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William Dorey

McMaster University, English and Cultural Studies; History, Graduate Student

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William Dorey is a student, novelist, and poet. As a student at McMaster University, William is pursuing his MA in English Literature. Expanding from the constrictive realm of classical literature, some of William’s academic interests include Science Fiction and Weird literature, the history of social activism, and the important intersections of race, gender, sexuality, and popular culture.

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Janine Deschenes

McMaster University

University of California, Davis

Michael Rothberg

University of California, Los Angeles

Eleanor Moseman

Colorado State University

Liverpool Hope University

Brett Ashley Kaplan

University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Dr. Gary P Spicer

Manchester Metropolitan University

Tallinn University

Université de Montréal

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Papers by William Dorey

Rooms of Encapsulated Memory: Rethinking Surrealism's Ability to Re/member the World After the Holocaust

Developing a New Life Strategy: Intersubjective Witnessing and the Potential for Mental Health Literacy in Miriam Toews's Swing Low: A Life

By drawing our attention to the limitations of our existing ways of understanding mental illness,... more By drawing our attention to the limitations of our existing ways of understanding mental illness, Toews vocalizes the necessity of bearing witness to embodied experiences of Madness while simultaneously disrupting the boundaries between both health and illness and individuals. In doing so, Swing Low: A Life ultimately invites us to create a new space of intersubjective witnessing that ensures that the voices and experiences of Madness do not remain silent in the face of oppression—a space that allows Mad positive thought, work, and art to seep through the walls of the Ivory Tower of academia and into the accessible educational praxis of mental health literacy.

"How fucked up is you?": Celebrity Transgression, the Alter Ego, and the Failed Anti-Hero in Eminem's Career

By placing two of his most critically and commercially successful albums, The Marshall Mathers LP... more By placing two of his most critically and commercially successful albums, The Marshall Mathers LP (2000) and its sequel The Marshall Mathers LP2 (2013), in conversation with Chris Rojek’s work on the celebrity anti-hero, I examine the ways in which Mathers weaponizes these identities to not only perform his role as an anti-hero, but also distance himself from any criticism that he would be forced to endure. As a result of these exceptionally successful performances however, I argue that Mathers has effectively transgressed the realm of the anti-hero itself, despite his best efforts to re-attach himself to that label. In doing so, I hope to draw attention to the limitations of existing scholarship dedicated to theorizing Eminem and the anti-hero and instead offer a new way to think through his career that is predicated on transgression, linguistic violence, and notoriety.

"Physics depends on a universe infinitely centred on an equals sign": Unreality, Narrative Spaces, and Postmodern Schizophrenia in House of Leaves

In a review of House of Leaves for the New York Times, Robert Kelly writes that Danielewski’s nov... more In a review of House of Leaves for the New York Times, Robert Kelly writes that Danielewski’s novel is “a vast exploration and meditation on the paradoxical spaces that open out from – or as – our awareness” (New York Times). It is precisely these paradoxical spaces of awareness that I would like to consider here, as House of Leaves is a self-reflexive novel that ultimately works to complicate our own understandings of reality, identity, and tradition. Ostensibly about a house that is larger on the inside than it is on the outside, House of Leaves takes the perceptual experience and involvement of reading and places them at the heart of the text, effectively distancing the reader from any preconceived notions about the aesthetic limitations of literature. Based on Fredric Jameson’s work on the experience of the postmodern schizophrenic—that is, “an experience of isolated, disconnected, discontinuous material signifiers which fail to link up into a coherent sequence” (119)—I argue that Mark Z. Danielewski manipulates our awareness of reality in an attempt to dissociate us from our preconceived understandings of the world. As a result of the breakdown of the temporal, spatial, and linguistic continuities that we have typically associated with our own understanding of reality, both the characters in and readers of House of Leaves are forced to occupy a space of unreality, wherein we are made to operate in a perpetual present moment that effectively alienates us from our preconceived ability to understand reality. In doing so, the reader ultimately becomes a postmodern schizophrenic narrator within the novel, as the novel’s aesthetic structure and complex ending force us to occupy a space outside of our understanding of literary tradition and reality—that is, we are forced to exist within a seemingly disjointed space of unreality that affords us the ability to continue the creation of one collective metanarrative centered around the novel long after its completion.

