Browsing by Author "Sigler, David"

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    Digitextual Modernism: Digital Remediation of Modernist Poetry
    (2021-12) Best, William; Clarke, Michael Tavel; Bourrier, Karen; Sigler, David; Farfan, Penelope; Ross, Stephen
    “Digitextual Modernism” is an exploratory case-study in how digital remediation influences the development of meaning in Modernist poetry. As has been well established in previous scholarship, much of Modernist poetry is exemplary for intertextual theories of semiotics, and digital media likewise are structured upon and heavily influenced by intertextuality in particular, and Modernist theories and poetics broadly. As such, this study posits that various Modernist poems, when digitized, reflect upon their digital mediations and proffer unique intertextual readings beyond or in contrast to “traditional” readings that are largely reliant on the codex. Using the poetry of three authors of relatively disparate styles – Marianne Moore’s “An Octopus” and “The Fish,” T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land, and W. B. Yeats’s “The Wanderings of Oisin” – this study examines Web-based mediations of the poetry to provide evidence for a long-held but largely underexamined assumption: digital media fundamentally changes or augments the hermeneutic process in reading Modernist poetry. This is accomplished by examining the engagements with intertextual semiotics in each poem, reading the poems in digital media, and considering the theoretical influence of digital media on the intertextuality at play in these readings, as well as analyzing the ways that the poetry critiques digital media. Particular attention is given to “distracted” reading practices, intertextuality between code and rendered text, algorithmic mechanisms of control on intertextuality, and skeuomorphic authenticity. The study concludes with a Coda that brings together “High” Modernists broadly to consider the phantasmagoria of Modernist Facebook profiles in light of the nigh-ubiquitously paradoxical attitude of these authors about the relationship of the author and/or authorial biography to her writing.
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    "Doomed to Live": Reading Shelley's Frankenstein and "The Immortal Immortal" with Derrida's Death Penalty Seminars
    (Litteraria Pragensia, 2019-02-25) Sigler, David
    Drawing upon Jacques Derrida’s recently published two-volume seminar on the death penalty, this essay analyzes two parallel cases from Mary Shelley’s fictions: on the one hand, Elizabeth’s objection to the death penalty in Frankenstein, as she visits Justine Moritz in prison; and on the other hand, the eternal life bestowed upon Winzy in the short story “The Mortal Immortal.” In both cases, the calculations at work necessarily incorporate something incalculable as the punishment becomes “capital.” Shelley objects not just to the cruelty of the death penalty or to the possibility of wrongful conviction, but also to the ways that the law is permitted to draw equivalencies between persons and subject them to a calculation. By thinking of the death penalty and “life penalty” as two sides of the same coin, Shelley effectively deconstructs the logical framework for capital punishment and articulates a complex abolitionist position. Shelley offers, in her fictional interrogation of life sentences and death sentences, a contradictory and bleak set of meditations upon the injustice inherent in human equivalence.
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    Flood Waters: A Novel
    (2019-01-21) Vance, Erin Emily Ann; Mayr, Suzette; Srivastava, Aruna; Davenport, William Jeptha; Sigler, David; Mayr, Suzette
    Flood Waters centres around Matilda Netherwood, a young woman suffering from severe epilepsy, and examines her coming-of-age as she breaks free from her extremely strict and restrictive grandfather and finds herself in a relationship with a married man. As Matilda navigates illness and isolation, and then illness and motherhood, the various perspectives of the novel ruminate on her past and present and the ways in which she is and has always been a haunted woman.
