women of Indian society is Shashi Deshpande. Her works accentuate the woman deprived of love, understanding, and companionship in Indian social milieu and She shows how the traditional Indian society is biased against woman. Separated by generations and still homogeneous in their voice against the oppression on the women by the social order gives ample reason for their comparative study. 
Mary Wollstonecraft’s work Wrongs of The Woman talks about similar issues as discussed in Shashi Deshpande's novel The Dark Holds No Terrors. It has been centuries since man's fear of castration has lead him to empower women in ways unacceptable. Both works, set in different era, underline “the use of sexual power as a tool for power.” Through this paper I would like to discuss the contentious issue of sexual abuse in marriages. The paper would centre its attention on the reasons why this parasite of abuse is still part of the modern advanced social structure with the protagonists of these works in mind.

Catherine Melnyk
University of Alberta, Comparative Literature Master’s
Madness Examined in Lu Xun’s A Madman’s Diary and
Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s The Yellow Wallpaper
Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s The Yellow Wallpaper (1892) and Lu Xun’s A Madman’s Diary (1918) are two complementing works that both deal with a narrator’s descent into madness. While Lu Xun is Chinese and Gilman is American, the two authors can be considered contemporaries of one another as they both wrote during the nineteenth and twentieth century and have both been considered modernist writers. It is interesting to note that the subject of madness was a prevalent theme for both of the authors, and the concept of madness can be argued as a global point for intersections within literatures, transcending language, culture and the idea of nation. Both Xun and Gilman use the short story to delve into issues of authorial intent, the reliability of a narrator, and finally, the issue of madness illustrated by the characters of their texts. Madness is used as a narrative tool by Gilman and Xun respectively to discuss issues of gender, social change, and cultural revolution. Although separated by thousands of miles, Gilman and Xun struck chords with their respective cultures by including and weaving in the voice of a mad character into their literary works. In this essay it will be argued that Gilman and Xun use the language of health and illness to comment on their cultures’ social and medical conventions of the time, and that madness within the short stories is used as a literary agent in order to promote change, comment on society, and cause site for literary critical discussion.

Chuckie Patel
University of Alberta, Comparative Literature Master’s
Walking in another Man’s Moccasins:
 Cultural Stereotypes Disseminated in 200 years of Popular Culture
As Europeans began to migrate and colonize the ‘New’ Western World, frontier stories presented a mythology and set of values that were integral to forming a part of the American identity. By labelling this hemisphere ‘The New World,’ colonizers indicate first, their ethnocentricity in placing the ‘Old World’ (European nations) above all others, and second, their presumption in declaring a world was empty of inhabitants. The indigenous peoples were either forgotten, or treated as uncivilized creates. Their narratives continue to be ignored or misrepresented.
In recent years, there has been a greater movement to depict the lost voices of these peoples. But though these bodies of works attempt to sympathize with the Native American people, the same set of stereotypes continue to be observed. Spanning two hundred years, James Fenimore Cooper’s The Last of the Mohicans, Laura Ingalls Wilder’ Little House on the Prairie and Disney’s production of Pocahontas all contain the same stereotypes veiled under the guise of sympathy. These narratives are depicted through the lens of the European Colonizer, and thus their ‘sympathetic’ portrayal of Native Americans is neutralized.

Dr. Cindy Chopoidalo
Lakeland College, Instructor
Hamlet and Humour
Humorous adaptations of Shakespearean tragedies such as Hamlet range from the nineteenth-century genres of burlesque and travesty to postmodern parody/satire/pastiche. Some of these works, such as John Poole’s Hamlet Travestie of 1810, the “collage” productions of Joseph Papp and Charles Marowitz in the 1960s, and John Reed’s All the World’s a Grave of 2008, produce new fictional worlds literally from the material of the earlier one, and in doing so are able to critique the literary/dramatic conventions of Elizabethan Britain as well as of their own times and places. Other humorous adaptations of Hamlet are meant less as deconstructions of their literary genres than as playful reimaginings, attempts to lighten the mood of what is, in its original form, a dark tragedy. This is the approach Ona Winants Borland takes in the 1912 play Omelet and Oatmealia; while Robert Barnard, in his 2002 short story “The Fall of the House of Oldenborg,” plays upon both the Shakespearean text and the genre of the detective story. Yet even these adaptations, in inviting us to laugh at, or with, a much-revered and much-studied literary work, serve as reminders of the Shakespearean text’s use of humour in the face of tragic events.

Collette Leung
University of Alberta, Master of Library and Information Science and Humanities Computing Master’s
                                       ‘Foreign’ Languages as Native Identities: 
                                                The Case of English and Nigeria  
Increasingly in foreign diasporas, English is being used as a ‘lingua franca’, a means of communicating between people of different cultures with different linguistic backgrounds.  The use of English in such diasporas, is changing the language itself, as well as reshaping culture.  This paper seeks to examine the case of Nigeria through the use of pidgin, political and social uses of English, educational language policies, as well as the use of English in literature and the media.  This, in turn, exposes the development of culture and nationality in Nigeria, and the ‘foreign’ language of English becomes a means of native identity for Nigerians.  Literature becomes a much broader intersection of language and culture than a simple duality of “North and South” or “local and foreign” can portray, and the language of English itself is reappropriated and changed in these uses.

