Open Theses & Dissertations

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A critical introduction to Ashes Come With, a novel and Ashes Come With, or Walter Benjamin is Stuck in a Tuna Can, a novel
(University of New Brunswick, 2023-12) Vernon, Thomas R.; Sinclair, Sue; Crawford, Lucas
This research-based dissertation comprises a novel, Ashes Come With, and its critical introduction. The novel is inspired by the exile of German-Jewish literary philosopher Walter Benjamin (1933-1940) and that of his imagined queer, HIV+ great-great-grandson, Pear, in the 2000s. The critical introduction shares some of my lived experiences informing the novel and its composition, and it demonstrates how the meanings applied to my life and body for purposes of power (the biopolitical) fuel the novel’s composition and narrative. One principal question motivates this work: How might biopolitical forces, so significant in my lived experience, activate characterological decisions and narrative advancement? The novel activates the connections between the circumstances of Benjamin’s actual exile (displacement, poverty, antisemitism) and key Benjaminian insights vital to contemporary critical discourse (material dialectics, constellation, montage). In spite of Benjamin’s relatively well-documented life, the novel finds its story within the gaps of the historical record. Walter’s 1930s fight to survive, do his work, and get that work out of France is embedded in and informs Pear’s struggle to get out of the U.S. eighty years later. As sentient ash in the 2000s, Walter’s ontological cohesion depends upon the care and attention he brings to Pear. Similarly, Pear “reaches out” to Walter in his imagination as he faces bewildering obstacles. The existential stakes faced by the characters in one storyline ignite story advancement in the other despite temporal divides. The critical introduction challenges its readers to queer the biopolitical constitutive ingredients of failure as it operates in the characters’ lives. Throughout the dissertation, these “ingredients” become sites of story generation and critique. Research for the novel included on-site research visits, close study of historical testimony, ephemera, and Benjamin’s oeuvre while attending to its omissions, such as the immediate circumstances from which several Benjamininan principles emerge. The dissertation demonstrates that the deployment of the biopolitical rooted in characterological, historical, and geo-political collapses of intention opens opportunities for creative or critical engagement.
A procession of eyes: seven stories and a novella
(University of New Brunswick, 2012) Jenkin, Kit; Jarman, Mark Anthony
A Procession of Eyes: Seven Stories and a Novella is a series of interrelated stories that deal with the relationship between humans and their virtual technologies. Today, virtual technologies are ubiquitous. Everyday reality now has a virtual component. These stories explore this dichotomous relationship between virtuality and reality, often showing one collapsing into the other. They explore the emotional investments we give to our technologies, their effect on identity, and what it means to be an embodied human with a virtual alter-reality. Virtual technology, for the characters in these stories, is, at once, a safe place and oppressive force which must be escaped. These characters are depressed, self-deluded, stuck in certain areas of life that do not show any way out. They turn to the wonders of technology as a haven from the mental stresses of modern life, but turn away from technology in order to assert their sense of identity.
