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Dissertations / Theses on the topic 'Canadian literature Literature'
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Wong, Anita Jennifer Carleton University Dissertation Canadian Studies. "Chinese-Canadians in Canadian literature; changing images, emerging voices." Ottawa, 1992.
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MacLean, Alyssa Erin. "Canadian migrations : reading Canada in nineteenth-century American literature." Thesis, University of British Columbia, 2010. http://hdl.handle.net/2429/30313.
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This dissertation contributes to the fields of Canadian literature, American literature, and transnational and hemispheric studies by examining Canada’s place in American Renaissance discussions about imperialism, citizenship, and racial and national identity. In the nineteenth-century US, Canada became symbolically important because of its perceived common origins with the US as well as its increasing resistance to forms of American imperialism. Canadian Migrations examines the significance of the Canada-US relationship by analysing literary representations of two population movements across the Canada-US border: the 1755 deportation of French Catholic Acadians from Canada to the American colonies and the antebellum flight of African Americans north to Canada. American authors gravitated towards these narratives of displacement to and from Canada in order to discuss the meaning of American citizenship and the treatment of racial minorities within US borders. I argue that both of these Canada-US movements prompted critical inquiries in US culture about forms of American imperialism. In Part One, I examine authors such as Nathaniel Hawthorne, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, and Harriet Beecher Stowe, who portrayed the violent expulsion of Acadians by British troops justified the creation of the United States as a necessary defense against imperial rule. Yet the Acadian expulsion also prompted these authors to question the contemporary US government’s own displacement of racial and linguistic minorities through slavery and westward expansion. In Part Two, I examine the northward movement of fugitive slaves across Lake Erie to Canada. By crossing Lake Erie, Black migrants—and the iconic texts written about them—challenged the conceptual categories that sustained US slavery and imperialism. Authors such as Stowe, Josiah Henson, Lewis Clarke, and William Wells Brown described scenes of nautical transit and transformation across the Lake Erie Passage to contest US slavery and to develop notions of Black citizenship. By recovering this conversation about the significance of Canada-US cross-border movement, I position nineteenth-century Canada within the movement of people and ideas across the Black Atlantic world. Together, my chapters demonstrate how the imagined community of the United States emerged through a series of complex political, cultural, and literary negotiations with Canada.
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Cohen, Mark 1966. "Just judgment : censorship of and in Canadian literature." Thesis, McGill University, 1999. http://digitool.Library.McGill.CA:80/R/?func=dbin-jump-full&object_id=35866.
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This thesis is the first major study of censorship of and in English Canadian literature. While there are several reasons scholars have focused on censorship in Europe and the United States, it is the ascendancy in quality and quantity of Canadian writing leading to its further use in institutions where censorship takes place---such as schools and libraries---that necessitates a study of censorship in Canadian literature now. This rise in censorship has prompted Canadian authors increasingly to write about the subject. In this thesis I study censorship issues raised both explicitly md implicitly by Timothy Findley, Margaret Atwood, Margaret Laurence, Beatrice Culleton and Marlene Nourbese Philip. All of these writers have been subjected to censorship attacks and have responded to these attacks and grappled with the philosophical implications of censorship in their fiction and non-fiction. My investigation of censorship in these texts sheds new light on the works of literature themselves, but the literary texts also suggest a new way of looking at censorship. Each of my chapters offers arguments challenging the traditional Enlightenment model of censorship as an oppressive government practice against its citizens, a definition resulting in the mistaken views that censorship has been largely eradicated in the West and that, when it does surface, it is to be condemned on principle. This view can be contrasted with a "constructivist" model of censorship as the delegitimation of expression by social forces. My findings support a definition which draws on both models wherein censorship is the exclusion of some discourse as the result of a judgment by an authoritative agent based on some ideological predisposition. The key word in this definition is "judgment" which, when recognized as the primary activity in censorship, must change the way we approach censorship controversies. For if censorship is the exercise of judgment, and judgment is enmeshed in the fabric of huma
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Beedham, Matthew. "'Border rhetoric' : reading Asian-Canadian literature." Thesis, University of Nottingham, 2003. http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.401546.
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Fee, Margery. "Canadian Literature and English Studies in the Canadian University." Essays on Canadian Writing, 1993. http://hdl.handle.net/2429/11661.