Cristy Duce
University of Lethbridge, English Master’s
Imperial Romance: Romance and Relationship as a Tool to 
Illustrate Larger Societal Forces
Authors use romance and interpersonal relationships to illustrate larger political and social forces.  The characters in selected post-9/11 Pakistani novels particularly demonstrate the authors’ concern with forces of imperialism and colonialism, both past and present, and the ways in which these forces create violence and international hierarchies.  These hierarchies play out on a more local scale as well in the form of intranational conflicts that create tensions between characters of even the same nationality, but belonging to a different ethnic group or socioeconomic class.  As the public cannot be separated from the private, all relationships within the novels are shown to be influence and dictated by who governs and how, and who holds power and why. Therefore, the relationships within these novels are useful as both allegories of larger forces as well as direct evidence of the results of these forces.


Danielle Lamb
University of Alberta, Comparative Literature PhD
Re-reading Sor Juana’s Response in Contemporary Chicana Poetry
Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz is well known in Latin America as the seventeenth century nun, poet, playwright and author who sought to defend the intellectual rights of women. Although some feminist critics crown Sor Juana the “first American feminist” others are reluctant to provide her with such a title.  Despite these different opinions however, most scholars agree that the impact of Sor Juana’s writing on Chicana literature cannot go unnoticed.  Chicana poets, because of their shared motherland and mother tongue re-imagine, Sor Juana for inspiration. In the first part of this essay I will provide a feminist reading of the letter Response to the Most Illustrious Poetess Sor Filotea de la Cruz (Response) written in 1651 to demonstrate that the images, themes and political ideologies that Sor Juana brings forth act as a watershed for Chicana poets, including Lorna Dee Cervantes.  Almost three hundred years after the death of Sor Juana Cervantes re-reads and re-imagines the Response in her poem “Beneath the Shadow of the Freeway” (1981). Cervantes’s poetry depicts the struggles of being a woman, a Chicana, a person living adrift in two cultures, and the linguistic hybrid weaving together Spanish, English, and caló. Cervantes’ poetry echoes Sor Juana’s vindication in that she describes the struggles of being a woman but at the same time it is different because she is doubly othered by her gender and her race.

Darcy Gauthier
University of Toronto, Comparative Literature PhD
Between Bodies: The Theatre of Abe Kobo Studio
Abe Kobo’s personal history serves as a topographical map of modern alienation: growing up in Manchuria, Abe was always (geographically, culturally) positioned somewhat outside the mainstream, able neither to identify with the essential image of ‘Japan’ as it was officially constructed, nor, constantly reminded of his Japanese-ness, to uncategorically become a‘Manchurian’. It is no surprise then that Abe’s creative works are often concerned with the themes of belonging and alienation and characterized by a scepticism towards nationalism and other sources of authority. Abe’s work as such is easily situated within the discourse of hybridity and postcolonialism, and his experimental theatre serves as a profound example of resistance to cultural and corporeal imperialisms. Focusing on the Abe Kobo Studio (1973-79), I propose that its experimentations with the audiovisual capabilities of theatre -- its resistance to logocentric theatre and its emancipation of the body from pre-inscribed patterns of movement -- can be understood as an articulation of resistance to two of the zones through which a hegemonic order most claims its authenticity: language and the body. The body can be, in Foucault’s well-known formulation, a passive “inscribed surface of events”, but it can also be, if mobilized like in Abe’s plays, a site of active resistance to inscription: a body that moves with its own patterns and is capable of, as Elizabeth Grosz writes, “the possibility of a counter-strategic reinscription.”

David Buchanan
University of Alberta, Comparative Literature, PhD
Print and Politics: the Case of Ján Kalinčiak’s Reštavrácia: Obrazy z nedávnych čias
This paper provides a situational and material history of Slovak author Ján Kalinčiak’s (1822-71) historical novella Reštavrácia : Obrazy z nedávnych čias (1860), including descriptions of: (1) the emergence and development of Slovak language and literature, c.1790-1850; (2) print and publishing in Slovak, c.1850-1870; (3) the formal and thematic resources of Reštavrácia; and (4) the negotiation of Slovak self-identity and group formation within the Kingdom of Hungary, c.1840-1870. Reštavrácia is recognized as a literary classic in Slovakia and commonly associated with national aspirations on Slovak territory in the Romantic period. It is also a unique chronotopic adaptation of the popular historical romance form developed by Walter Scott, Honoré de Balzac, James Fenimore Cooper and others relative to the social, economic, and political circumstances of Slovak readers.

Faiza Ahsan
University of Alberta, Comparative Literature Master’s
On Ideal Man: Resonant Voices from the East and the West
This paper explores the idea of ideal man as presented by the Pakistani National poet, Allama Muhammad Iqbal (1877-1938) and a Brazilian writer, Paulo Coelho (1947-) in some of their selected works. Both these writers propound that by developing positive qualities in the self, individuals can become strong enough to control their destiny and be close to perfection. For this purpose, I have focused on Coelho's prose work, Warrior of the Light: A Manual (1998), and Iqbal's selected poems from his Urdu poetry collections.  One of the aims of comparative analysis of literatures from different parts of the world is to look for similarities and differences in them, but not with the aim of judging but in order to celebrate difference. Another reason is the need to discern certain universal patterns of positive human behavior in order to bring the ‘parts’ of the world closer to each other. Yet another aim is to bring together the world-views of two geographically very distant authors, and to converge and / or overlap their philosophical stances regarding the personal development of man in order to form an extensive sketch of the characteristics of an ideal man that Iqbal and Coelho wish everyone to become.