"After Ez stirred up that hornets['] nest": Ezra Pound's politics of "open" poetry
(University of New Brunswick, 2020) Ehtee, Svetlana; Tryphonopoulos, Demetres
Ezra Pound was a literary activist who devoted his life to educating those willing to be initiated to radically new, “open” modernist writing. He was also a poet of megalomaniacal ideas, who believed that he could change the world by teaching his readers. Seeking a solution for contemporary socio-political issues, Pound turned to equating usury with Jewish people, blaming them for the world’s ills. These beliefs resulted in the poet’s endorsement of Mussolini’s and Hitler’s causes. The aim of this dissertation is to investigate how Pound’s mission to educate readers became an effort to indoctrinate them by exposing them to his fascist, racist, and anti-Semitic views. I will demonstrate how The Cantos, which Pound sets up to be aesthetically and semantically “open,” evolves into a “closed” manifesto, that mirrors Pound’s political agenda. In what follows, I begin in Chapter One by developing this argument through the analysis of biographies devoted to the poet. Highlighting the works which exculpated or elided Pound’s extreme right-wing politics and efforts, this chapter will trace the apologetic stream of Pound’s biographers. Chapter Two will cross-examine his published correspondence with Olivia Rosetti Agresti (1937–59), and his unpublished exchange with Graham Seton Hutchison (1934–36) to determine whether Pound censored himself in print to hide the extent of his biases and pro-Nazi leanings. The subsequent analysis of Pound’s unpublished correspondence with Archibald MacLeish (1926–58) follows in Chapter Three, continuing the discussion of Pound’s support for Mussolini, even after the dictator’s confinement in the Nazi-backed Salò Republic (1943–45). Chapter Four will focus on the poet’s unpublished correspondence, in the 1950s, with John Kasper who, under Pound’s guidance, fought against de-segregation in the United States. Finally, in Chapter Five I will draw chronological connections between selections from The Cantos and Pound’s correspondences to show the effects of Pound’s socio-political beliefs on his epic. I will cross-examine my findings with selections from “The First Thirty Cantos” (I–XXX), “The Fifth Decad” (XLII–LI), the “Italian Cantos” (LXXII–LXXIII), and the “Pisan Cantos” (LXXIV–LXXXIV) to argue that Pound’s anti-Semitic, fascist, and racist views inform the text of the poem, and ultimately cause its structural “closure.”
Antibody // Traumatic Entanglement, Eco-Poethics, and Speculative Horror as Survivor Futurisms
(University of New Brunswick, 2021-08) Salazar, Rebecca; Finlay, Triny; Martin, Randall
The speculative horror poems collected in Antibody trace the ecological and personal entanglements of sexual trauma and its myriad intersecting oppressions. The introductory section brings polyvocal queer attention to entanglement ontology, an ecocritical expansion of intersectional feminist theory. This approach roots all human and social issues in the urgent ecological crises of the Anthropocene; in a very literal sense, every social interaction is “always 100 percent nature and 100 percent nurture” (Fausto-Sterling qtd in Sullivan 24). The subsequent sections of poetry chart the dissolution of a sexually violated speaker entangled in the hegemonies that perpetuate the parallel harms of rape culture and ecological destruction. The essays accompanying each section of poems expand this narrative by interrogating three particular horrors of various traumatized ecosystems: INVASION, on the imbrication of sexual violence in literary communities and the silencing that countered the #MeToo movement in CanLit; HAUNTING, on the biologically interlocked oppressions that make the current world unsurvivable for sick and survivor bodies; and KINSICKNESS, on the disrupted relationality that characterizes both sexual and ecological traumas, and the rituals which may offer ways to heal broken relations. By attending to trauma on multiple scales through poetry, hybrid non-fiction, and feminist horror, Antibody proposes horror as a mode that radically refuses to erase the atrocities of the Anthropocene, while also acting as a form of speculative futurism that imagines alternate futures in which traumatized people and ecosystems can survive.
Atlantic Canada's poetic menagerie :: animal presence in the poetry of John Thompson, Don Domanski, John Steffler, and Harry Thurston
(University of New Brunswick, 2014) Armstrong, Tammy; Leckie, Ross; Tremblay, Tony
This dissertation examines the place of the animal in Atlantic Canadian poetry. Focusing on four poets—John Thompson, Don Domanski, John Steffler, and Harry Thurston—whose careers began in the 1960s, this study analyzes not only various ways these writers live with and use animals, but also how they think with and through animals, both in their experiences and their poetry. The similarities within this group of writers exemplify how animal presence can no longer be read as a marginal consideration in Atlantic Canadian poetry. Each poet in his own way creates a zoopoetics that shows how the act of composition in the poem itself might be read as an animal that the poet struggles to tame, even as the real animal disrupts the poem by its subversive presence in the composition. In an effort to bridge contemporary efforts to redefine the critical importance of the animal, and to apply those shared concerns to Atlantic Canada, this study draws primarily on three areas of scholarly discussions: the “question of the animal” in continental philosophy; regionalism in Atlantic Canadian studies; and recent critical perspectives in Animal Studies. There is also an interdisciplinary use of ecocriticism, phenomenology, zoosemiotics, and literary studies. The interdisciplinary nature of to this study also exemplifies how relevant critical approaches across the disciplines are to the animal. Though the focus of this study is on Atlantic Canada, these four poets have been extremely influential in Canadian poetry of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, particularly in the ways they link ecopoetics to the animal. John Thompson’s work suggests the possibilities and limitations in moving away from language, the ego, and the domestic space toward the uncontrollable animal realm. Don Domanski expands this idea of zoopoetics by rejecting concepts of the ego. Drawing on spirituality and science in tandem with the metaphoric nature of language, he investigates mysteries imbedded in the physical world. Steffler’s landscape imagines itself as animality that defies the poet’s observations and definitions. Steffler constructs ideas of modern, masculine selfhood by animalizing the natural world. In equally important ways, Thurston’s poetry engages the animal primarily from his personal perspectives of farming, science, and an eco-poetic lens. Thurston’s work eventually embraces a feral or animalized script, grounded in present-day realism, ecology, and his extensive understanding of Atlantic Canada. By bringing these poets together through their investigations of the animal encounter, the dissertation argues for a specific need for Animal Studies in Atlantic Canadian poetry.