Where We're From, There's Always Music in the Air: Semiotics, Defamiliarization, and Unreal Reality in Twin Peaks

As Lawrence Crawford would say, “Perception is the center of aesthetic experience, and perception... more As Lawrence Crawford would say, “Perception is the center of aesthetic experience, and perception can only be established by effecting a (textual) difference” (210). This connection between perception and aesthetic experience serves to contextualize my discussion of the first dream sequence in Twin Peaks, as there are clear surrealist conventions in this scene that effect the viewer’s understanding of the multiple layers of reality in Twin Peaks. We, as viewers one step removed from the fictional reality of the television show, exist in a very real reality, a very real existence, in time and space. But what happens when our perception of logic and reality is defamiliarized? Based on Darko Suvin’s classification of cognitive estrangement—that is, science fiction’s (SF) act of twisting what was once understood to be normal or conventional into a completely different thing altogether (372)—I argue that David Lynch’s dream sequence manipulates the semiotic relationship between certain signs and signifiers in an attempt to disassociate viewers from their cognitive understanding of their existence in both time and space. As a result of this temporal and spatial displacement, both the characters in and the viewers of Twin Peaks simultaneously occupy a space of both perceived real version of reality and an unreal reality, wherein logic is suspended, signs are void of all meaning, and cognitive senses are defamiliarized.

"To Being an 'Us' for Once Instead of a 'Them'": Silence, Agency, and Identity in the Film Version of Jonathan Larson's Rent

By analyzing Angel in the film version of Jonathan Larson’s rock-musical Rent in the context of s... more By analyzing Angel in the film version of Jonathan Larson’s rock-musical Rent in the context of social and medical stigma, I will argue that Larson re-appropriates the scientific and political discourses that have been used to marginalize the LGBTQ and HIV/AIDS communities to create a voice and identity for these populations. As a result of this technique, Rent becomes a project through which these marginalized communities claim a public voice in response to the silence that was forced upon them by Reagan’s administration. However, Larson takes this one step further by having a spectre of silence haunt the play, ultimately reminding us that our narratives of illness and sexuality still silence these populations today.

"The lie made into the rule of the world": Absolute Power, Omniscience, and Transgression in Franz Kafka's The Trial and the Book of Job

The challenging of divine and absolute power in both The Trial and the Book of Job manifests ... more The challenging of divine and absolute power in both
The Trial
and the Book of Job manifests itself in the questioning nature of both Josef K. and Job, briefly suggesting that man has an intrinsic responsibility to understand the structures of power that dictate their lives. Therefore, by examining
Josef K.‘s
attempts to understand the power structures that dictate his life and the ultimate result of his pursuit of answers in
The Trial
in relation to Job‘s quest to hold God
accountable for the destruction of his life, I argue that both texts initially seek to challenge the legitimacy of political and religious structures of absolute power. As a result of their exploration of these dominant systems of power however, both men come to understand that absolute power is an inescapable aspect of central authority that they will never be able to fully understand.

Negotiating the Question of Foreignness in Kant's Project Towards Peace

I argue that Kant’s final turn in the conclusion of the work, where he opens up his project towar... more I argue that Kant’s final turn in the conclusion of the work, where he opens up his project towards perpetual peace to the absolute guest—that is, in this case, the reader—becomes a tangible creation of the type of cosmopolitan community that he defends in this treaty. As a result, “Perpetual Peace” becomes both a physical and metaphorical site of the complex connections between representation, community, education, and justice, suggesting that perpetual peace is a process that has a certain kind of finitude about it; there is some kind of final destination to peace that lies in the cosmopolitan law of hospitality. In the distance, however, tucked away in the crevices between his articles and declarations, lurks the unaddressed question of the foreigner—the question that ultimately reveals the limitations of “Perpetual Peace”. For in making hospitality a judicial decree and forcing the host to commit oneself to absolute hospitality, the host risks destroying the very essence of hospitality that his cosmopolitan community depends upon.

Defending Freedom and Justice?: The Tortured Body as a Site of Transformative Biopower

While the Abu Ghraib Prison scandal is just one of many examples of abuse and terror in the ongoi... more While the Abu Ghraib Prison scandal is just one of many examples of abuse and terror in the ongoing War on Terror, I would like to use these photographs to ascribe meaning to the tortured body in a time of severe political and social schism. By doing this, I will argue that the spectacle of the imprisoned body—that is, the tortured Middle Eastern prisoner—is the subject of state power that reinforces dominant notions of power relations that exist in our society. As a result, I believe that the scars and bruises of the tortured body become spaces where an advancement of Foucault’s theory of biopower hides itself, ultimately establishing and rewriting itself in the social distinction between the West and the Middle East.