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English Studies began in Canada in 1884 at Dalhousie University; Canadian literature was first taught at the post-secondary level in 1907 at the Ontario Agricultural College in Guelph. Arnoldian humanism dominated the outlook of early professors of English in Canada. Their feeling that Canadian literature was not among "the best" explains why so few courses appeared in Canadian universities, despite nationalist pressure from students. About 5-10% of courses then were devoted to Canadian literature in the English curriculum and this (except in Quebec) remains the case today.
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Varma, Manju. "Multicultural children's literature, storytelling the Canadian identity." Thesis, National Library of Canada = Bibliothèque nationale du Canada, 2000. http://www.collectionscanada.ca/obj/s4/f2/dsk1/tape3/PQDD_0016/NQ53715.pdf.
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Fehrle, Johannes [Verfasser], and Wolfgang [Akademischer Betreuer] Hochbruck. "Revisionist westerns in Canadian and U.S. American literature." Freiburg : Universität, 2012. http://d-nb.info/1122647484/34.
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Stacey, Robert David. "The transformed pastoral in recent English-Canadian literature." Thesis, McGill University, 1995. http://digitool.Library.McGill.CA:80/R/?func=dbin-jump-full&object_id=23359.
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This thesis examines the use of the pastoral form in recent Canadian literature. As the pastoral constitutes a literary site where a concern for landscape converges with a search for community, it has been employed as a myth in nationalist discourses whose functioning depend heavily on symbolized landscapes and idealized social types. The philosophical basis of the pastoral is the classical opposition between nature and culture. For this reason, its representations are often coded as 'natural'. To this extent, the pastoral participates in a hegemonic myth-making system, constituting a limited semiotic field in which certain representations are privileged while others are negated. Following Marx and Barthes, the thesis contends that an attack the nature/culture opposition is essential to undermining the hegemony of the myth-making process. In the context of nationalism, a pastoral can articulate a critique of dominant a 'naturalized' representations when it questions its own use of the nature/culture opposition.
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Braz, Albert Raimundo. "The false traitor, Louis Riel in Canadian literature." Thesis, National Library of Canada = Bibliothèque nationale du Canada, 1999. http://www.collectionscanada.ca/obj/s4/f2/dsk1/tape9/PQDD_0001/NQ41111.pdf.
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Libin, Mark. "Commencement exercises, toward beginnings in English-Canadian literature." Thesis, National Library of Canada = Bibliothèque nationale du Canada, 1999. http://www.collectionscanada.ca/obj/s4/f2/dsk1/tape9/PQDD_0017/NQ45010.pdf.
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Cohen, Mark. "Just judgment, censorship of and in Canadian literature." Thesis, National Library of Canada = Bibliothèque nationale du Canada, 1999. http://www.collectionscanada.ca/obj/s4/f2/dsk1/tape7/PQDD_0026/NQ50133.pdf.
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Durnin, Katherine Joanne. "Métis representations in English and French-Canadian literature." Thesis, National Library of Canada = Bibliothèque nationale du Canada, 2001. http://www.collectionscanada.ca/obj/s4/f2/dsk3/ftp04/MQ65030.pdf.
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Smith, William Leon. "Torontos : representations of Toronto in contemporary Canadian literature." Thesis, University of Nottingham, 2012. http://eprints.nottingham.ac.uk/14507/.
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This thesis examines how representations of Toronto in contemporary Canadian literature engage with place and further an understanding of spatial innovation in literature. Acknowledging the Canadian critical tradition of discussing place and space, the thesis moves the focus away from conventional engagements with wilderness motifs and small town narratives. In this way the thesis can be seen to respond to the nascent critical movement that urges engagement with contemporary urban spaces in Canadian literature. Responding to the critical neglect of urban representation, and more particularly, representations of Toronto in Canadian literary criticism, this thesis examines Toronto as a complex and contradictory site of symbolic power across critical, political and popular discourses. Furthermore, this thesis repositions an understanding of Toronto by paying attention to literary texts which depict the city's negotiation of national, local and global forces. The thesis seeks to understand the multiplicity of the city in lived, perceived and conceived forms - seeing Toronto as Torontos. Questioning existing frameworks deployed in Canadian literary criticism, the thesis develops a unique methodology with which to approach the complex issues involved in literary writing about place, drawing on contemporary Canadian criticism and transnational approaches to critical literary geography. The central chapters focus on four texts from the twenty-first century, three novels and one collection of poetry, approaching each text with a critically informed spatial lens in order to draw out how engagements with Toronto develop spatial innovation within literature. The thesis analyses how engaging with Toronto challenges writers to experiment with literary form. In turn the thesis seeks to elucidate the spatial developments achieved through literary writing. The thesis then demonstrates an understanding of the material geography of the city, situating readings with reference to interview material from parties involved in writing, producing and distributing literary depictions of Toronto. Hence it combines traditional literary criticism with a spatially and socially engaged criticism, in order to clearly address the literary geographies of Torontos.
