Subjectivity and Embodied Experiences of Time in Contemporary English-Canadian Fiction and Film

My dissertation offers close readings of four literary and filmic Canadian works--Michael Ondaatje's novel Anil's Ghost (2000), Dionne Brand's short-story collection Sans Souci and Other Stories (1983), Jeff Lemire's graphic narrative Essex County (2009), and David Cronenberg's film Spider (2002)-- to demonstrate their engagement with embodied experience. This study argues that subjective experience is inseparable from the process of thinking through and with the body. This focus on embodiment, I argue, often gives way to a privileging of present-time experience, even within accounts of the traumatic past. I connect this interest in present-time embodied experience to a larger concern in the development of Canadian criticism and suggest that Canadian criticism is in need of a corrective shift away from a focus on the past and towards an attentiveness to the present. Chapter one examines embodiment, touch, and forgetting in Ondaatje's Anil's Ghost. Here, I show how the novel provides a model of willed forgetting that allows characters to survive the horrors of war and to experience valuable moments of life-affirming embodied engagement and communication, often through physical touch, in the present. Chapter two shows how the body plays a fundamental and productive role in the psychological processes through which Brand's Black female characters confront a history of oppression. I read the Sans Souci collection as a short-story cycle that is unified by a thematic focus on embodied experiences of time, racism and sexism, and Black female subjectivity. Chapter three focuses on the second book of Lemire's Essex County, and its representation of the aging body in connection with memory and storytelling. I argue that the protagonist's physical movement and positioning in space help him to remember his past and tell his story, and also allow him to experience positive moments of engagement with his present-time embodied experience and the external world. My final chapter, on Cronenberg's Spider, shows how embodied experiences and gestures, such as Spider's writing and his creation of web-like sculptures, play an integral role in the process of constructing, reviving, and engaging with past and present experiences.

Department dc:contributor.department

English

Year dc:date.issued

2014

Author dc:creator

• Mullins, Katherine

Advisor dc:contributor.advisor

• Goldman, Marlene

• Canadian Fiction
• Contemporary Fiction
• Film
• Graphic narrative
• Trauma Studies

Handle dc:identifier.uri

http://hdl.handle.net/1807/74823

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:utoronto.scholaris.ca:1807/74823