Baptized in Fire: Trauma, Storytelling, and Survival
(University of New Brunswick, 2021-04) St. Peters, Joel; Gray, Robert W.
On the afternoon of September 13, 1977, my grandfather was burned on more than two-thirds of his body while working as a lineman for Nova Scotia Power. Despite a less than 10 per cent chance of survival, he is alive today thanks to the support of his wife and two children. My creative research project analyzes the benefits of model stage theories of healing following such a traumatic event. The research focuses on how trauma impacts families, how families can navigate recovery, and how storytelling is a crucial aspect of the healing process. The therapeutic potential of the screenplay emerges by establishing the connection between contemporary screenplay structure and models of healing used in psychology. This culminates in my creative piece, a screenplay based in part on the first four months of my grandfather’s recovery—a survival narrative seeking to help trauma victims become trauma survivors.
Brut Elegies
(University of New Brunswick, 2023-03) Bonfiglio, William; Sinclair, Sue; Finlay, Triny
In 1922, German art critic and doctor Hans Prinzhorn published his landmark text Bildnerei der Geisteskranken. In this work, he presented groundbreaking analyses of visual art composed by the institutionalized and so-called mentally ill, raising provocative questions about the innate creative tendencies of humans and the correlation between neurodivergence and creativity. While Prinzhorn’s text represents a formative treatise in human cognition and psychology, its importance to the art world cannot be overstated. Prinzhorn’s analysis established the foundation for what French artist and critic Jean Dubuffet would later designate as art brut, loosely defined as works by untrained individuals isolated from the stultifying influences of popular culture and the mainstream art world. In Dubuffet’s estimation, such works comprise the closest humankind can come to pure expression: an art uncorrupted by social norms, peer pressure, and the artist’s own self-consciousness. In the following collection of poetry, titled Brut Elegies, I reflect upon and respond to the visual works of institutionalized artists whose pieces were collected and studied by Prinzhorn and which formed the foundation of Dubuffet’s analysis. The poems incorporate biography, traditional poetic forms, and ekphrasis to engage with the subject matter on multiple fronts and deliver a diverse representation of the works and their creators. This collection is accompanied by a critical introduction to art brut and my poetic process, as well as an essay that delves into the ekphrastic act, offering a close reading of three ekphrastic poems and exploring how ekphrasis lends itself especially well to the consideration of themes of marginalization, fetishization, and spectatorship.
chronic
(University of New Brunswick, 2017) Annear, Grace; Finlay, Tatrina; Jarman, Mark
Framed by the physical language of elite athletics, Chronic depicts the experiences of a young collegiate woman as she navigates a chronic pain condition known as vulvodynia. Despite the literary tradition of women in pain, women suffering, and women with illness, this particular condition lacks much in the way of a literary cannon. Set on the grey shores of BC’s west coast, the narrative follows Kit and her fellow athletes over the course of a competitive year, their inter-‐twined exchanges forming a narrative that muddles and globalizes the concept of pain. Through its depiction of sexual relationships and athletic endeavours, the novel strives to challenge traditional models of physicality, identity, mental health, and female sexuality. By couching a story of vulvodynia in the physical language of an athlete, Chronic conveys that one of the primary struggles of chronic pain is the perception of, and the relationship with, one’s body.
