As a theorist who has worked in a variety of contexts, usually comparative, I am interested in contact zones between regulatory discourses, often with an Indigenous and/or minority community focus. Current research includes studies of:
- the concept of “time immemorial” in selected Indigenous land title cases in B.C.;
- spatial deixis in Tsilhqot’in v. B.C. ;
- theorizing the court’s concepts of narrative and textuality in three contexts:
Indigenous land title cases (with an emphasis on B.C.). While much work has been done on the court’s responses to traditional oral narratives of place and identity, this project seeks to approach familiar questions from a different perspective. By studying the complex relations between oral and print-based narratives in the court’s estimation, and by studying the court’s understanding of ‘orality’ in land title cases and its understanding of ‘fiction’ in expressive freedoms cases, a new perspective may be articulated. This is a book-length project, initially funded by the Hampton Foundation.
The English professor as expert witness. While many studies have considered the court’s responses to expert witnesses from the social sciences or empirical sciences, little attention has been given to the relatively rarer use of expert witnesses from the humanities. Focusing on my own experience as an expert witness but also drawing on the experiences of other English professors in several recent Canadian cases, this study will explore the court’s inferences and hypotheses about ‘English’ as discipline and profession. When an English professor testifies as an expert witness, what can the court hear and why?
Anime and comic books. Both anime and popular comic books have been objects of legal scrutiny in Canada (and elsewhere) recently and both pose problems for the court’s understanding of ‘harm’ and the ‘public good.’ This study explores the challenge for the courts of construing texts involving both visual and verbal elements in highly stylized generic contexts which push the boundaries of ‘artistic merit.’
Selected publications
Review of Garry Thomas Morse, Discovery Passages, in Canadian Literature 214 (Autumn 2012) 178-81.
“Mousike/Memory: Sound/Sign: From Joyce to Zukofsky,” from Writing Joyce: A Semiotics of the Joyce System (Indiana University Press, 1989). PDF
“‘Making Up Stories’: Law & Imagination in Contemporary Canada.” ESC 29:3 (2003) PDF
“Meridians of Perception: A Reading of The Journals of Susanna Moodie,” in Arnold E. Davidson & Cathy N. Davidson, eds. The Achievement of Margaret Atwood (Toronto: Anansi, 1981). PDF
“From Picture To Hologram: Nicole Brossard’s Grammar of Utopia,” in Shirley Neuman and Smaro Kamboureli, eds. A Mazing Space: Writing Canadian Women Writing (Edmonton: Longspoon/NeWest, 1987). PDF
“The Ethos of Censorship in English-Canadian Literature: An Ontopornosophical Approach,” in Klaus Petersen and Allan C. Hutchinson, eds. Censorship in Canada Today (University of Toronto press, 1999). PDF
“The Choreography of Gesture: Marcelle Jousse and Finnegans Wake,” James Joyce Quarterly 14.3 (Spring 1977). PDF
“From Catechism to Catachresis: Aspects of Joycean Pedagogy in Ulysses and Finnegans Wake,” in Morris Beja and Shari Benstock, eds. Coping With Joyce: Essays from the Copenhagen Joyce Symposium (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1989). PDF
“Imagination and Memory in Vico and Joyce,” in Marcel Danesi, ed., Proceedings of the Conference on Vico and Anglo-American Science, Philosophy and Writing (The Hague: Mouton de Gruyter, 1994). PDF
“Laws of Media: Vico and McLuhan on The New Science.” Signature 2 (Winter 1989) PDF
“Portrait of the Poet as Joyce Scholar: An Approach to A.M. Klein.” Canadian Literature 76 (Spring 1978). PDF
Copies of these publications can be reproduced and given to third parties in any format or medium for personal research or study, educational or not-for-profit purposes without prior permission or charge, provided the work is properly acknowledged by providing full bibliographic data as cited.
