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Item Finding Nemo: Verne’s antihero as original steampunk(2010) Perschon, MikeIn the foreword to his annotated translation of Jules Verne’s 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. It is this Nemo, Verne’s original character, who embodies the essence of the Steampunk aesthetic of the instability of identity through his repeated death-and-rebirth cycle in both novels. Mixing one part recursive fantasy, one part historical criticism, and one part textual analysis, this paper will demonstrate how Captain Nemo is representative of one of the core elements of the Steampunk aesthetic, namely the redefining of identity.Item Finding Nemo: Verne’s antihero as original steampunk(2023) Perschon, Mike; Westfahl, GaryThis volume is a fresh examination of the works of Jules Verne, the pioneering and enduringly popular science fiction writer. Essays study Verne’s various novels—including Around the World in Eighty Days, The Mysterious Island and The Adventures of Captain Hatteras. Included essays offer analyses of literary responses to Verne’s work, assessments of film adaptations of his novels and discussions of steampunk, the Verne-inspired science fiction subgenre that has influenced writers like Philip Jose Farmer, Caleb Carr and Adam Roberts.Item “Steam Wars,” the special edition: steampunk on the move in Philip Reeve’s and Christian Rivers’s Mortal Engines(2024) Perschon, Mike; Danahay, Martin A.; Howey, Ann F.While steampunk continues to defy a fixed definition, certain features can be identified which appear in almost all steampunk cultural products. These features are technofantasy, retrofuturism, and vintage elements. This last feature is often represented as neo-Victorian. While it is undeniable that many steampunk works are set in worlds or alternate histories based upon the Victorian culture or period, there is a growing body of steampunk works set in other cultural spaces, temporal periods, or even secondary worlds. This article suggests that it’s time to leave the tacit conflation of steampunk and neo-Victorianism behind, in favor of vintage, a more dynamic term that points to a past that is decades distant, but not in the ancient past.Item Theory in practice, or, CanLit is so paranoid, you probably think this essay is about you 1(2023) van der Marel, Lisa CamilleUnangax·scholar Eve Tuck observes that most, maybe all, research is guided by underlying assumptions about how it will help or improve or heal something in the world; these assumptions constitute, in Tuck's words, a "theory of change" (413). For all their meaningful differences, anticolonial, queer, and feminist approaches to cultural scholarship are predicated on a shared theory of change: careful analysis can be analeptic, bell hooks' characterization of theorizing as "a place where I could imagine possible futures, a place where life could be lived differently" pinpoints this reparative drive (2). Studying Black womanhood helped hooks heal from her experiences of Black womanhood. Here, theory, "'lived' experience of critical thinking, of reflection and analysis" (2), proved consolidating: "I worked at explaining the hurt and making it go away" (2). The academic field of literary studies is, I suspect, underwritten by similarly healing experiences, ones facilitated by narratives, texts, poetry. Reading helped readers, so they pursue it. This foundational, reparative theory of change may also be why the scandals and institutional failures known as the "CanLit dumpster fire," "CanLit firestorm," or "CanLit in ruins" remain derailing for the field's Black, queer, and feminist scholars.Item ‘Born in villages, roaming the world’: Diasporicity in Fateh’s Sikh Canadian hip hop(2023) Grewal, SaraThis paper shows that various songs by Sikh Canadian rap artist Fateh represent engagements with essentialist discourses that neatly mirror Bibi Bakare-Yusuf’s notion of “diasporicity”: the continual re-inscription of the origin in acts of embodied agency that retain their connection to tradition while also negotiating the body’s social meanings that exist outside of the subject’s selfpositioning. I argue through a reading of Fateh’s songs that the notion of diasporicity reveals how race, ethnicity, and religion overlap for Sikh Canadians—especially the ways in which bodily expressions of Sikh “religion” are simultaneously interpellated through the discourse of culture/ethnicity and religio-racialization.Item Lives of the poet: seasonal affective market disorder(2024) Hutchinson, ChrisThe theme of this issue revolves around the tension between truth and deception in human relationships, particularly in the context of social interactions and personal dynamics. It reflects the ongoing debate about whether complete honesty or selective deception is more beneficial for individuals and society.Item A case study on the value of humanities-based analysis, modes of presentation, and study designs for SoTL: close reading students’ pre-surveys on gender-inclusive language(2023) Copland, SarahClose reading has long been heralded as a humanities-specific methodology with significant potential for SoTL. This essay fills a gap in SoTL literature with a full case study demonstrating what, exactly, close reading shows us about our data that social science-based quantitative and qualitative analyses may not. Close reading-based analysis of first-year writing students’ pre-surveys on gender-inclusive language entails attention to the interrelated form and content of students’ self-reflections. This analysis reveals nuances and complexities that, if overlooked, would result in inadvertent misrepresentation of the data. This case study responds not only to calls for humanities-specific SoTL methodologies but also to related calls for greater legitimation of diverse forms for SoTL dissemination, some of which originate in the humanities. It is therefore cast as a reflective essay based on its author’s scholarly personal narrative (SPN) as a new, humanities-based SoTL researcher. Finally, this