J P R Bolay

Published in Studies in Canadian Literature, vol. 42, no. 2, 2017, pp. 154-170.

A metacognitive paper in which I reflect on what Derrida calls a document's "privileged topology" and the question of how we digitize absences within the archive. I use case studies from the University of Calgary's Digital Collections to distinguish between and recontextualize different forms of and approaches to digitization. I conclude by unpacking the hauntological nature of re-collecting selections from a fonds into a digital archive as well as the impacts of this haunting on the relationships between author, reader/collector/scholar, and archive.

This chapter from The Canadian Alternative: Cartoonists, Comics, and Graphic Novels (eds. Dominick Grace & Eric Hoffman, U Press of Mississippi, 2018) examines the politics of representation -- both in terms of monstration and recitation -- in Chester Brown's comic biography of Louis Riel. I draw on Genette's theory of focalization to demonstrate the ways by which Brown's Riel transcends the realism of his story world and the historicism of narrative, yielding a semi-mythological yet empathetic reconsideration of history.

Developed from my MA project at the University of Saskatchewan and published in Jeu vidéo et livre / Videogame and BooK (eds. Björn-Olav Dozo and Fanny Barnabé), this paper examines the narratological function of textual objects in videogames. Included in this study are the booklets that accompanied older games, peripherals such as the art book accompanying Skyrim's Special Edition, and diegetic texts such as the Codex in Mass Effect. The paper demonstrates the important role textual objects play in bridging mechanics with narrative.

This paper was presented at the Western Canadian Studies conference in Winnipeg, Mb. on 5 Nov. 2015.

Thomas Wharton writes in the introduction to Robert Kroetsch’s The Words of My Roaring that “the novel doesn’t only contain tall tales; it is one. In Kroetsch’s country, prairie politics, like so much else, takes on mythic dimensions” (vii). I posit that, in a Kroetschian fashion, Words is not a tall tale, but a tale about telling, and a sobering reflection on the consequences thereof within the seemingly mythic landscape of prairie politics. The novel is more than a tall tale or a narrative that contains tall tales, but a meta-narrative that reflects and comments on that mode of story-telling through the construction of Backstrom’s voice and its deconstruction of the tales it tells.

This paper was presented at the Annual Meeting of the Bibliographic Society of Canada at the Congress of the Humanities and Social Sciences in Calgary, Ab. on 30 May 2016.

A creative critical examination of the archive, both material and digital, and the relationship between reader, place, and text within the context of archival research.

Despite the 2006 volume Milton in Popular Culture, very little attention has been paid to the inter-relations between Milton's Paradise Lost and musical renditions thereof. I intend to take preliminary steps toward amending this neglect through a study of Paradise Lost, a concept album by American neoclassical metal band Symphony X. I will illustrate how Symphony X retells Paradise Lost and complicates the album’s narrative through the use of voice and creative extrapolation, resulting in an intertextual relationship through which the album and Milton’s epic influence one another’s readings, particularly with regards to gender. The allusive nature of Symphony X’s retelling demonstrates the continued relevance of Milton’s work and the Romantic interpretations thereof in popular and alternative culture, particularly with regards to sympathetic readings of Satan that deconstruct the biblical good/evil binary. One of the difficulties in interpreting the album is that singer Russell Allen shifts his tone of voice to suit the mood of the song, not to denote a change in speaker as is done in other concept albums. Thus, key passages that blend characters' voices on the album further emphasize the deconstruction of good and evil introduced through the extrapolated narrative and challenge the traditional gender roles presented in the source text. I conclude that within Symphony X’s writing and performances of Paradise Lost, the combination of performative genders challenges the politics of both the source text and the album’s cultural context.

While the concepts of cognitive estrangement and the novum have been grounded in Science Fiction theory for decades and arguably present in its literature for centuries, their depiction and thus their roles in literature have shifted in certain contemporary works due to the popularization of Artificial Intelligence (A.I.) and theories of Singularity. This trend is particularly evident in Robert J. Sawyer’s “Shed Skin” (2009) and Wake (2009), and Robert Charles Wilson’s “The Cartesian Theatre” (2009) and Spin (2005). A close examination of these works, supported by contemporary technological, sociological, and literary theory, suggests a trend towards the characterization, subjectification, and humanization of technology. This new direction estranges the reader from the traditional concept of the novum and facilitates a new cognition of post-human entities that strive towards a harmonious future of Singularity.