Browsing by Subject "Nation"

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    From the Margins of History: Everyday Life and Narrating the Nation in British Fiction and Cinema After 1940
    (2021-07) Jeon, Bomi
    Analyzing British literary and cinematic texts since the Second World War, this project examines how these works embrace everyday life as a set of experiences that complicate official narratives of history and national identity. Throughout the last half of the twentieth century, there have been numerous efforts to define and rebuild a coherent British national character, in response to rapid and threatening social upheavals including the decline of the British Empire, postwar immigration, and economic globalization. Literature and cinema record this social transition in order to discover the possibility of a common culture; at the same time, they willfully challenge a fixed and stereotypical idea of British identity by exposing various gender, class, and racial differences and conflicts hidden behind monolithic accounts of the nation. Virginia Woolf, George Lamming, and Sam Selvon present prewar and postwar Britain as a zone of competing voices. They show how native and immigrant British subjects respectively produce critical readings of the island’s spatial history to deal with the sense of radical loss and dislocation caused by the War and decolonization. Toward the end of the century, Mike Leigh and W. G. Sebald register the unspoken boredom and melancholy deeply felt by historically marginalized individuals, representing multifaceted temporalities that effectively disrupt and renounce Britain’s linear narrative of progress and civilization. In particular, I focus on the ways these novels and films imagine diverse spatial and temporal narratives through their serious engagement with everyday life. As a perpetual emergent social sphere of human existence, the everyday in these texts marks a tension between collective and individual consciousness that encompasses locally situated aspects, power, knowledge, and the imagination of the social actors involved. The writers in my project locate these daily tensions in a dynamic social domain, in which a familiar story of the traditional community is constantly negotiated and sometimes subverted by another form of narrative signaled by creative interactions between ordinary people and their surroundings. Taking a cue from the theories of the everyday life, I argue that these authors’ aesthetic commitment to representing daily perceptions, memories, and experiences revitalizes more inclusive and democratic modes of social existence in a society dominated by hierarchical and standardizing principles of capitalist modernity and the post-imperial nation-state.
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    Premonition of a future line we will be writing:politics, language and identity in experimental English Canadian poetry.
    (2011-06) Cox, Ryan Jacob
    "Premonition of a Future Line We Will Be Writing: Politics, Language and Identity in English Canadian Experimental Poetry," explores the way Canadian identity is constructed and interrogated principally in the poetry of the Postmodern period of the 1960s and 1970s, though my first chapter does reach back to the roots of Canadian poetry. I argue that Canada's position as a multilingual settler nation results in an inability to form a coherent and consistent national identity. The inability to naturalize a national identity or character, along with the ever-present concern with language, provides a space open to play and allows language to trouble and de-naturalize other centers of power. Language play in this kind of cultural environment becomes political. This can be seen in the failed legislative assault on bill bissett as I argue in my second chapter. bissett' s use of language to challenge hegemonic forces and satirize them, his refusal to conform, causes a member of the House to denounce him as evil. What bissett does, however, is typical of Canadian poetry. Like bissett, bpNichol, and Margaret Atwood use the destabilizing qualities of language and the failure of a domestic literary identity to play in spaces of power and construct new identities: Nichol by exploring post-structuralist language as an emancipatory tool, and Atwood, in The Journals of Susanna Moodie, by using representations of the past and textual masks to craft a national narrative for herself. Perhaps the most significant intervention of my project comes in the last chapter. I argue that despite the controversy these poets and the tactics they deployed generated in the 1970s, that in the 1980s with the production of Fraggle Rock and its being broadcast on the CBC they become normalized. Several Canadian poets including Nichol worked on the show which as a result not only injected the philosophies of the experimental poets into mass culture, but was supported by the national broadcaster and aimed at children. If the CBC can be seen as a prime mover in the formulation of an official Canadian culture than this sanction can be read as evidence of a shift in the nation's culture.