Fernando Moreira
University of Calgary, Bachelor of Arts Multidisciplinary Degree
Pure and Precise: Writing and Arbitrary Symbols
Germaine de Stael’s Darwinist perspective regarding literature is evident in his quotation; as it promotes an incorrect and Eurocentric conception of what constitutes a “pure” and “precise” written language.  In fact, the modern dictionary definition of literature is no better: “writings in which expression and form, in connection with ideas of... ...universal interests are characteristic... ...features in poetry, novels... ...and essays.” 
I propose a redefinition of literature returning to its basic component: written language.  On its own, written language has two fundamental components worth studying: the arbitrary symbols and how they represent objects and ideas.  As a point of departure, this essay will first present a brief summary of writing systems including: pictographic, logographic, syllabic and alphabetic.   Second, argue against the classic Darwinist tendency to organize writing systems within an evolutionary sequence beginning with “primitive” pictorial systems that eventually become sophisticated alphabetic systems.  Third, dispute the Eurocentric attitudes that only graphically recorded spoken language allows us to express all thoughts, no matter how abstract (Boon 1994:7).  Lastly, stress the importance of contextualizing writing systems within a broader socio-cultural reality.  These arguments are developed using examples from Mesoamerican texts and art.

Francisco J. Gómez
Athabsaca University, Integrated Studies Master’s
The Collective Memory of Latin America
The Latin American region, comprising almost six hundred million Spanish and Portuguese speakers within twenty American countries, is a coalescent multicultural force that embraces common experiences of external coercion and a sense of identity shared by a single drama. From native cosmology and cultural indoctrination, this preceding colonial mentality created transformation in intellectual and moral values within the American continent.  The changes, brought by European colonization, gave form a new way of thinking and perceiving the world reflected in the postcolonial mentality of imposition and European acculturation that lessened and depreciated indigenous values. Additionally, the multiplicity of landscapes, shapes, sounds and colors of the New World gave birth to a novel language able to describe this rich cultural and biological diversity in a land of stunning geographical contrast. Later on, with the arrival of modernity, the universal acceptance of different cultures and the globalized liberal values generates a bond with the Old World that remains vivid.   We are still sharing the inherited doctrines of the enlightment and the Latin languages of Spain and Portugal. Nevertheless, the ancestral wisdom of native tongues language still part of the new postcolonial citizens of Latin America that share the collective memory of a continent.

Gabrielle Kristjanson
University of Alberta, Comparative Literature Master’s
Treacherous History and The Effect on Readers of Gary Jennings’ Aztec
 Aztec (1980) is a monumental historic fiction novel in which Gary Jennings allows the reader to experience Aztec culture, lifestyle, geography and politics both before and during the Spanish conquest by following the life of his main character, Mixtli. It is an attempt to give voice to the historically marginalized indigenous people. The similarities between this telling and the historic Spanish narratives are stricking, both in style and content, but not without problems. The relationship between narrator and narratee in Aztec reveals the biased nature of both Mixtli’s own telling and the Spaniard’s reception of his telling which is extended to the reader through an act of ethical judgement. These same problems are thus extended to the historic records. Investigation into these records reveals aspects which Jennings took and expanded upon, including the real-life basis for Mixtli, as well as points of divergence between the narratives. Through these similarities and differences, Jennings impresses his own personal bias toward the Euro-dominant historic record onto the reader via the structuring and development of his characters. As a whole, the novel works toward a depiction of historic record as inherently flawed and history iteself as a flawed discipline, easily dominated, manipulated and deceived.
 

Hanna Chuchvaha
University of Alberta, Modern Languages and Cultural Studies / Art and Design PhD
Marketing and Means of Representation in the Russian Art Periodical
The Golden Fleece (1906-1909)
The words “book” and “text” are often interchangeable, so whenever we read a text, we simultaneously read a book. Before interpreting the meaning of the text, however, the reader attends to the visual/material elements—cover page, fly-leaf, title page, colophons, frontispieces, illustrations, and, eventually, the typographic features and general layout of the text and illustrations—everything that constitutes the whole package, which is called “the book.” In this case, the cover-page and title play the major role when the reader starts his/her personal involvement into the meaning of the text.
The proposed paper will deal with interpretation of text-image relationship that allows for three narratives to unfold: one told by the title (written words), another presented by the image (visual narrative) on the cover-page, and the third one told by interrelation of image and text. The main concern of this paper will be to investigate what did the image and title, placed on the cover-page of the first issue of the most luxurious Russian Modernist periodical The Golden Fleece (Zolotoe runo), 1906-1909, represent, and how all three narratives might be interpreted in the cultural context of the early twentieth century.

Jessica Friederichsen
University of Alberta, Comparative Literature Master’s
The Other Author: Rumi, Barks, and cross-lingual adaptations
Coleman Barks’ ‘versions’ of the thirteenth century Persian poet Rumi have propelled both men in Western pop-culture fame in a way that no poet has.  Why Rumi?  Why now?  Both this paper and Barks himself view Barks’ works as adaptations of Rumi, rather than as translations.  As the writer of a cross-lingual adaptation, Barks has the power to position Rumi and his work for readers unfamiliar with the originals. Barks’ versions are a palimpsest (Linda Hutcheon), but the original is inaccessible.  In prefaces, interviews, and even in his books, Barks speaks often of Rumi, emphasizing the distance between himself and Rumi, and minimizing the importance of Islam in Rumi’s work, de-hinging it from both author-ity and context.  In a culture of competing authorities (Anthony Giddens), celebration of layman knowledge (wikis), and preoccupation with individual experience (facebook), this lack of outside authority is far from discouraging; it opens the door for the layreader and welcomes her own experience.  The distances that Barks has written into Rumi – Rumi from reader, East from West, then from now – become an inviting space by Barks’ suggestion that none of these distances matter anyways; that Rumi is a universal poet. 