Cid and the Raiders
(University of New Brunswick, 2024-04) Duggan, Thomas; Schryer, Stephen; Creelman, David
Cid and the Raiders is a short story collection about how changing economic conditions and cultural upheaval caused by the decimation of the rural economy, increased oil work, and reactionary politics challenge working- and middle-class identities. As corollaries to class identities, the collection also addresses masculinities, which are frequently tied up to working- and middle-class identities, and nostalgia, which is an understandable symptom of radical economic and cultural change. Themes explored include the fluidity and contestation of working-class identities; the effects of work and environment on ideology creation; the constructions of masculinity; and nostalgia. The stories map ‘class’ through engagement with previous depictions of the post-cod moratorium and post-oil boom NL in Maritime fiction and art. While sites of migratory work and oil extraction remain a conspicuous absence, images of these sites remain in echoes, symptoms, and hauntings.
Colonel Alzheimer
(University of New Brunswick, 2017) Mojib, Erfan; Ball, John
Colonel Alzheimer is a collection of short stories about the ordinary life of a small fictional community in the heart of Iran. Set in a desert town fabled for its heat and sandstorms, the collection presents a society that is trapped between past and present, reality and dreams, modernity and tradition. Although the stories deal with universal subjects, they come to life through small-scale events, and local miracles that have a tremendous influence on the lives of ordinary people. Colonel Alzheimer is also a window into a culture that, in recent years, has been misrepresented by the media and by diasporic writers and memoirists who contribute to prevalent stereotypes about their own people. Although the collection is in some sense a personal tribute, it strives to draw readers’ attention away from ideological, cultural, and political differences and remind us that there are more things that unite people than divide them.
Contemporary North American poetry as postsecular prayer
(University of New Brunswick, 2019) Reimer, Perry; Schryer, Stephen; Sinclair, Sue
My thesis explores contemporary North American poetry as a form of postsecular prayer. I discuss works by Mary Szybist, Louise Glück, and bpNichol. These authors blend conventions of prayer from disparate religions with secular discourses to write poetic prayers that straddle the sacred and the secular. I explore Szybist’s fascination with personal prayer; I read Glück as a writer of communal prayer that finds common ground across religious and non-religious boundaries; finally, my chapter on Nichol examines what role form and language play in postsecular prayer. These three authors liberate prayer language from its religious roots and re-appropriate religious forms for secular self-discovery, healing, and the establishment of communities that transgress religious and secular boundaries. I track how these poets produce postsecular prayer, which is in many ways analogous to religious prayer in its objectives – to find meaning within and navigate an immense and uncontrollable world. I use postsecularism, which resists the dogmatism of both religious and secular doctrine to allow for contestability and pluralism, as my theoretical focus. This framework allows for the deconstruction of the religious, opening up possibilities for prayer as a means of spiritual growth for the individual. Through postsecular prayer, individuals and communities can find comfort despite the unknown and achieve collective understanding in the absence of an authoritative, religious divine.
I didn’t understand love like that
(University of New Brunswick, 2023-04) Henbest, Rosemary; Sinclair, Sue
I Didn’t Understand Love Like That was inspired by my friend Louise. I wanted to think about why I was so surprised when she admitted to me that she was lonely. I wanted to think about why I had never said it myself. My big question was how can I find language for loneliness by challenging myself to write about my own? In response I wrote an autobiographical triptych, a long poem that includes 1) a series of grateful and awkward first-encounter sketches, 2) a list poem of the lonely moments of my childhood, and 3) an exploration of the loneliness of various Biblical women. In my introductory essay, I explore the different shapes and shadows of loneliness and ask how loneliness might be different for Christians than it is for those with a secular worldview. Throughout my work I try to learn from Louise and bravely say, “oh, I’m lonely.”