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Hedler, Elizabeth. "Stories of Canada : national identity in late-nineteenth-century English-Canadian fiction /." Fogler Library, University of Maine, 2003. http://www.library.umaine.edu/theses/pdf/HedlerE2003.pdf.
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Fagan, Kristina Rose. "Laughing to survive, humour in contemporary Canadian Native literature." Thesis, National Library of Canada = Bibliothèque nationale du Canada, 2001. http://www.collectionscanada.ca/obj/s4/f2/dsk3/ftp05/NQ63653.pdf.
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Renger, Nicola. "Mapping and historiography in contemporary Canadian literature in English /." Frankfurt am Main [u.a.] : Lang, 2005. http://www.gbv.de/dms/bs/toc/490250424.pdf.
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Woolner, Victoria Evelyn. "Scottish romanticism and its impact on early Canadian literature." Thesis, University of Glasgow, 2014. http://theses.gla.ac.uk/5071/.
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This research considers the impact of Scottish romanticism on the construction of literary identity in the Canadas prior to Confederation (1867). I argue that early Scottish dominance in literary Canada, and similarities faced by both countries in defining a sense of self—including participation in a wider empire (or Union), populations divided by language and religion, and the need for a distinct identity in the face of a dominant neighbour to the south—all contributed to a tendency on the part of Canadians to look to Scotland as a model. Through an examination of early Canadian literature and on-going British constructions of the colony, the thesis considers the manner in which Scottish romantic strategies of literary nationalism are deployed and manipulated in the process of articulating a Canadian identity. Particular attention is paid to the works of John Galt and Major John Richardson, while tropes examined include the construction of landscape and settlement narratives, stadial histories, the historical novel, national tale and the depiction of a national history, and the manipulation of a romanticised Scottish military past in constructing Canadian history.
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Surgeoner, Joanna Christine. "Books and worlds : a literary cartographer of the Canadian north /." Thesis, Connect to this title online; UW restricted, 2004. http://hdl.handle.net/1773/5674.
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Sugars, Cynthia Conchita 1963. "The uncompromised New World : Canadian literature and the British imaginary." Thesis, McGill University, 1998. http://digitool.Library.McGill.CA:80/R/?func=dbin-jump-full&object_id=35630.
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This thesis explores contemporary (post-1980) British constructions of Canada or "Canadianness" as these have been conceived through the reading and reception of English-Canadian literary texts in Britain. I am arguing that in recent years Canada has been construed in Britain as an ideal, and furthermore, that this idealization has taken place in response to a perceived cultural and socio-economic malaise within contemporary British society. I use a combined postcolonial and object-relations approach to discuss the psychic investment involved in this construction of Canada as a post-imperial role model. These readers engage with the Canadian object as a sort of phantasy space, projecting onto Canada a self-image which expresses the British desire for postcolonial diversity. Canada thereby enables the dodging of the quagmires of imperiled national identity (and personal subjectivity), for its diffuse and decentralized makeup is balanced by an essentialized notion of cultural and national uniqueness. Throughout I take issue with the ways Canada tends to get celebrated in these writings as a postmodern ideal of unproblematized pluralism and endless diffusion, knowable by the sheer extent to which it seems to defy collective identity. These celebrations of Canada as a new (postmodern) Eden succeed only in emptying the Canadian domain of anything remotely contestatory or political. Indeed, this vision of Canada utilizes a limited version of postmodernism as an idealistic play of pluralities without any sense of accompanying political strife or contradiction.
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Byrne, Elizabeth. "Neither this nor that: the hyphenated existence of Chinese children growing up in twentieth century North America /." Burnaby B.C. : Simon Fraser University, 2005. http://ir.lib.sfu.ca/handle/1892/2313.
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Pawlowsky, Alexandra. "Ukrainian Canadian literature in Winnipeg, a socio-historical perspective, 1908-1991." Thesis, National Library of Canada = Bibliothèque nationale du Canada, 1997. http://www.collectionscanada.ca/obj/s4/f2/dsk2/ftp03/NQ32887.pdf.