Kara Abdolmaleki
University of Alberta, Comparative Literature PhD
Particles in Love: Quantum Theory in Persian Classical Literature
This study is intended to offer a survey of the affinities, correspondences, overlaps and mutual impacts between the philosophical implications and interpretations of quantum theory on the one hand and literature on the other. The association of new physics with literature, especially the novel in the West, started with advent of modernist poetics and literature was a response to the philosophical impacts of new physics on our perception of reality. Some writers like Yeats, Pound and Proust went only as far as adopting new scientific metaphors to explain the process of poetic creation while others like James Mellard viewed the advent of new physics as an “explosion” which wreaked havoc on literature and especially the novel in the sense that the reality that literature was mimetically representing went up in smoke. The focus of this study is the exact point where literature—especially classical Persian literature and the poetry of Hafez and Rumi—sees the discoveries of quantum physics in a crystal ball centuries before physics came to be known as a science. 

Laura Graham
University of Alberta, Sociology Master’s
Ancient, Spiritual, and Indian: Analyzing Discourses of Authenticity in Modern Yoga
Representations of yoga in popular texts often rely on notions of its antiquity, spirituality and Indian origins to certify that they are authentic depictions. Yet the idea that “real” yoga is Ancient, Spiritual and Indian is built on four problematic assumptions: 1) there is an authentic, spiritual yoga that must necessarily reside in the East, understood specifically as India, 2) an inauthentic, materialist yoga which must necessarily reside in the West, 3) that modern yoga in the West and East must necessarily be different and (4) that Yoga is still “pure” in the sense of being classical or unchanged by modernity (hence, pre-modern) in the East and that any alterations (or modernizations) must have occurred in the West. This paper argues that these assumptions are unsupportable and in fact reify current power relations while obscuring the complexity of modern, pre-modern, Eastern and Western forms of yoga. Though modern yoga’s relation to pre-modern forms, origins, and religious content should never be dismissed, these concepts are not frequently mobilized as substantive subject matter in popular yoga texts. Rather, representations of authenticity most often appear as political, often Orientalist signifiers that must be critically interrogated.

Leah Skinner
University of Alberta, Comparative Literature Master’s
Def(y)ining a woman’s place: Assia Djebar and Abla Farhoud as 
female members of francophonie and beyond
As members of la francophonie, those countries that politically belong or colonially belonged to the national conglomerate of France, Assia Djebar and Abla Farhoud are part of a larger artistic debate that questions the persistent center-periphery model of terminology and social structure that frames the literary production of French-speaking writers. As made visible by the 2007 francophonie manifesto, “Pour une littérature-monde en français,” awareness about the power of definition is growing and concern about its manner of determining French identity is being voiced. Djebar, an Algerian-born novelist, translator and filmmaker is an internationally acclaimed member of France’s Académie française. Farhoud, born in Lebanon and residing in Quebec, is a novelist, playwright and actress who has worked and produced in many francophone countries, including France. In this paper, Djebar’s novel Ombre Sultane (A Sister to Scheherazade) and Farhoud’s play Les filles des 5-10-15c (The Girls of the Five and Ten) are examined as they question the definition of the “Other” from a feminine standpoint, revealing the tensions produced by operating within discordant francophone spaces. Just as the women that Djebar and Farhoud represent are searching to create their own social space free from center-periphery demarcation, so too is francophonie ready to shed its structured historical relationship with France and emerge as a unified, yet diverse and boundary-less French literary world/world-literature – littérature-monde.

Mai Hussein
University of Alberta, Modern Languages and Cultural Studies PhD
Wajdi Mouawad’s Theatre Going Beyond Borders
Described as "Lebanese in his childhood, French in his way of thinking and Québécois in his theatre, Wajdi Mouawad’s theatre seems to be a “crossroad” of cultures and themes. While writing theatre he is trying to blur the boundaries of language, of exile and of social and cultural confinement to span the cultural gaps that can exist between his native Lebanon, North America, Québec and Europe despite space and time barriers.
In this sense, this presentation aims to provide an overview of  Mouawad’s theatre in his journey of reconstructing postcolonial and hybrid identity through an imaginary time and space in his creative world of words. I will argue that such a trajectory leads to re-open widely the door to questions, interrogations and reflections of the audience/ or readers and to show how Mouawad’s theatre is at the nexus of contemporary preoccupations of the 21st century: the resistance to boundaries and confinement, the desire to create new dialogues between cultures and to create the image of the rhapsodic author able to remap and reread History outside the comfortable linguistic, cultural and geographical borders, to highlight the tension of what is said and what is done, to see the invisible and to say the unspeakable. 

Marina Ebrahimi
Brock University, Master’s
Representation of Iranian Women in North American Movies
I would like to investigates the [re]presentations of Iranian women in North American cultural imagination as manifested in three movies. I will contextualize these representations within 3 historical pivotal points: The Iranian Revolution of 1979, the September 11 attacks on the US, and the disputed 2009 presidential re-election. I argue that the portrayal of Iranian women during and after each of these crisis points have been tainted with the dominant discourse of the imperialist/colonizer: exoticzing and demonizing them, portraying them as backward, evil, ignorant, and in need of rescue from their superstitions, their patriarchal world-order, and their fundamental government. The movies I am looking at are: And In Love I Live, Prince of Persia and Women Without Men. The theoretical framework of this investigation is envisioned by
Michel Foucault’s concept of discourse analysis, whereby “Truth” is constructed by regulatory regimes of knowledge and power. This study is informed by postcolonial thinkers such as Edward Said, Frantz Fanon, Noam Chomsky and Homi Bhabha whose discussions on [trans]nationalism, cultural hegemony, human rights, decolonization, neo-imperialism and the constructedness of the notion of Orient and Middle East, are indispensable to understanding of how Iranian women are perceived in North America.