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    Illustrations of “Rapunzel” as Commentaries on Women’s Isolation
    (2024-08-12) Schaad, Tamara; Wagner, Martin; Faivre, Cyrielle; Sigler, David; Friedman, Rachel
    The Covid-19 pandemic has brought social isolation to the forefront of public debate. Yet, social isolation is not a recent phenomenon and understanding its history can enrich the current debate. Contributing to our knowledge of the different ways social isolation has been evaluated in the past, my thesis analyzes the historical illustrations of what is, arguably, the most widely distributed German literary text on women’s social isolation, the Grimm fairy tale “Rapunzel.” My corpus includes roughly 250 illustrations from 68 German-language editions of the Grimm’s Kinder- und Hausmärchen or German-language editions based on this larger work, ranging from 1857 to 2021. While scholars have commented on the importance of isolation as a motif in “Rapunzel,” they have paid little attention to the history of illustrations of this fairy tale or to how this history reveals changing notions of women’s isolation. This gap is all the more striking as the importance of book illustrations, in general, is now widely recognized through major studies by Bill Katz, John Harthan, and others. In my thesis, I seek to establish, first, to what extent social isolation was made thematic in the illustrations, and second, how the portrayal of social isolation changed over time. I argue that recent illustrations portray Rapunzel’s isolation more prominently and recognize it as more problematic than older illustrations and that the depiction of Rapunzel’s isolation has thus changed significantly over time. These findings can shed light on the different understanding of women’s isolation and provide an important paradigm in our understanding of the social construction of women’s rights and of gender. Although the cultural history of women’s social isolation over the past 164 years cannot be studied completely through the reception history of any one text alone, the widely distributed tale of “Rapunzel” does provide one important case study of how the understanding of women’s isolation has developed.
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    Lacan's Romanticism
    (Routledge, 2020-01) Sigler, David
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    Logical Time in Austen's Persuasion: Desire and the Unproductive Anxious Interval
    (Routledge, 2021-06-16) Michalski, Isabelle; Sigler, David
    This essay reads Jane Austen’s Persuasion in light of Jacques Lacan’s essay “Logical Time and the Assertion of Anticipated Certainty.” We weigh the glances exchanged between characters in a chain of four episodes from the novel, paying attention to the pauses produced in each scene. Such an analysis suggests that the characters, confronted with an effectively carceral system of social rules, must deduce their own gender identities, and their desirability within that sexual regime, by letting go of their very subjectivity. A complex temporality is produced in the field of desire that undercuts any distinction between objective and subjective self-knowledge.
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    Patriots for Empire: Unionism, Imperialism, and Scottish Colonial Administrators in the British Atlantic, 1698-1776
    (2023-04-25) Bates, Zachary Adam; MacMillan, Kenneth Richard; Campbell, Lyndsay; Spangler, Jewel; Sigler, David; Stanwood, Owen
    This study expands on understandings of the first British Empire by integrating several Scottish colonial administrators who served in Britain’s North American colonies into its intellectual and political history. It argues that these officials manifested, modified, and maintained a Scoto-British view of the British Empire that developed as a result of the Glorious Revolution in 1688 – which established Britain as a polity ruled by Parliamentary sovereignty – and the Act of Union in 1707 – which forged England and Scotland into a united kingdom. Their intent was to extend their understanding of the revolution and union settlement throughout the British Atlantic empire, and they took great interest in extending Britain’s North American colonial possessions westward and conquering islands in the Caribbean. However, they encountered a colonial understanding of these same events that empowered assemblies and colonial institutions to challenge royal authority, and they expressed concern that the colonies were becoming more republican and would potentially become independent. By the 1720s, many of these officials began to contribute tracts and advice to the Board of Trade, often recommending stricter oversight of the colonies and reforms in their governance, such as direct taxation or Parliamentary intervention; and by the 1730s, they also began to construct a British history that celebrated a progressive vision of Britain’s past that focused on the expansion of liberty, the mixing of different races (Britons, Saxons, Danes, Romans, and others), Britain’s overseas possessions, and continued westward expansion. The Scoto-British view of the empire became increasingly untenable in the 1750s and 1760s due to colonial opposition, and it eventually dissolved with the dismemberment of much of Britain’s North American colonies. Yet, the Scoto-British vision of the empire – based on unionism and imperialism – lingered in the vision of Alexander Hamilton and in the imaginations of several nineteenth-century adherents of Manifest Destiny and in the idea of America as a melting pot. This study fills a gap in the study of the British Empire by reintegrating this view, and it suggests that many of the concepts normally attributed to American exceptionalism had their origins in a larger, British history.