case study demonstrates the value of flexible, deliberately unscientific study designs that are responsive to emergent conditions but foreign to SoTL’s dominant social science paradigm. As guides to instruction, pre-surveys are necessary complements to pre-quizzes: learning what students think they know about a concept or skill, their attitudes towards it, and their contexts of prior learning about it—not just their knowledge of it, which is all pre-quizzes can tell us—is an important precursor to effective instruction. But maximizing pre-surveys’ potential to guide instruction requires flexible study designs so we can change our pedagogy, including our study’s “intervention,” if necessary, on the fly.Item 'It […] cannot do any harm to anyone whatsoever’: fictionality, invention and knowledge creation in global notifications, Joseph Conrad’s prefaces and Chance(2024) Copland, SarahChance explores the intersection of two of novelist Joseph Conrad’s life- long fascinations: fictional representations of nonfictional conversational storytelling and the relationship between truth, credibility and invention. The latter is also apparent throughout Conrad’s prefaces, in which he works through long- held anxieties about the truthfulness and credibility of his representations and about critics’ concerns on these fronts. To reconcile the relationship between invention and truth or credibility, he describes a process of constructing, via invention, fundamentally truthful and credible stories about real- world events and figures. In Chance, Conrad depicts a character narrator, Marlow, doing the same thing. There are, however, two salient differences between Marlow’s and Conrad’s undertakings: one is their distance from the events and figures they are telling about and telling to (Conrad very distant from them vs. Marlow literally living amidst them), and the other is the genre claims they make for their narratives (Conrad’s literary fictions vs. Marlow’s conversational nonfictions). Conrad depicts Marlow using invention (through fictionality and otherwise) to supplement the limitations of his knowledge about other people, their motivations and their relationships, so that he can narrate a credible and compelling nonfictional conversational tale for his narratee. But because Marlow lives amidst and communicates with the subjects of his tale and presents his communications as nonfictional, the knowledge he creates through invention is consequential for his own and others’ involvement in the unfolding action. Failure to signal must have beens and hypotheticals as invention contributes to significant outcomes for the people with whom Marlow communicates in the told. Conrad thus qualifies his portrait of the affordances of invention for knowledge creation in global nonfictions with a cautionary note related to narrating situations like Marlow’s: telling nonfictional conversational stories about and to our acquaintances.Item Before borders: a legal and literary history of naturalization by Stephanie DeGooyer(2024) Hollingshead, DavidLet me begin with an unequivocal endorsement: anyone interested in the fields of novels studies or law and literature will find Before Borders deeply rewarding to read. It is historically rich, rigorously researched, and confidently polemical in ways I will elaborate below. But this monograph should be of interest to scholars, regardless of expertise, as a pedagogical document, one that expertly models the rhetorical move of the scholarly intervention, what we sometimes call the "so what?" question of research work. What begins, in the first chapter, as an exegesis of underexamined seventeenth-century juridical documents that reimagined political subjectivity following the Union of the English and Scottish Crowns quickly coalesces into a set of powerful claims that bear heavily on contemporary understandings of the novel, the nation, and the concept of naturalization in literary studies. Moving briskly between early modern legal theory (Blackstone, Locke, Bacon), canonical works of fiction (Richardson, Defoe, Burney, Mary Shelley), and contemporary criticism (Arendt, Barthes, Benedict Anderson, Jacques Rancière), Stephanie DeGooyer always keeps a keen eye on her study's high argumentative stakes.Item What does reading do in the Anthropocene?(2024) Hollingshead, DavidAntoine Traisnel's Capture and Jennifer Wenzel's The Disposition of Nature are two new publications in animal studies and postcolonial ecocriticism respectively that chart very different paths for environmental scholarship in the wake of the nonhuman turn, yet they are both shaped by a context that exceeds their stated methodological frames. My aim here is to give short accounts of each work before addressing a broader shift in the field of literary studies, which I describe as a reconsideration of texts’ political and material efficacy in the face of anthropogenic climate change and species extinction. I suggest that a unique set of institutional factors, including neoliberal austerity measures underwriting the turn to “postcritique,” as well as the rise of environmental justice–oriented ecocriticism, have rendered the fields embracing the nonhuman turn newly uncertain about what texts (and the work of studying texts) do in the Anthropocene. The different tracks Traisnel and Wenzel take in addressing this uncertainty can nevertheless put them in a fruitful conversation with one another about the future of ecological approaches to literature despite their significant divergences in focus and method.Item Research recast(ed): MacEwan celebrates month of scholarship - The broken hours with Jacqueline Baker(2023) Miskiman, Megan; Schabert, Reinette; Baker, JacquelineIn today’s episode, Associate Professor of Literature and Creative Writing here at MacEwan, Jacqueline Baker, shares her inspiration and process on her newest book - The Broken Hours - a ghost story about the final days of the infamous horror icon - HP Lovecraft.Item Research recast(ed): S2E4 - Hip hop and the Urdu Ghazal, with Sara