The Witness and the Survivor: Politics of Historical Trauma, Remembrance, and Testimony in the Stories of Mavis Gallant and Yves Theriault

By first understanding the type of survivor presented in each story in the context of Giorgio Aga... more By first understanding the type of survivor presented in each story in the context of Giorgio Agamben’s classification of the witness, then moving to a critical examination of the larger implications of the varying forms of remembrance and witnessing in these stories, I will argue that these texts use the politics of historical trauma and testimony to critique the larger societal frameworks in which they operate. However, the varying forms of societies in which the victims and their testimonies are forced to operate within, namely a ruthless patriarchy in “My Heart is Broken”, rampant consumerism in “Baum, Gabriel, 1935 – ( )”, and a vicious history of white colonization in “Akua Nuten”, ultimately undermine the testimony of the witness, as their power over the individual dictates the type of survivor that the victim is allowed to be. As a result, the internal workings of bearing witness to trauma and the external functions of the worlds in which they exist operate in a complicated relationship, wherein the society essentially creates its own kind of complacent survivor, void of any meaningful critique.

Oh the Humanities!: The Consequences of the Conservative Infiltration of the Post-9/11 University

While the war on higher education started long before the terrorist attacks and the ensuing War o... more While the war on higher education started long before the terrorist attacks and the ensuing War on Terror (H. Giroux 141), the aftermath of these events have led to the attempted dismantling of the university and the defamation of the Liberal Arts. When coupled with the aggressive form of neoliberalism that underscores our lives and renders the individual a consumer and virtually everything else a commodity, it is important for the university to understand its role in the formation of critical, intellectually-responsible students. Instead, this obligation has been dismantled in the face of anti-intellectualism, spawning a detrimental response from the conservative public and even Humanities academics alike.

These Aren't the Middle Easterners We're Looking For: Politics of Torture, the Body, and Mourning in Kathryn Bigelow's Zero Dark Thirty

By analyzing the film Zero Dark Thirty in the context of Said’s theories of Orientalism, I will a... more By analyzing the film Zero Dark Thirty in the context of Said’s theories of Orientalism, I will argue that the Othering of Middle Eastern bodies at the hands of Western entertainment renders the Middle East as the bastion of evil in the world. As a consequence of this Othering, Zero Dark Thirty ostracizes Middle Easterners from the global community, emphasizing the fact that the War on Terror is not simply a physical conflict, but also an ideological battle that goes beyond the physical realm of the war. Due to the horrendous treatment of Middle Easterners, through both torture and murder, their bodies become a site of both physical persecution and ideological conflict.

Rooms of Encapsulated Memory: Rethinking Surrealism's Ability to Re/member the World After the Holocaust

Developing a New Life Strategy: Intersubjective Witnessing and the Potential for Mental Health Literacy in Miriam Toews's Swing Low: A Life

By drawing our attention to the limitations of our existing ways of understanding mental illness,... more By drawing our attention to the limitations of our existing ways of understanding mental illness, Toews vocalizes the necessity of bearing witness to embodied experiences of Madness while simultaneously disrupting the boundaries between both health and illness and individuals. In doing so, Swing Low: A Life ultimately invites us to create a new space of intersubjective witnessing that ensures that the voices and experiences of Madness do not remain silent in the face of oppression—a space that allows Mad positive thought, work, and art to seep through the walls of the Ivory Tower of academia and into the accessible educational praxis of mental health literacy.

"How fucked up is you?": Celebrity Transgression, the Alter Ego, and the Failed Anti-Hero in Eminem's Career

By placing two of his most critically and commercially successful albums, The Marshall Mathers LP... more By placing two of his most critically and commercially successful albums, The Marshall Mathers LP (2000) and its sequel The Marshall Mathers LP2 (2013), in conversation with Chris Rojek’s work on the celebrity anti-hero, I examine the ways in which Mathers weaponizes these identities to not only perform his role as an anti-hero, but also distance himself from any criticism that he would be forced to endure. As a result of these exceptionally successful performances however, I argue that Mathers has effectively transgressed the realm of the anti-hero itself, despite his best efforts to re-attach himself to that label. In doing so, I hope to draw attention to the limitations of existing scholarship dedicated to theorizing Eminem and the anti-hero and instead offer a new way to think through his career that is predicated on transgression, linguistic violence, and notoriety.