Is there room for us, St. Lawrence Seaway?
(University of New Brunswick, 2022-12) Jessome, Michael Patrick; Sinclair, Sue
The essays of Is There Room for Us, St. Lawrence Seaway? examine how the socioeconomic marginalization of Cape Breton Island and Atlantic Canada has influenced the production and study of its literature, while the poems of the dissertation, The Great Lakes Flow to the East, complement that examination by conveying an experience of Cape Breton from the perspective of one who grew up there. The title, Is There Room for Us, St. Lawrence Seaway? asks readers to imagine how matters might improve for Cape Breton if it were relocated to Central Canada, while the title of the poetry section, The Great Lakes Flow to the East, suggests that not all "great" matters flow westward across Canada. The poetry of the dissertation plays with adverse national perspectives of Cape Breton, repositions canonical figures, explores the island's significant history, and celebrates Cape Breton without losing sight ofits hardships. The first critical essay of the introduction examines Ray Smith's short story, "Cape Breton is the Thought-Control Centre of Canada" as a means of prefiguring the aesthetics behind the poems of the dissertation, while the second critical essay engages with three book-length studies of Maritime/ Atlantic-Canadian literature that have attempted to define this literature as a unique genre. Smith's story reveals a version of a Cape Bretoner who is caught between provincial and federal identities, while the book-length studies, by varying degrees, use the socioeconomic issues of Atlantic Canada to organize and define the region's literature. This organizational method, while well-meaning, has favoured content over aesthetic analysis and has produced monographs focused on fiction, with other genres, such as poetry and drama, receiving little attention. As a whole, this dissertation hopes to underscore Canada's aversive divisions from an Atlantic-Canadian perspective, illuminate Ray Smith's creation of a polarized Cape Bretoner, broaden the discussion of what Atlantic-Canadian literature is, and create a poetic summary of the author's personal experiences with Cape Breton Island.
Island: Decolonizing Newfoundland history to understand current Qalipu Mi’kmaq realities
(University of New Brunswick, 2023-09) Walbourne-Gough, Douglas; Sinclair, Sue; Snook, Edith
This poetry manuscript, Island, and its accompanying critical introduction articulate specific difficulties and circumstances surrounding my struggle with identity and Indigeneity in Southwestern Newfoundland in the wake of the Qalipu First Nation enrolment process. The critical introduction re-examines Ktaqmkuk, or Newfoundland, history through a decolonizing lens to understand why the concept of Newfoundland Indigeneity, outside of the Beothuk, is often met with question or contempt. Concerns around Qalipu First Nation are understandable. The national narrative surrounding Newfoundland and Indigenous peoples has been, since 1949, that the Beothuk are the only population Indigenous to Newfoundland. When Newfoundland and Canada entered into Confederation, the Indian Act was not applied in Newfoundland as it was in other provinces. This lack of federal recognition virtually erased Newfoundland Mi’kmaq from Canadian narratives of Indigenous history. This, combined with the Mi’kmaq mercenary myth and the fact that Qalipu First Nation was created without consultation with the Mi’kmaq Grand Council, fuels mistrust and intense scrutiny. How does an island supposedly without Indigenous people suddenly have the second-largest seat at the Assembly of First Nations? The critical introduction and poetry work to ensure that Qalipu voices are heard and legitimized in academic contexts; they act as a counternarrative to misinformation concerning the Qalipu First Nation. Island contains distinct yet interwoven narrative threads: poems that instigate and redefine my understanding of my family history; poems that articulate childhood and teenage traumas that still affect me in adulthood; and poems that ask what an Indigenous Newfoundland identity is. The title is a nod to Newfoundland as a physical island, as well as a historically and socially islanded (that is to say, isolated and distinct) site. The writing process culminates in the realization that an island is only truly isolated on the surface. Though not all the poems are Mi’kmaq-specific in content, they all interrogate, reflect, and reposition, while working toward necessary healing. Island is a deep lean into my past to better inform who and where I am. I know I am not the only one wrestling with these issues. Island is my best attempt at healing, and at helping others.