Grewal(2022) Ekelund, Brittany; Cave, Dylan; Grewal, SaraToday we sat down with Dr. Sara Grewal, to learn about the Urdu ghazal, the politics of hip hop and the importance of language. You can find Sara on Instagram and Twitter at @litmasterg. You can also learn more about her community work by visiting the Punjabi Community Health Services website. This episode is packed with extra to explore, like Ghazals you can check out by Parveen Shakir, Jagjit, and Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan. Sara also shares a bit of a hip hop song with a poignant message, so if you’d like to hear the whole thing go here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ub4jPZzSBe0.Item Research recast(ed): Following up with Dr. Josh Toth(2022) Ekelund, Brittany; Cave, Dylan; Toth, JoshToday we got to dive back into the wide world of cinema with our Episode 15 guest, Dr. Josh Toth. We will explore an interesting approach to hospitality as we get all the spoilers on Francis Ford Coppola’s vampire movie - Twixt. And of course - we get reactions on the new Matrix movie too!Item Research recast(ed): S1E15 - That's so meta with Dr. Josh Toth(2022) Ekelund, Brittany; Cave, Dylan; Toth, JoshToday we talk a lot about the Matrix and Bob Dylan as we explore metafiction, truth and postmodernism through movies, films and even some music. Here to guide us, is Dr. Josh Toth, an Associate Professor of English at MacEwan University, whose work focuses on literary theory, film studies and contemporary American literature. Dr. Toth is particularly interested in books and movies that play with our expectations and force us to reconsider how we see the world and ourselves. A lover of books, he is also an author of books, including his two most recent: Truth and Metafiction: Plasticity and Renewal in American Narrative; and Stranger America: A Narrative Ethics of Exclusion, both of which we will discuss today.Item "What I want isn’t what I want to want" & “And what of the fleshy contents of my skull?”(2023) Hutchinson, ChrisTwo poems by Chris Hutchinson.Item Item Item Guest editors’ introduction: “west-east” lyric: a comparative approach to lyric history(2020) Burney, Fatima; Grewal, SaraFor comparatists, the question of how to compare, or what constitutes the grounds of comparison, has defined the field since its inception; comparison as method seems to provoke a turn toward the self-reflexive for its practitioners, perhaps in an attempt to avoid the age-old problem of apples and oranges. This concern becomes further pronounced for those of us who work between traditions construed broadly as either 'Eastern' or 'Western', since the sense of shared roots in literary cultures either fades substantially, or provides painful reminders of the stark contrasts in power differentials between the two in the context of Western colonialism and its enduring effects since at least the sixteenth century. How, then, to compare? This question becomes marked once again for those of us who focus on poetry, which has been dominated by the discourse around a 'lyrical ideal" that eschews the 'real world' of politics and social realities in favour of a focus on the self, as well as on a particular 'lyric I' which functions as the site of an unproblematically universal vision of selfhood.Item Hip hop and the university: the epistemologies of “street knowledge” and “book knowledge”(2020) Grewal, SaraWhile hip hop and the university appear to operate within radically different social (and socioeconomic) spheres, we nevertheless see increasing overlap between the two that demonstrates a mutual interest and perhaps desire between the two. With the rise of hip hop studies on the one hand and a remarkable array of hip hop songs and films that address the university space and/or university education on the other, these two discursive spheres produce knowledges that are both complementary and contradictory. By analyzing several texts—major academic works of hip hop scholarship; films on hip hop and the university, especially Method Man and Redman’s 2001 How High; and the rap oeuvres of Kanye West and J. Cole—this article examines the ways in which the epistemologies of hip hop and the university interact and conflict. By examining these texts, I show that academic epistemologies, or what I term “book knowledge,” inadvertently impose a hierarchical and colonizing frame on rap and hip hop, such as the practice of “close reading” rap as poetry. Instead, I argue that we can learn how to ethically inhabit and transform the university space by drawing from hip hop’s commitment to producing the radical, decolonial, and embodied practices of “street knowledge.”Item The ghazal as “world poetry”: between worlding and vernacularization(2022) Grewal, SaraWhile the ghazal has appeared in many linguistic traditions, its diversity is undermined by the imposition of a singular definition of this genre, which is further compounded by the overly simplistic identification of ghazal as lyric; these lyricized readings of the ghazal as both transhistorical and transnational rely on a discourse of “worlding” as an imperial project of cultural recovery and homogenization. In contrast, this article employs the methodology of historical poetics to argue via a reading of meta-ghazals in Persian, Urdu, and English that reading practices around the ghazal—including definitions of the genre that variously emphasize form versus theme—change according to the historical and geographical context of its circulation. However, by celebrating the ghazal’s travel as seemingly apolitical and/or ahistorical, the discourse of world poetry, particularly in the reception of the ghazals of Agha Shahid Ali, participates in an ongoing imperialism in world literary study. In contrast, we can read the ghazals of Adrienne Rich as exemplifying the tradition of vernacularization that has enabled the ghazal’s movement between languages, such that her work, like the work of historical poetics as a methodology, honors the history of the form’s travel through its appearance in contemporary American English.