"Physics depends on a universe infinitely centred on an equals sign": Unreality, Narrative Spaces, and Postmodern Schizophrenia in House of Leaves

In a review of House of Leaves for the New York Times, Robert Kelly writes that Danielewski’s nov... more In a review of House of Leaves for the New York Times, Robert Kelly writes that Danielewski’s novel is “a vast exploration and meditation on the paradoxical spaces that open out from – or as – our awareness” (New York Times). It is precisely these paradoxical spaces of awareness that I would like to consider here, as House of Leaves is a self-reflexive novel that ultimately works to complicate our own understandings of reality, identity, and tradition. Ostensibly about a house that is larger on the inside than it is on the outside, House of Leaves takes the perceptual experience and involvement of reading and places them at the heart of the text, effectively distancing the reader from any preconceived notions about the aesthetic limitations of literature. Based on Fredric Jameson’s work on the experience of the postmodern schizophrenic—that is, “an experience of isolated, disconnected, discontinuous material signifiers which fail to link up into a coherent sequence” (119)—I argue that Mark Z. Danielewski manipulates our awareness of reality in an attempt to dissociate us from our preconceived understandings of the world. As a result of the breakdown of the temporal, spatial, and linguistic continuities that we have typically associated with our own understanding of reality, both the characters in and readers of House of Leaves are forced to occupy a space of unreality, wherein we are made to operate in a perpetual present moment that effectively alienates us from our preconceived ability to understand reality. In doing so, the reader ultimately becomes a postmodern schizophrenic narrator within the novel, as the novel’s aesthetic structure and complex ending force us to occupy a space outside of our understanding of literary tradition and reality—that is, we are forced to exist within a seemingly disjointed space of unreality that affords us the ability to continue the creation of one collective metanarrative centered around the novel long after its completion.

Where We're From, There's Always Music in the Air: Semiotics, Defamiliarization, and Unreal Reality in Twin Peaks

As Lawrence Crawford would say, “Perception is the center of aesthetic experience, and perception... more As Lawrence Crawford would say, “Perception is the center of aesthetic experience, and perception can only be established by effecting a (textual) difference” (210). This connection between perception and aesthetic experience serves to contextualize my discussion of the first dream sequence in Twin Peaks, as there are clear surrealist conventions in this scene that effect the viewer’s understanding of the multiple layers of reality in Twin Peaks. We, as viewers one step removed from the fictional reality of the television show, exist in a very real reality, a very real existence, in time and space. But what happens when our perception of logic and reality is defamiliarized? Based on Darko Suvin’s classification of cognitive estrangement—that is, science fiction’s (SF) act of twisting what was once understood to be normal or conventional into a completely different thing altogether (372)—I argue that David Lynch’s dream sequence manipulates the semiotic relationship between certain signs and signifiers in an attempt to disassociate viewers from their cognitive understanding of their existence in both time and space. As a result of this temporal and spatial displacement, both the characters in and the viewers of Twin Peaks simultaneously occupy a space of both perceived real version of reality and an unreal reality, wherein logic is suspended, signs are void of all meaning, and cognitive senses are defamiliarized.

"To Being an 'Us' for Once Instead of a 'Them'": Silence, Agency, and Identity in the Film Version of Jonathan Larson's Rent

By analyzing Angel in the film version of Jonathan Larson’s rock-musical Rent in the context of s... more By analyzing Angel in the film version of Jonathan Larson’s rock-musical Rent in the context of social and medical stigma, I will argue that Larson re-appropriates the scientific and political discourses that have been used to marginalize the LGBTQ and HIV/AIDS communities to create a voice and identity for these populations. As a result of this technique, Rent becomes a project through which these marginalized communities claim a public voice in response to the silence that was forced upon them by Reagan’s administration. However, Larson takes this one step further by having a spectre of silence haunt the play, ultimately reminding us that our narratives of illness and sexuality still silence these populations today.

"The lie made into the rule of the world": Absolute Power, Omniscience, and Transgression in Franz Kafka's The Trial and the Book of Job

The challenging of divine and absolute power in both The Trial and the Book of Job manifests ... more The challenging of divine and absolute power in both
The Trial
and the Book of Job manifests itself in the questioning nature of both Josef K. and Job, briefly suggesting that man has an intrinsic responsibility to understand the structures of power that dictate their lives. Therefore, by examining
Josef K.‘s
attempts to understand the power structures that dictate his life and the ultimate result of his pursuit of answers in
The Trial
in relation to Job‘s quest to hold God
accountable for the destruction of his life, I argue that both texts initially seek to challenge the legitimacy of political and religious structures of absolute power. As a result of their exploration of these dominant systems of power however, both men come to understand that absolute power is an inescapable aspect of central authority that they will never be able to fully understand.

