Name: Scott Marentette

E-Mail: scottmarentette@trentu.ca

Classes: CUST3015Y

Scott Marentette graduated from the Centre for Comparative Literature at the University of Toronto in 2010.  In his dissertation “The Language of Real Life”: Self-Possession in the Poetry of Paul Celan, T. S. Eliot, Rainer Maria Rilke, and Paul Valéry, he exposed the roots of property relations in the phenomenology and rhetoric of home, homelessness, dwelling, and appropriation in twentieth-century poetry and Martin Heidegger’s phenomenology.  By applying an ideological critique to Heidegger’s claim regarding language as the house of being, Scott questioned who owns that house.  Scott’s primary interest lay in matters of phenomenological and political ownership and appropriation as related to discourse and authorship. 

In current related research, Scott is extending the work of his dissertation by accounting for the relationship between author and reader as far as it concerns mutual participation in reception theory.  Such issues raise an ethics of interpretation with regards to the author’s and the reader’s respective positions towards the text.  In particular, he is now focusing on confidentiality and credibility at the core of rhetoric in modern literature, cinema, and television, and society.   

In another current research project, Scott is examining the recent global migration from rural settings to urban centres as reflected in various cultural forms.  He is exploring the potential for different, plural structures of property relations within the informal economies that are arising as a result of this unprecedented urban migration.