Melting road: happiness in the age of climate change
(University of New Brunswick, 2021) Hayward, Benjamin Bruce; Jarman, Mark Anthony
A heat wave in Europe kills over a thousand a week and melts the sticky, black asphalt of the highway reststops. Neoliberal austerity and growing inequality beneath the banking towers of London signal the depths of late capitalism. This creative thesis is a travel novel narrated by an unemployed Canadian looking for direction in life after the economic recession. He visits the UK during the hottest summer on record in order to reconnect with his half-brother, who is squatting in empty investment properties in London. As they party on a low-budget and hitchhike across Europe, the narrator is exposed to political and ethical anti-establishment arguments and faces the question of whether or not willing participants in neoliberalism are culpable for its failures. Blocked at the UK border, the narrator retreats from injustice to a beach commune in Spain. In the end, he must reconcile the freedom of escaping neoliberalism with the responsibility of opposing it and decide for himself how to find happiness in the age of climate change.
Mixed use: The hybrid imaginary in American verse practice from William Carlos Williams to Rebecca Wolff
(University of New Brunswick, 2024-08) Crymble, Phillip; Leckie, Ross; Schryer, Stephen
This dissertation contests the misconception that, throughout the twentieth century, mainstream and avant-garde poets in the United States were split into antagonistic camps. Along with belying allegiances between poets in opposing camps, this totalizing division also papers over hostilities between poets within the same camp. By the late 1990s, a movement referred to as “hybrid” or “post-avant” developed and its goal was to combine conventional and experimental practices to create a “third way.” Hybrid poets believed that affect, lyric address, and subjectivity were crucial to the artform and that experimentalists who felt otherwise had surrendered to a paralyzing insularity. But while post-avant poets assumed their approach was new, adverse poetries were actually brought together as early as the 1910s. William Carlos Williams, the first poet examined in this dissertation, combined the expressionist and constructivist strains of modernist verse practice to create an approach to the artform predicated on an inclusionist ethos. Mid-century poet Robert Lowell, who is also central to the hybrid debate, believed that lyricism and vernacularity were essential to poetry’s evolution, but was criticized, like Williams, for combining experimental and establishment practices. At the close of the millennium, as avant-garde and mainstream camps became increasingly balkanized, Rebecca Wolff, the third poet featured in this dissertation, spearheaded a hybrid revival by repudiating the verse binary in her debut poetry collection Manderley (2001), and by founding Fence, an iconoclastic literary magazine that was the first to platform post-avant writing. In positioning Williams and Lowell as inclusionists, then, and by demonstrating that, like Rebecca Wolff, they, too, were attacked and disregarded as much for prejudicial biases as for mixing discrete approaches, this study troubles the notion of the two-camp binary. Along with revealing the importance of pluralism to the evolution of the artform, the evidence also indicates that the idea of a closed verse community is little more than an illusion. In a world where binary thinking continues to be called into question, the controversial discoveries of these findings represent a breakthrough, and as such, will prove useful to future scholars conducting research into the cultural history of American poetry practices.
Modernist eschatology: T.S. Eliot’s Four Quartets, H.D.’s Trilogy, and the Second World War apocalypse
(University of New Brunswick, 2016) Joudry, Kyle; Tryphonopoulos, Demetres
This thesis explores the degree to which T.S. Eliot’s (1888-1965) Four Quartets (1936-42) and H.D.’s (1886-1961) Trilogy (1944-46) engage in eschatological discourse. Both Eliot and H.D. treat the Second World War as apocalyptic, prompting each poet to rely on eschatological writing as a means of resisting wartime injustices. Paradoxically, a primary manner in which each poet deploys their eschatology is through a discussion of Incarnational theology. This study relies upon Christian theology as a methodology for understanding the various Christian allusions within each poem, providing a reading that seeks to reconfigure scholarly understandings of Eliot’s and H.D.’s wartime epics.