Michael J Brisbois
University of Calgary, English PhD
Resources and Apocalypse: The Challenge to Globalization
My presentation will explore the way the concept of Peak Oil has been represented in literature. The literary representation of Peak Oil, the idea that international oil production will sharply decline over the coming decades, is a recent development in apocalyptic literature. It represents one of the most compelling arguments against trends of globalization and so my paper would seek to answer the following questions: how do authors who use Peak Oil in their work challenge globalization and how do they represent the future through this engagement with Peak Oil and globalization?
My paper will use focus its attention on James Howard Kunstler`s 2008 novel A World Made by Hand. This novel explores the social and technological fallout of Peak Oil. Kunstler himself has written non-ficiton pertaining to Peak Oil, The Long Emergency (2005), and my essay will place his non-fiction in dialogue with his fiction to see where the literary representation differs from the supposedly factual information of the earlier book. Peak Oil is a way apocalypticists have begun to think about economic and environmental issues, but might still be regarded as a fringe or alternative idea; however, it does reflect a commentary on the way globalization has used resources and disturbed wealth. This critique of globalization is a growing and important literary motif and bears consideration.

Mike Perschon
University of Alberta, Comparative Literature PhD
Finding Nemo: Rediscovering Verne’s antihero
In the foreword to his annotated translation of Jules Verne’s Vingt mille lieues sous les mers (20,000 Leagues Under the Sea), Walter James Miller suggests that Verne’s image was in need of rehabilitation due to the plethora of poor English translations his works have suffered. With the emergence of better translations, the same need for rehabilitation has emerged for Captain Nemo, the anti-hero of Verne’s underwater adventure tale. In the updated, post-colonial English translations of The Mysterious Island, Nemo is revealed to be the antithesis of the Caucasian pop-culture iteration made famous by James Mason and most recently continued by Patrick Stewart and Michael Caine: an Indian prince whose real name is Dakkar, a leader of the Sepoy rebellion against colonial rule in 1857.  Mixing one part recursive fantasy, one part historical criticism, and one part textual analysis, this paper will demonstrate how, through his repeated death-and-rebirth cycle, Nemo embodies the process of an identity in-the-making.

Milana Bodiroga
York University, Interdisciplinary Studies Master’s
Andrić’s Architecture
When Maria Todorova examines Keyserling’s contention that if the “Balkans hadn’t existed they would have been created” in Imagining the Balkans she identifies a hole in Said’s popular orientalist dialectic as a model of narrative identity formation. Balkan scholars identify the interstitial nature of the Balkans in the global imaginary as being directly attributable to its geography, affecting the conceptual imaginary of self both in the West and the Balkans themselves.  Just as Said moved past the dialectic to a more complex, polysonic form of analysis in Culture and Imperialism, so too have Balkan literary and film scholars.  But before any of this; before Said, Foucault, Iordanova or Cornis-Pope/Neubauer, there was Ivo Andrić.  My paper examines how Andric’s complex construction of his Nobel Prize winning novel The Bridge on the Drina provides an attempt at a polyvocal, anti-imperial, anti-interventionist text that anticipates the complex multi-voiced narratives that would be a product of decolonization, the civil rights movement and feminism much later in the century. In the process, Andric provides a study in the complexity of the Balkans in their role as “bridge” between East and West, and how the inevitable flows of power through the region have a perpetually formative effect on the culture and people.

Mostafa Abedinifard
University of Alberta, Comparative Literature PhD
Reflections on Formal and Stylistic Aspects of
Marjane Satrapi’s Persepolis Series
Comics (“plural in form, used with a singular verb” as Scott McCloud notes), unlike what is regularly assumed, is not a genre, but an artistic medium, or “a form of expression” (Douglas Wolk). This, along with the fact that comics as “the sequential art” (Will Eisner) is the only medium rendered through the juxtaposition of “verbal and pictorial images” (W. Mitchelle calls comics “image-text”), makes works of comics highly suggestive of the artist’s style. In my paper, I intend to focus on some stylistic aspects of Marjane Satrapi’s Persepolis series. As Hilary Chute remarks, Satrapi’s style of cartooning has been “a subject of debate” to the point that some critics, in their discussions of Persepolis series, despite their praising its content, have “devalued its aesthetics”. I argue that although in her style Satrapi can be demonstrated to have been influenced by various cartooning styles, including the Persian miniature, she has managed to approach her partly borrowed style in a personal and creative manner. As I try to show through some examples, Satrapi has succeeded in experiencing some previously unexplored, yet powerful potentialities, of the styles she draws on, and has utilized such potentialities for more effective artistic expression in Persepolis.

