Questions of Trace: Presence, Politics, and Virtual Necromancy in Canadian Literary Archives

Questions of Trace: Presence, Politics, and Virtual Necromancy in Canadian Literary Archives excavates the documents, both archival and published, of politically-inclined works by Guy Vanderhaeghe, Katherine Govier, and Robert Kroetsch to examine depictions of progressivism and agrarian socialism in 20th-century western Canada. The fonds serve as case studies to theorise archival presence, absence, and trace. I conclude by unpacking the politics inherent to the archive and the practice of academic collection. Specifically, I examine how digitisation radicalises the archive’s spatiality and alters the relationship between author, text, reader, and archive to serve a necromantic function: it raises the author as an uncanny simulation, a revenant coming back to the text, the selection, the present. Drawing on the works of Jacques Derrida and others, I show how this evocation deconstructs the archive’s own nature, becoming a mystical enunciation that haunts the ecology of the digital environment. Poems and flash fictions introduce each of the thesis’ chapters, adopting the style and/or subject matter of the primary texts to reflect the themes that will be discussed and to engage with the discourses that will be employed in the critical writing that follows. My project employs a creative, conceptual, practice-based, and meta-cognitive approach to research that re-collects authors’ texts and characters, but also interpretations thereof, blurring the boundaries between genres of academic writing.

Name thesis:degree_name

Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

Discipline thesis:degree_discipline

English

Grantor dc:publisher.institution

Arts

Year dc:date.issued

2019

Author dc:creator

• Bolay, Jordan

Advisor dc:contributor.advisor

• Van Herk, Aritha

Committee members dc:contributor.committeemember

• Wiens, Jason
• Kertzer, Jonathan

• archive
• regionalism
• western canada
• metafiction

Statement dc:rights

• University of Calgary graduate students retain copyright ownership and moral rights for their thesis. You may use this material in any way that is permitted by the Copyright Act or through licensing that has been assigned to the document. For uses that are not allowable under copyright legislation or licensing, you are required to seek permission.

Language dc:language.iso

eng

DOI

http://dx.doi.org/10.11575/PRISM/36798

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:ucalgary.scholaris.ca:1880/110704