Canadian literature

This thesis examines how political and social issues have molded and alteredCanada's penal system since the nineteenth-century. From early Anglo-Canadian society to Joseph Archambault's 1938 Report of the Royal Commission to Investigate the Penal System of Canada, the Canadian penal system waxed and waned against social and political tides. As rehabilitative justice took hold throughout the developed world in the early twentieth century, Canada attempted to shift its justice ideologies only to find that punitive justice had created strong footings. This made reform challenging to implement.

Author Keywords: Archambault Report, Canadian penal system, Canadian prisons, prison press, prison systems, prison writing

Canadian authored diverse LGBTQ2S children's picture books can help counter socialized aspects of heteronormativity and other forms of oppression. This thesis outlines the challenging process for identifying and locating Canadian authored diverse LGBTQ2S children's picture books, with suggestions provided for mitigating this process. Twenty-two books (list and summaries included) are collected and then analysed through three different lenses: Sipe's Semiotically Framed Theory of Text-pictured Relationships; intersectionality; and Canadian Studies. Findings include: the significance of a micro press in offering representation for queer intersectionality, the shift from the portrayal of discrimination against queer parents to an attention to the policing of children's gender identity and expression, and the embrace of the child on their own terms. In addition, a Canadian queer children's book has been created by the researcher, developed through the process of writing of this thesis.

Author Keywords: Canadian authors, Canadian identity, children's picture books, countering heteronormativity, ethnic diversity, LGBTQ2S

The future-poetry of Dennis Lee published in Testament (2012) is the culmination of four cycles of creativity in his lifetime, each seeking a Real beyond the nihilism of technological modernity. Ultimately, Lee wagers the role of the poet and the future of poetic language on Earth on a non-modern that risks entangling the poet who enters void and embodies its meaninglessness.

CHAPTER ONE: To approach this wager, the thesis first identifies the sources in philosophy of a Canadian Romantic modernism embraced by George Grant in collegial exchanges with Dennis Lee during the period of Civil Elegies (1972). Grant elicits a politics out of Nietzsche; Lee extends a poetics out of classical experimental modernism, made intelligible in this thesis by Mallarmé's "cadence" or "rhythm" of things in nothingness and by Beckett's word-play at the impasse of naming. CHAPTER TWO:

To think beyond the mastery of the world by technique is to encounter a choice between silence as assumed by Grant and nonsense as explored by Lee during the period of Alligator Pie (1974) and The Gods (1979). CHAPTER THREE: The example of Paul Celan and his revisiting of Hölderlin provokes Lee to attend upon cadence at the level of the discrete word, an experiment with the dissolution of language and selfhood anticipated in the period of Riffs (1993) and Nightwatch (1996). Here, the undermusic felt

to belong to the life-world (Lebenswelt) impacts as affect, in contrast to Celan's alienated death-walk. CHAPTER FOUR: In the spirit of "post-internet poetry," and by means of the spontaneous polyphonic scoring of cadence, Lee transforms the modernist impasse at the void into a further contradiction, the living of which may allow the poet access to a

non-modern, but at a cost: the loss of poetry to incomprehension and insignificance, the reduction of the poet to a medium of the void, the dissolving of structure into materialities colliding in chance.

Author Keywords: Dennis Lee, George Grant, Nonsense, Paul Celan, Technological Modernity, Void

Robert Bringhurst states that polyphonic art is a faithful, artistic reflection of the multiplicity of the world's ecosystems. This ecocritical perspective recognizes that human art informs our understandings of the world, and therefore artists have a moral obligation towards that world. In Chapter One I argue that mimesis should be reclaimed as a useful literary category since all art, regardless of intentions, has an effect on both culture and the natural world. In Chapter Two I argue that by reconnecting publishing craft and philosophy, our books can serve to bring us more in tune with the structures of the natural world. I conclude in Chapter Three by asking how a counterpublic consciousness can be cultivated, and how Bringhurst's mission of transforming culture might be fully realized. Altogether, this view of literature offers an antidote to Western culture's destructive tendencies towards the natural world.

Author Keywords: Bringhurst, ecocriticism, mimesis, poetry, polyphony, typography