Myron Soloduk
University of Regina, Graduate
‘Pop Goes the World’:  Pop Culture as Big Brother
in Thomas Pynchon's Vineland
Critical reception to Thomas Pynchon's Vineland typically views the novel as a rather jejune social critique of Reaganomics. Pop culture, in this context, becomes Pynchon’s method of mythologizing America, that is, pop culture is a creative, identifying force in the novel.  Pop cultural references and themes in Vineland, both on the narrative level, cited and referenced like scholarly documents, and the character level where actions become increasing similar to film and television characters, guide the meaning of the novel.  As such, "reality turns into its own appearance" (Zizek 28, his emphasis).  The dark heart of the novel, however, is its realism.  In contrast to the conspiratorial surrealism of Pynchon’s earlier novels, Vineland is much more of a social-realist novel than one would expect and depicts the hegemonic force that pop culture exerts on contemporary society.  Thus, Big Brother manifests in a parallax view, not in increased surveillance, but in the increase of television consumption, not Them watching Us, but in Us watching TV.  The plethora of fictional drama that supplants reality becomes the means of social control in the novel, where the ideas in circulation are those that come from pop culture.

Nicole Go
University of British Columbia, Asian Studies PhD
Chinese Coolies, (Auto-)Ethnography and (Post-)Colonial Spaces:  Racialized Labour in Japanese and Asian North American Literature
In David Henry Hwang’s The Dance and the Railroad (1981), a former Chinese opera singer practices his art with what remaining energy he has after a day working on the Transcontinental Railroad.  He says, “When my body hurts too much to [practice], I look at the other Chinamen and think, ‘They are dead.  Their muscles work only because the white man forces them.  I live because I can still force my muscles to work for me.’” Hwang’s work attempts to re-masculinize an Asian male subject castrated by the effects of indentured labour during the late 19th and early 20th century, a period formative to a modern, abject Asian North American subjectivity.
The abjectification of the Chinese body is also apparent in Natsume Soseki’s Travels in Manchuria and Korea (1909); however, coolies are racialized primarily through senses of smell and touch rather than skin colour.  Visual senses are reserved for admiring the Chinese body at work, with Soseki likening a group of coolies to vanquishing warriors in The History of the Chinese Armies despite their subjugated position.  In doing so, he gestures, as Hwang does, towards a lost culture swallowed by the workings of modernity.
This paper discusses author positionality and contemporaneity and its effects on literary representations of the Asian body in white and non-white spaces.  I will also explore how the demands for racialized labour influenced cultural identity formation during periods of intense nation-building.

Nicole Nolette
McGill University, French Language and Literature PhD
“When You Sing You Laugh at the Same Time. It Must Be Because You’re Winning Too!”: Partial Translation, Affect and the Audiences of Atanarjuat
In a recent article, Inuit literature scholar Sophie McCall has spoken of the subtitles of the film Atanarjuat, The Fast Runner as ‘partial translation’ (2004). She claims that the poetics and politics of this practice, in which some Inuktitut remains untranslated into English, can be encapsulated in the opening line of the film: “I can only sing this song to someone who understands it”. My interest here lies in how such ‘partial translation’ is defined, as well as the mechanisms by which this practice posits different audiences of the film in terms of their relation to the traditions of ethnography, of translation and of hermeneutics. While I believe that McCall may be right about one direction of translation in the film, its opposite direction, studied here, also contains subtle affects to which may be attributed poetics sand politics. This opposing movement of translation, in fact, may be embedded in the next line of the film, “When you sing, you laugh at the same time. It must be because you’re winning too!” Finally, I argue that the exploration of ‘partial translation’ in Atanarjuat may hold the first hints of an affective turn in translation studies.

Reza Ashouri Talooki
University of Alberta, Comparative Literature Master’s (2011)
Problem of Identity; Migrancy, Dispora, and Hybridity in E. M. Forster's A Passage to India and Michelle Cliff's No Telephone to Heaven
This paper examines the issue of identity in E. M. Forster's A Passage to India and Michelle Cliff's No Telephone to Heaven. Almost all the main characters suffer from 'diaspora' and 'hybridity' that migration has brought to them. The "liminal" space in which the characters are entrapped exerts dramatic constraints on them in so far as it is much too difficult for them to achieve any firm grasp of their national and cultural identity. Yet, the cases of India and Jamaica are very different; the former exhibits a dual sphere where the British, as the colonizers, and Indians, as the colonized, are both entangled, while the latter portrays the migration of a Jamaican family, The Savages, and the problems they experience thanks to 'migrancy'. The British and Indians, on the one hand, and the Jamaicans, on the other, set on a quest to attain a better understanding about their identity which comes to them in hybrid forms. Therefore, the identity the characters are after does not hold a stable status. Hence, literature is viewed as a sanctuary that represents the (post)colonial atmosphere of the nations that have strived to achieve the identity colonization and migration granted them.

Safaneh Neyshabouri
University of Alberta, Comparative Literature PhD
Representations of Touranians in Shahnameh
Shahnameh (Book of Kings), written by Hakim Abul Ghasim Ferdowsi has been viewed as the representation of the world from the Iran-centric point of view. The Persian nationalism derived from this epic paean is largely originated in the conflict between Iran and Touran. Shahnameh begins by a genealogy of the mythical royal family of Iran. Fereydoun is the fourth king in Shahnameh and it is with him that the Iranian history truly begins. He divides the world into three parts and assigns each of his three sons to rule over one part. Greece and the West are given to Salm, Turan and China are granted to Tur and Iran and Arabia are given to the youngest son, Iraj. Iran was considered the center of the world and was desired by the two older sons who kill Iraj out of their jealousy. This is the starting point of the conflicts and wars between Iranians and Touranians.
The epic-length conflict between Iranians and Touranians is the representation of the ways Iranians define themselves against the Tourani “Other”. Being of the same ancestry makes these relations to the Other more complicated. Using Todorov’s ideas on the question of the other as discussed in The Conquest of America, this research demonstrates how Touranians are represented in Shahnameh and how peace is finally achieved between the two nations by understanding the Other through filial relations.

