PhD Oral Exam - Sadie Barker, English

When studying for a doctoral degree (PhD), candidates submit a thesis that provides a critical review of the current state of knowledge of the thesis subject as well as the student’s own contributions to the subject. The distinguishing criterion of doctoral graduate research is a significant and original contribution to knowledge.

Once accepted, the candidate presents the thesis orally. This oral exam is open to the public.

Abstract

The frontier, this project proposes, is a historically ongoing concept, signifying assemblage, and discursive construction inviting new kinds of encounters between postcolonial and aesthetic theory. A signpost of occupation, dispossession, and geopolitical encroachment, and a recurring motif in popular storytelling today, the frontier, this dissertation suggests, presents an opportunity to critically engage (and perhaps rethink) postcolonialism’s general wariness of aesthetic theory and aesthetic theory’s traditional tendency to isolate aesthetic experience from historical and cultural circumstance. Toward this possibility, this project surveys of a variety of “frontier genres” in the Canadian context: The popular frontier zones of Canadian art, the feminist wild, the Pacific Northwest, and the western, as they appear in contemporary television, award-winning literature and cinema, or institutions (such as national galleries). Utilizing historically informed postcolonial analysis of these sites, as well as aesthetic attention to their generic stylistic features and characterizations, I aim to illuminate the productive ambivalence the frontier poses to the disciplinary boundaries of postcolonial and aesthetic concern, and thus, the frontier’s significance in affirming interdisciplinary relationships and animating decolonial futures.