Reading poetry and its paratexts model users’ rights: Mary Dalton’s Hooking, cento poetics, and copyright law

This draft paper focuses on Newfoundland poet Mary Dalton's 2013 book Hooking -- a collection of centos (poems composed only of lines from other poems) -- in order to propose a method for reading the exercise of users' rights in Canadian poetry by attending to poetry books' paratexts (front and end matter that acknowledges permissions or cites sources). This talk moves from an introductory discussion of users' rights enshrined in Canadian copyright law (e.g. fair dealing, the public domain) to a survey of poetry books, including Dalton's, and how their paratexts frame these books' transformative use of other works. The talk aims to promote a more widespread and robust exercise of users' rights in the service of cultural production and expressive freedom by showing the extent to which published authors, no less than users or readers, need fair dealing too. (Posted for open review, this is a preliminary draft of a talk to be given at a workshop on cento poetry, held at the University of Bochum, Germany, in November 2020.

Engage - Using Data About Research Clusters to Enhance Collaboration

This project explored different classifications of research and ideas for implementing these in University systems to facilitate publicity of research

A Close Reading of Part 5 of Robert Kroetsch’s 1977 long poem SEED CATALOGUE

A close reading of Part 5 of Robert Kroetsch's 1977 long poem Seed Catalogu

Institutions and Interpellations of the Dubject, the Doubled and Spaced Self

This essay develops the idea of the dubject as a model of remediateda subjectivity. It will discuss some theoretical and institutional contexts of the dubject, and then will consider digital manifestations of the dubject with reference to how popular digital applications interpellate the user (see Althusser 1971)—that is, how they impose specific ideological and institutional conditions and limitations on applications and on users’ possibilities for self-representation. This work is an attempt to think digital identity and agency in the context of postcoloniality, as a complement to the more prevalent approach to mediated identity in terms of postmodernity. This work thus builds my larger research project of applying postcolonialist critique to popular culture, particularly that of Canada’s majority white settler society

Dubjection: A Node (Reflections on Web-Conferencing, McLuhan, and Intellectual Property)

From the editors' introduction to the book in which this chapter appears, _McLuhan's Global Village Today_ (Pickering & Chatto, 2014): "Mark A. McCutcheon’s contribution, ‘Dubjection: A Node (Reflections on Web-Conferencing, McLuhan and Intellectual Property)’, offers a more practical take on contemporary media theory. It is very McLuhanesque for several reasons: first, it comments on McCutcheon’s contribution to our McLuhan conference via the internet, probably the most typical way of communicating in the global village of the twenty-first century. But in addition to insightful technological remarks, McCutcheon also comments on the development of media communication on the web and its legal and copyright repercussions. He creates the innovative term dubject in order to refer to the new situation of the subject in twenty-first-century communication networks such as Twitter and Facebook, and in internet teaching and web-conferencing set-ups" (3).Athabasca Universit

Frankenstein as a figure of globalization in Canada’s postcolonial popular culture

This essay analyzes the cultural functions of Frankenstein as a figure of globalization in postcolonial popular culture. Focusing on the case of Canadian film production, I begin by contextualizing Canadian film as a postcolonial site of globalized popular culture, characterized by ‘technological nationalism’. In this context, I consider three Canadian films that adapt Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein to represent globalization. David Cronenberg’s Videodrome (1983) borrows from Frankenstein and Marshall McLuhan to critique new media in the ‘global village’; Robert Lepage’s Possible Worlds (2000) quotes from the Universal Frankenstein film; and Mark Achbar and Jennifer Abbot’s The Corporation (2003) uses Frankenstein as a recurring analogy for the modern corporation. This essay signals a starting point for a more interculturally and transnationally comparative investigation of how Frankenstein adaptations provide a powerful repertoire of representational devices for a postcolonial theory of globalization.SSHR

A Midsummer Night's Mash-up: Adapting Shakespeare as a Canada Day Dance Party

On 1 July 2000, Toronto's Opera House became the unlikely set for a passing strange adaptation of Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream. Serenity Industries, a Toronto dance party promotion company, hired the Queen Street East Theatre turned concert hall to host A Midsummer Night's Dream - a Canada Day rave

The Cento, Romanticism, and Copyright

This article excavates the obscure literary genre of the cento – a genre of poetry defined by its wholly derivative composition from quotations of other works – and its supplementary relation to Romantic literature and the period’s transformations of copyright regulation. The cento’s Romantic reworkings position this genre as a precedent for later appropriation art, especially digital culture’s sampling and remix practices. Specific uses of the cento form by the essayist William Hazlitt and the poet William Wordsworth suggest precedents in the period’s culture of literary production for fair dealing, the “user’s right” to the limited appropriation of copyrighted works that has more recently become ensconced in copyright law. By investigating the place of the cento in Romantic literary production, this study argues for the importance of fair dealing to both creative and critical forms of writing, and contributes historical context to the present-day “copyfight.” This reprint of "The Cento, Romanticism, and Copyright" is made available for Open Access distribution with the author's grateful acknowledgement of English Studies in Canada (ESC) for the original publication of the article.Athabasca University Academic Research Fund progra

Monstrous Times Call For Monstrous Methods: Review of Monsters of the Market: Zombies, Vampires, and Global Capitalism, by David McNally

A book review of Monsters of the Market: Zombies, Vampires, and Global Capitalism (2012) by David McNally, published in the science fiction studies journal Extrapolation