Sarah Shewchuk
University of Alberta, Comparative Literature PhD
Women’s Voices, Historical Silences:
Reconsidering Léo Delibes’ Opera Lakmé and Giacomo Puccini’s Opera
 Madama Butterfly
Opera is an art form that uniquely highlights the human voice. Yet, in spite of the prominence of the operatic diva in nineteenth and twentieth century Western European society, in many instances within the operatic canon, women’s voices have been silenced. Through their recent socio-historical readings of opera, scholars such as Mary Ann Smart, and Linda and Michael Hutcheon, and Herbert Lindenberger have draw attention to the role of gender in opera. In this paper, I will explore the role of women’s voices in Léo Delibes’ Lakmé, a French opera that premiered Paris in 1883 and is set in colonial India, and Giacomo Puccini’s Madama Butterfly, an Italian opera that premiered in Milan in 1904 and depicts the interaction of the Americans and Japanese in Nagasaki at the beginning of the twentieth century. My examination will focus on the historical figures on which Lakmé and Cio-Cio San, the heroines of both operas, are based, the adaptation of the libretto of each opera from a literary work, the elements of Oriental exoticism in the libretto and score of both operas, and the reception of both works. My discussion will be informed by Edward Said’s discussion of Giuseppe Verdi’s Aida in Culture and Imperialism (1994), in which he explores the cultural implications of the premier of an Italian opera in Cairo in 1871 (112-32). Notably, Said is remarkably silent on the gender implications of the opera, and thus, through this layered reading, I will be able to undertake an examination not only of how Western opera represents Eastern women at a specific point in time, but also how contemporary scholarship shapes our understanding of operatic representations of the past.

Sergiy Yakovenko
University of Alberta, Comparative Literature PhD
Milan Kundera’s Concept of Die Weltliteratur
In this paper, I will try to trace Kundera’s notion of world literature as a part of his aesthetic and geopolitical viewpoints, juxtaposed with Goethe’s project of die Weltliteratur, as well as with the theoretical constructs of the contemporary comparative literature. Kundera’s die Weltliteratur, despite being almost totally Western-oriented and geopolitically biased, is concurrent with the twentieth-century comparatists’ endeavours to craft a theoretical model for the ever unstable object of comparative studies. Besides, Kundera’s critique of comparative literature, foreign literature, and other traditional literary studies encompasses such topical for the contemporary comparatism questions as accurate translation, unimportance of the national/original language of a work of literature, the problem of the large and small literatures, and the decline of the traditional university practices such as Slavic studies.
The provocative manner of Kundera’s reflections may seem revolutionary on the part of the national literatures demise to die Weltliteratur – an enterprise which looks especially scandalous for the Central-European literatures with their nation-ridden literary histories. Kundera’s despise for the Romantic “kitsch and vulgarity,” for the lyrical paradigm of literature under the rule of inhuman “History,” concurrent with the ongoing process of globalization, is inseparably linked with his preference for the history of the (Central-European) novel which – in addition – serves as a basic unit of his Weltliteratur.


Suzan Masoud
University of Alberta, Comparative Literature Master’s
Ghosting Others and the Compass Within: Psychological Divides in Five Mirrors
This paper is a comparative exploration of the psychological divides between the self and the other in an interdisciplinary selection of works: Sylvia Plath’s poem, “Mirror” (1961), Emily Dickinson’s poem, “I’m Nobody! Who are you?” (1861), Jean-Paul Sartre’s play No Exit (1947), Samuel Beckett’s play Waiting for Godot (1953), and Alejandro Amenábar’s film The Others (2001). My method involves using psychoanalytical and philosophical interpretations, tracing expositions of the tension within the self pertaining to the other. The theoretical literature I will use includes Jacques Lacan and Georg Hegel. My analysis is thematic; it does not focus on a perfect matching between works and theories. Rather, it is geared to generate further dialogue. Mirroring is the focal trope I will use to construct the different parts of the paper. My purpose is to explore how manifestations of the tension between self and other appear in the selected works, arguably joined by the mirroring trope, whereby the other is but self in the collective psyche. This paper will argue that an exposé of the divide within is necessary to understand the divide outside which is set by the compass that Germaine de Stael uses, for example, in his Northern-Southern classification of literature.

Svitlana Krys
University of Alberta, Modern Languages and Cultural Studies PhD
The French Jacques Cazotte’s and the Ukrainian Oleksa Storozhenko’s Tales 
About Enamoured Devils (1772 and 1861): 
Toward a Study of a Common Folkloric Source
While drawing heavily on Ukrainian folklore, Oleksa Storozhenko’s (1805-1874) long story Zakokhanyi chort [Devil in Love] (1861) also reveals surprisingly close textual parallels to the eponymous novella of the French Gothic author, Jacques Cazotte (1719-1792; Le Diable amoureux [The Devil in Love, 1772]). This article investigates whether these parallels speak of specific literary influences, which Cazotte’s narrative might have had on Storozhenko’s, or whether both authors were independently inspired by some universal, European fairy-tale or myth of the Devil in love. This is especially interesting given their documented fascination with folklore. To discover possible common folk origins, I utilize the international tale type catalogue by Aarne and Thompson and Thompson’s motif-index of folk literature.
My examination reveals that while elements of some general tale types and motifs are present to a greater or lesser degree in the narratives by Cazotte and Storozhenko, there is not a single folktale type or distinct folktale motif, which could serve as an archetype for the “devil in love” narrative. Moreover, my study shows that both authors significantly stylized the motifs and elements of the folktale types they used, reworking them according to the Gothic and Romantic tradition, rather than merely copying them from folklore. Thus, the textual similarities between Storozhenko’s story and Cazotte’s novella must be of literary influence, which debunks early scholarly assertions that Storozhenko drew his inspiration from Ukrainian folklore alone. On the contrary, I assert that his story is intertextually linked to his French predecessor, and like Cazotte’s, belongs to the genre of the kunstmärchen—the artistic fairy tale—rather than the folkloric tradition, although both authors borrow excessively from the latter.