Negotiating the Question of Foreignness in Kant's Project Towards Peace

I argue that Kant’s final turn in the conclusion of the work, where he opens up his project towar... more I argue that Kant’s final turn in the conclusion of the work, where he opens up his project towards perpetual peace to the absolute guest—that is, in this case, the reader—becomes a tangible creation of the type of cosmopolitan community that he defends in this treaty. As a result, “Perpetual Peace” becomes both a physical and metaphorical site of the complex connections between representation, community, education, and justice, suggesting that perpetual peace is a process that has a certain kind of finitude about it; there is some kind of final destination to peace that lies in the cosmopolitan law of hospitality. In the distance, however, tucked away in the crevices between his articles and declarations, lurks the unaddressed question of the foreigner—the question that ultimately reveals the limitations of “Perpetual Peace”. For in making hospitality a judicial decree and forcing the host to commit oneself to absolute hospitality, the host risks destroying the very essence of hospitality that his cosmopolitan community depends upon.

Defending Freedom and Justice?: The Tortured Body as a Site of Transformative Biopower

While the Abu Ghraib Prison scandal is just one of many examples of abuse and terror in the ongoi... more While the Abu Ghraib Prison scandal is just one of many examples of abuse and terror in the ongoing War on Terror, I would like to use these photographs to ascribe meaning to the tortured body in a time of severe political and social schism. By doing this, I will argue that the spectacle of the imprisoned body—that is, the tortured Middle Eastern prisoner—is the subject of state power that reinforces dominant notions of power relations that exist in our society. As a result, I believe that the scars and bruises of the tortured body become spaces where an advancement of Foucault’s theory of biopower hides itself, ultimately establishing and rewriting itself in the social distinction between the West and the Middle East.

The Witness and the Survivor: Politics of Historical Trauma, Remembrance, and Testimony in the Stories of Mavis Gallant and Yves Theriault

By first understanding the type of survivor presented in each story in the context of Giorgio Aga... more By first understanding the type of survivor presented in each story in the context of Giorgio Agamben’s classification of the witness, then moving to a critical examination of the larger implications of the varying forms of remembrance and witnessing in these stories, I will argue that these texts use the politics of historical trauma and testimony to critique the larger societal frameworks in which they operate. However, the varying forms of societies in which the victims and their testimonies are forced to operate within, namely a ruthless patriarchy in “My Heart is Broken”, rampant consumerism in “Baum, Gabriel, 1935 – ( )”, and a vicious history of white colonization in “Akua Nuten”, ultimately undermine the testimony of the witness, as their power over the individual dictates the type of survivor that the victim is allowed to be. As a result, the internal workings of bearing witness to trauma and the external functions of the worlds in which they exist operate in a complicated relationship, wherein the society essentially creates its own kind of complacent survivor, void of any meaningful critique.

Oh the Humanities!: The Consequences of the Conservative Infiltration of the Post-9/11 University

While the war on higher education started long before the terrorist attacks and the ensuing War o... more While the war on higher education started long before the terrorist attacks and the ensuing War on Terror (H. Giroux 141), the aftermath of these events have led to the attempted dismantling of the university and the defamation of the Liberal Arts. When coupled with the aggressive form of neoliberalism that underscores our lives and renders the individual a consumer and virtually everything else a commodity, it is important for the university to understand its role in the formation of critical, intellectually-responsible students. Instead, this obligation has been dismantled in the face of anti-intellectualism, spawning a detrimental response from the conservative public and even Humanities academics alike.

These Aren't the Middle Easterners We're Looking For: Politics of Torture, the Body, and Mourning in Kathryn Bigelow's Zero Dark Thirty

By analyzing the film Zero Dark Thirty in the context of Said’s theories of Orientalism, I will a... more By analyzing the film Zero Dark Thirty in the context of Said’s theories of Orientalism, I will argue that the Othering of Middle Eastern bodies at the hands of Western entertainment renders the Middle East as the bastion of evil in the world. As a consequence of this Othering, Zero Dark Thirty ostracizes Middle Easterners from the global community, emphasizing the fact that the War on Terror is not simply a physical conflict, but also an ideological battle that goes beyond the physical realm of the war. Due to the horrendous treatment of Middle Easterners, through both torture and murder, their bodies become a site of both physical persecution and ideological conflict.