Intimate encounters with violence: media and trauma in the work of Phyllis Webb and Daphne Marlatt

Campbell, Collin (2021) Intimate encounters with violence: media and trauma in the work of Phyllis Webb and Daphne Marlatt. Doctoral (PhD) thesis, Memorial University of Newfoundland.

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Abstract

This dissertation looks at the work of Phyllis Webb and Daphne Marlatt, two West Coast Canadian poets who explored questions of media technologies and trauma violence in their work during the latter half of the twentieth century. This thesis takes up contemporary phenomenological and feminist analyses of the connections between media technologies and trauma, especially war violence, in relation to both the creative and practical careers of these two writers. Research into the histories of media technologies such as the letter, radio, photography, and television shows how these technologies have shaped our experience of violence both globally and locally, from nineteenth-century colonial garrisons in Canada to the internment of Japanese Canadians during the Second World War to the 1991 Gulf War. Ultimately, this dissertation suggests that these two poets offer new phenomenological interpretations of the ways in which media technologies shape our perception of historical, hidden traumas.

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