"No matter what, we must eat to live": food feelings and body image in contemporary women's literature in Canada
(University of New Brunswick, 2020) Langmaid, M. Bethany; Crawford, Lucas
What if loving our bodies was not revolutionary? What if, rather, being happy with our bodies, no matter what they looked like, was the norm? Through its analysis of Saleema Nawaz’s Bone and Bread (2013), Tracey Lindberg’s Birdie (2015), and Mona Awad’s 13 Ways of Looking at a Fat Girl (2016), this thesis explores the ways that women authors in Canada write back against diet cultures and body shaming, and, in turn, depict positive and healing relationships between individuals, their bodies, and food. With today’s proliferation of technology amongst youth, people as young as elementary school-aged children can access fatphobic messaging through the glorification of thin ‘Influencers’ on platforms such as Instagram, Netflix, and YouTube. In response to this era of unlimited technological access, this thesis uses these three novels to shift the cultural focus from body- and food-shaming, and to, instead, promote self-acceptance and self-love.
Old Provinces, New Modernisms: Toward an Editorial Poetics of the Maritime Little Magazine
(University of New Brunswick, 2015) Johnson, James William; Tremblay, Tony; Tryphonopoulos, Demetres
As a territory located on Canada's geopolitical periphery—a territory lacking key points of access to large presses, arts capital, and cultural media—the Maritimes has been disproportionately served by alternative media like little magazines. Nevertheless, while there has been a substantial body of research dedicated to little magazine culture in Canada, its urban beginnings, and its contribution to the emergence of literary modernism, few studies have examined the development and influence of the little magazine in the Maritime Provinces. Taking as representative examples “The Fiddlehead” (1945– ), “Katharsis” (1967–1971), “The Square Deal” (1970–1971), “Sand Patterns” (1972–8), and “The Antigonish Review” (1970– )—little magazines which have distinguished themselves in the region for breadth of readership and authorship, editorial leadership, and cultural activism—this thesis examines the literary, cultural, and political functions of Maritime literary magazines from the qi.id-nineteenth century up to the 1980s. Paying close attention to the political, social, and economic environments in which these magazines have emerged and to which they have responded, this thesis sets forth an editorial poetics of the Maritime little magazine.
Only Young: A novel & critical introduction
(University of New Brunswick, 2024-04) Webb-Campbell, Shannon; Sinclair, Sue; Andrews, Jennifer
My novel, Only Young, and its accompanying critical introduction explore specific lived realities and difficult circumstances surrounding Newfoundland’s ongoing struggle with Indigeneity and identity in the wake of the Qalipu Mi’kmaq First Nation enrolment process. Only Young is named after a well-known colloquial Newfoundland phrase describing a lack of maturity or experience. This creative thesis is a coming-of-age story that portrays the complexities of Indigenous identity in Newfoundland from the perspective of a young Two-Spirit character, Sarah, whose story resembles my own. Only Young’s primary narrative takes place partly in Newfoundland and partly in Ontario and is set in 2011, when Qalipu Mi’kmaq First Nation Band was recognized by the federal government. The novel also flashes back to Mi’kmaq characters living at the time of Newfoundland’s 1949 Confederation with Canada. The dissertation examines these events and the narratives surrounding them primarily via Sarah’s exploration of both the colonial constructions of identity, and her larger family’s relationship to her ancestral lands and body. Despite hesitations, Sarah goes on a road trip from Ontario to western Newfoundland with her estranged father Charlie to his small Mi’kmaq community where he attempts to make amends. The road trip ends abruptly during a fatal snowstorm and an encounter with a moose. The novel portrays some of the implications of newfound identity on individuals who have sought band membership since 2011. Through Only Young, I examine how colonialism continues to fracture the identity of the Qalipu Mi’kmaq peoples and perpetuate trauma, creating a sense of estrangement or unbelonging through government-dictated criteria and selection processes for band members. My story is complicated by the fact that the Mi’kmaq Grand Council, the traditional government of the Mi’kmaq people across Canada, has also refused to recognize the legitimacy of the Qalipu Mi’kmaq First Nation Band and its members. Prefaced by a sixty-page critical introduction that surveys recent Indigenous work on identity formation, trauma and healing, my novel examines the theoretical and fictional implications of being part of the Qalipu Mi’kmaq tribe, regardless of band status.

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