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    Smutty Alchemy
    (2021-01-18) Smith, Mallory E. Land; Sigler, David; Lai, Larissa; Jenkins, Jacqueline; Camara, Anthony
    Sina Queyras, in the essay “Lyric Conceptualism: A Manifesto in Progress,” describes the Lyric Conceptualist as a poet capable of recognizing the effects of disparate movements and employing a variety of lyric, conceptual, and language poetry techniques to continue to innovate in poetry without dismissing the work of other schools of poetic thought. Queyras sees the lyric conceptualist as an artistic curator who collects, modifies, selects, synthesizes, and adapts, to create verse that is both conceptual and accessible, using relevant materials and techniques from the past and present. This dissertation responds to Queyras’s idea with a collection of original poems in the lyric conceptualist mode, supported by a critical exegesis of that work. “Smutty Alchemy,” the poetry collection, navigates lyric and conceptual traditions and forms to discuss scientific subject matter, taking as a focal point the work of Margaret Cavendish, a writer at the start of the seventeenth-century scientific revolution. The exegesis aims to situate the collection, “Smutty Alchemy,” within the intellectual context both of contemporary Canadian poetry and of creative-scientific writing. Stylistically, “Smutty Alchemy” speaks to the concerns of lyric conceptualism by blurring the lines among lyric, conceptual and language poetry traditions, playing with such recognized forms as sonnets, triolets, epic poems, and free verse, as well as refigured poetic shapes, such as the element poems, the cursed sonnets, and invented poetic shapes, such as the tardigrade-shaped poems, which specifically reference concrete poetry. Feminist writers and critics can both refuse to limit subject matter or style based on the autobiographical and confessional modes of the lyric poets and still discuss the mark of the personal upon even the most process-intensive poetics and “objective” voices. Additionally, they refuse to adhere strictly to any stringent rule-making of the conceptualists, or to choose exclusively a focus on language moments as do the language poets. My project explores this impetus towards the understanding of poetic forms, coupled with the impulse to delimit and expand the range of those forms by creating a poetry collection that pairs scientific subject matter with experiential knowing and the synthetic and invented poetic shapes of lyric conceptualism.
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    The Poetry of Collective Life; How Post-Hardcore Bands Integrate Confessionalism in their Subcultural Music by Altering their Mode of Address
    (2023-04-05) Siddoway, Katie; Sigler, David
    In this paper I will analyze how confession manifests in Cursive’s song “Some Red Handed Sleight of Hand”, juxtaposing my analysis with texts on subculture theory, namely Dick Hebdige’s Subculture: The Meaning of Style. Cursive writes in the post-hardcore genre, which is an offshoot of the punk music-based subculture. It explores how subcultural artists simultaneously represent their personal stories and reflect/adhere to subcultural values. Cursive acknowledges and contributes to this trend, as they integrate a religious metaphor alongside their personalized author-speaker, making their exploration of selfhood more widely comprehensible. Intertextually, subcultural confessionals both present experiences that are unique to their authors and embrace vague descriptors that allow their stories to appeal beyond the scope of themselves. Cursive reimagines confessionalism: they enter a context of social norms and mores, and can vaguely present thoughts and feelings that would require explanation were they not expressed within subculture. Subsequently, they can present a semi-confessional that both restricts and displays blatant confession. Confessionalism is a mode of lyrical expression centring first-person writing, making an inseparable author-speaker. In poetry and popular music, confession remains a mode of self-assertion that provides authors a theatre for unabashed, uninterrupted self-display, a trend that is disrupted within subcultural music. Subcultures are social subgroups developed by collective feelings of alienation from mass culture, and the subsequent desire to corrugate in a social microcosm where previously alienated qualities are accepted. In subculture, confession’s goal becomes to separate the author-speaker from mass culture but adhere to a smaller social group’s shared experiences. It simultaneously embraces self-assertion and homogenization.
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    Time/frame: Rewriting the Mirror Stage in Lacan's Anxiety Seminar
    (Association of Canadian College and University Teachers of English, 2019-01) Sigler, David; Lypka, Celiese
    This essay assesses Jacques Lacan’s comments on the mirror stage in his Seminar X: Anxiety, given between 1962–63. These comments stress the importance of time, framing, and the uncanny as factors in the mirror stage, thus giving Lacan’s signature concept several unexpected points of emphasis. As we compare the frame around the edges of a mirror to other framed stages discussed in Lacan’s seminar, we consider the implications of this new way of conceptualizing the mirror stage for literary studies and Lacanian psychoanalysis.