Tegan Zimmerman
University of Alberta, Comparative Literature PhD
Negotiating Masculine Economies in Ama Ata Aidoo’s “No Sweetness Here”
In Ama Ata Aidoo's short story “No Sweetness Here” the meaning of economy is defined in masculine terms. Aidoo suggests that patriarchal societies are based on an economy regulated, understood, defined, and put into place by men for men. Economy here not only refers to the public sphere but also to the private, and has the sense of oikonomos "one who manages a household or family” but also suggests "thrift," "direction," "administration," "arrangement," and "public revenue of a state" (“Economy”). I will argue in my presentation that in this short story two different kinds of patriarchy are operating but that they each function according to a privileging of the position of man in opposition and in relation to woman, including structuring and constructing the material and social spheres, both publically and privately. Evidence for this reading is best exemplified in Maami Ama, the story's protagonist, her son Kwesi, and Kwesi’s westernized school teacher, only known as “Chica” in the story.

Wei Xu
University of Alberta, Comparative Literature Master’s
Problematizing the Subjectivity through Deviance in Evelyn Lau’s 
Runaway: Diary of a Street Kid
In this paper, I attempt to explore the representation of deviance in Evelyn Lau’s autobiographical narrative, which is incarnated and lensed through the runaway/prostitute subject in the heroine’s incessant escape. The runaway motif, in the sense of both geographical dislocation and narrative remapping, effects the deterritorialization of systems established by patriarchal discourses. The prostitution motif in the narrative, serves to counter the patriarchal discourse inscribed onto the heroine’s body. The two deviant representations are meant to disturb the very identity, system and order in the postmodern sense, rending the subject “I” multiple, contradictory and discontinuous. I argue that Lau’s autobiographical voice, either as a “street kid” on the run or as a “fresh girl” to sell out, reiterates a discourse of deviance (or ex-centricity) in questioning the normative epistemology and transgressing the hegemonic culture imposed by both patriarchal Chinese and Canadian imperatives. This literary endeavour should be intended to eliminate Lau from the identity dilemma but paradoxically complicate the relationship between dominant Canadian society, Chinese community and Evelyn Lau herself, thus aggravating the tension around the site of struggle for the emergence of ethnic minority works and providing a forum for an ongoing debate on the responsibility of the ethnic author towards his/her writing.

Wenjuan Xie
University of Alberta, Comparative Literature PhD
Prolematizing Sex, Sexuality, and Gender:
The Identity of Transgender Fox Spirits in Chinese zhiguai tales
Folk tales constitute an important cite for cultural truth – the space where gender identity is constructed, and in some cases, contested. Chinese zhiguai tales provide such a locus of questioning and prolematizing sex, sexuality, and gender in their transgender imaginations. Zhiguai, literally meaning writing/recording (zhi) supernatural/strange tales (guai), is a genre of Chinese tales that take the factor of guai, or the supernatural/strange, as the basic generic feature. The erotic trafficking between transgender fox spirits and human beings presents exemplifies the essential guai element of the genre. Transgender foxes in zhiguai include the male fox who atones for his sexual crimes in female form and the bisexual fox who seduces both the husband and the wife. However, historically a genre dominated by male authors, compliers and readers, the Chinese zhiguai tales inevitably is created with an implied male perspective. My interest is to explore: what male anxieties are projected in these tales of gender subversions? What aspects of human sex, sexuality and gender are examined? What new sexual and gender possibilities are conceived in parodying human desires through the creation of an alien species?

Yared Mehzenta
University of Alberta, Drama Master’s
Beyond the Racial Stereotype: Tracing a Relief-Theory of Humor in
the Comedy of Russell Peters
One of the most assured ways for a comedian to get a laugh is to fall back on self-deprecating racial humor. This is especially true for comedians belonging to ethnic minorities. Arguably, racially specific humor is at its best when it exploits those ethno-cultural practices that deviate most noticeably from dominant, white, middle-class values and norms. For ethnic minorities living in Western societies, the habits and tendencies that are unique to a particular racial or cultural group and which differ palpably from mainstream social behavior pose a constant threat to one’s ability to ‘fit in.’ Cultural differences, insofar as they carry with them the capacity to mark one as different, as ‘other,’ constitute a source of ever-present anxiety for the ethnic minority in day-to-day life. Racial humor, then, plays on this anxiety in an attempt to defuse the power of racial or cultural difference-markers, functioning as a ‘relief-valve’ by which the anxiety caused by the potential threat of ostracism is replaced by a communal recognition of shared experiences between joke-teller and audience member, and between audience members themselves. Through a discussion of the racial humor used in the routines of Indo-Canadian stand-up comedian Russell Peters, this paper argues that despite relying often on stereotypical portrayals of ethnic characteristics, ethnic humor ultimately serves a democratic function: it legitimizes not the stereotypes themselves, but the cultural differences on which the stereotypes are based, creating a space in public discourse where such differences may potentially co-exist comfortably with mainstream social codes of behavior.