Panel 7
Multimedia Pasts, Presents, and Futures
Panel Chair - Dr. Caroline-Isabelle Caron, Queen’s University
Saturday, February 10, 2024
3:00 p.m. - 4:30 p.m. EST
The Artful Detective: Framing Manifest Destiny and Canadian Progress in the CBC’s Murdoch Mysteries
Sofia Parrila, Modern Languages and Cultural Studies, University of Alberta
According to Edward Said in Culture and Imperialism, the nineteenth-century English novel is a cultural institution inextricably linked to British imperial identity. Said argues that novels achieve authoritative status in part by appropriating history, turning it into narrative that valourizes and legitimizes the existence of empire. In the 21st century, the television show has arguably replaced the novel as the art form central to national cultural identity. In this presentation, I extrapolate Said’s analysis of the link between English cultural production and empire to the TV show in Canada's present-day settler-colonial state. I argue that the popular Canadian police procedural Murdoch Mysteries (2008-present) exemplifies televised entertainment’s capacity for appropriating history in service of the Canadian imperial identity. To illustrate my conclusion, I focus on a single historical appropriation in Murdoch Mysteries: the show’s use of John Gast’s 1872 painting “American Progress.” Historically intended and understood as a representation of American westward expansion, “American Progress” is reframed in Murdoch Mysteries as a symbol of American territorial aggression against Canada alone. Reframing a painting famous for its representation of the settler-colonialist mindset as a threat from one colonial nation-state to another displaces Indigenous North Americans as the targets of American expansionism. This displacement also obscures Canada’s ongoing history of colonial violence by reframing the Canadian nation as victim rather than aggressor. Furthermore, as a CBC-funded television show, Murdoch Mysteries furthers the CBC's mandate to “contribute to the development of a shared national consciousness and identity” (“Organization Profile – Canadian Broadcasting Corporation”). By contrasting Canadian and American identities, Murdoch Mysteries constructs a Canadian national identity centred in progressivism, resistance to American oppression, and moral superiority relative to America.
Sofia Parrila (they/them) is a settler scholar located in Amiskwaciwâskahikan (Edmonton), on Treaty 6 territory. Sofia graduated from the University of Alberta’s Department of Modern Languages and Cultural Studies in November 2022 with a Master of Arts in Transnational and Comparative Literatures. Their thesis, “Child of Nature: Wilderness, Myth, and Childhood in Middle-Grade Fantasy” is an ecocritical analysis of three popular series of children’s fantasy novels. Sofia’s research interests include genre fiction, Canadian literature, ecocriticism, and Queer theories. Sofia also holds a BA-Honors in Comparative Literature with a minor in Creative Writing from the University of Alberta.
Epic (Re)Tellings: Visual Narrative and Fictional Histories in Werewolf by Night
Victoria Quint, Medieval Literature and Languages, University of York
This presentation will use medieval imagery to explore the creation of history in Marvel’s monster-filled television special, Werewolf by Night (2022). The short film draws on a variety of visual motifs and cinematic techniques to develop an alternate history for a society where monsters and monster hunters roam the world. Most notably for this study, Werewolf by Night draws on imagery from the famed Bayeux Tapestry to decorate its set, featuring monster-slaying legends and magical creatures in place of the more human battles of 1066. By editing and including historically significant visual media from across a variety of periods and places, Werewolf by Night constructs a complex alternate history for its fantasy world. This presentation will use concepts of visual history and record making to assess the film’s manipulation of history and setting, exploring ways in which visual media works to shape understandings of the past and the present. The inclusion of recognizable, but not ubiquitous, historical imagery both contextualizes the film and reasserts the Bayeux motifs as temporal and narrative symbols within a modern milieu. But, based on the collection of visual time markers familiar to each unique viewer, the perception and experience of Werewolf by Night’s narrative history shifts and fluctuates. Werewolf by Night is self conscious and intentional about its construction of a world outside the bounds of known history, and yet it remains vague and almost paradoxical with its historical cues, creating a complex past that bleeds into a fluid present.
Victoria Quint graduated from Dartmouth College with a degree in English Literature in 2022, and is graduating with the 2022-2023 cohort from the University of York, where she earned her Masters of Medieval Literature and Languages through the Centre for Medieval Studies. In both her undergraduate and postgraduate work, Victoria focused on women writers and female saints from late medieval English literature, with a particular interest in late medieval drama. Currently, she is working at the Harvard Divinity School and deciding where her future studies will lead. Outside of academia, Victoria is an avid potter, and can be found carving medieval-inspired decorations into her pots and bowls.
“No Stopping This Train”: Replaying Climate Crisis in Final Fantasy VII: Remake
Shannon Payne, English, Dalhousie University
"The second response [to the Anthropocene], harder to dismiss, is probably even more destructive: namely, a position that the game is over, it's too late, there's no sense trying to make anything any better" (Haraway 3)
Final Fantasy VII (FFVII) is a game deeply concerned with climate crisis and Final Fantasy VII: Remake (Remake), made 23 years of failing climate policies later, takes up those concerns with a vengeance. I read Remake as not only an expanded and revised retelling of this original game but as a replay of FFVII, haunted by the original story and fixated on the experience of rushing toward its inevitable (tragic) end. The experience of time in this game—past, present, and future colliding violently in the mind of the protagonist in the form of vivid hallucinations of disasters—mirrors the experience of time when trying to live through climate crisis. Aravamudan refers to this experience of time as “catachronism”: “catachronism re-characterizes the past and the present in terms of a future proclaimed as determinate but that is of course not yet fully realized” (8). This experience of time can be tied to a central image of FFVII: a train barreling inexorably down tracks to a fixed destination. In FFVII, the train represents “the deterministic force of industrialization” (Milburn 204) but it takes on another layer in Remake wherein it comes to represent doom and the seemingly predetermined future of climate disaster. Ultimately, I will argue that Remake uses the structure of replaying a game with a fixed ending to explore feelings of doom surrounding the worsening climate crisis and to look for a way forward that reaches beyond what Haraway calls the “‘game over’ attitude” (3) toward climate change.
Shannon Payne is a Killam and SSHRC funded PhD Candidate in the English Department at Dalhousie University. In 2019, she completed her MA in English with a focus in Science and Technology Studies at the University of British Columbia. During that time her work (some of which she presented at Context and Meaning XVII: Complete Imperfection) focused predominately on ecocritical readings of monster movies. She has also presented her work at the International Gothic Association conference and as a part of the multidisciplinary Green College Members Series talks at the University of British Columbia. Her current work involves examining the unique structural and narrative capabilities of video games and their potential to offer new ways to respond to the climate crisis through fiction.