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Weise, Aliya James Allen. "Humanimalities| Sacrifice and Subjectivation in Literature of the "the Animal Turn"." Thesis, The George Washington University, 2019. http://pqdtopen.proquest.com/#viewpdf?dispub=13807232.
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<p> This dissertation argues for a greater recognition of the impact “the animal turn” has had on literary studies. The study analyzes a group of influential North American writers critically engaged with fascist formulations of bodily expendability and the entanglement of violence that crosses species boundaries. Narrative accounts of human genocide and nonhuman animal slaughter are key sites of the intersectionality of oppression in theoretical formulations by scholars of Critical Animal Studies. Such narratives offer the opportunity to explore the possibility of homology while acknowledging the limits of any analogy. Literature of “the animal turn” explores the entanglements of subjectivation across humanist and speciesist divides, one that determines in advance if it is permissible to systematically exploit and kill nonhuman animals with impunity. Emphatic in the different experiences of oppression, the narratives analyzed nonetheless identify and critique this speciesist discourse resulting in a tension that acknowledges a shared complicity in discursive violence while calling out for a new response to the question of the animal. This new response, I argue, requires a merger of the humanities and sciences: what I call a new <i>Humanimalities</i>. </p><p> Close readings of Gregory Maguire’s <i>The Wicked Years</i>, Octavia E. Butler’s <i>Xenogenesis</i>, Margaret Atwood’s <i> MaddAddam</i> trilogy, Randall Kenan’s A <i>Visitation of Spirits</i>, Leslie Marmon Silko’s <i>Ceremony</i>, Art Spiegelman’s <i>Maus</i>, and Yann Martel’s <i> Beatrice and Virgil</i> draw out implicit and explicit critiques of what Jacques Derrida characterized as the “sacrificial structure” of the Western subject. By highlighting literature’s critical engagement with the discourse of species, this dissertation explores the complicated navigations of selected narratives as they attempt to resist calculations of expendability without resorting to what one critic has characterized as an, “egalitarian pluralism of life forms and lifeways." Each narrative struggles with a utopian impulse of the total liberation for which Critical Animal Studies calls, an acknowledgement of the different experiences of non-human animal hierarchies, and an acknowledgement of their own narrative’s complicity in animal genocide.</p><p>
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Fowler, Adrian. "Distinct society: Cultural identity in twentieth-century Newfoundland literature." Thesis, University of Ottawa (Canada), 2003. http://hdl.handle.net/10393/28954.
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This thesis examines selected representations of Newfoundland cultural identity in twentieth century Newfoundland literature from Norman Duncan, E. J. Pratt and George Allan England to Bernice Morgan, Patrick Kavanagh and Wayne Johnston. The discussion is located within a broad context of popular and scholarly writings on the subject and a conceptual framework influenced by Benedict Anderson's book Imagined Communities and Seamus Heaney's essay "The Sense of Place." Nineteenth century attempts to maintain the distinctiveness of Newfoundland identity were politically motivated by advocates of home rule, civil liberties and sovereignty, and constituted part of the rhetoric and mobilization that resulted in responsible government and dominion status for the colony. In the twentieth century, a variety of writers addressed the subject, some from the perspective of visitors, others from the perspective of residents. Early in the century, this resulted in representations in the heroic mode that focussed upon the struggle of outport Newfoundlanders to wrest a living from the sea. At mid-century, this myth of heroic Newfoundland was supplanted by the romantic myth of the old outport in which the community life of Newfoundland coastal villages was recorded and extolled. By the 1970s, the outports had become symbolic of Newfoundland but by this time they were also beset by enormous changes brought about by the Second World War, Confederation with Canada, and government policies of industrialization and resettlement. Some writers responded by intensifying explorations of the cultural roots of the province in the traditional life, others addressed the challenges of the present, which included issues of neo-colonialism and economic imperialism as well as cultural dislocation. In all of this, Newfoundland writers contributed in significant ways to the imagining of their community and the survival of a country of the mind.
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Lu, Liang-Yuan 1962. "Teaching Chinese-Canadian literature to Taiwanese students : an educational strategy." Thesis, McGill University, 2006. http://digitool.Library.McGill.CA:80/R/?func=dbin-jump-full&object_id=99380.
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This thesis explores alternative ways for English literature students in Taiwanese Science Universities to choose more culturally accessible works in addition to the canonical English and American literature. Currently, many students consider their experience of reading Western literature to be both perplexing and frustrating because of inadequate language capability as well as unfamiliarity with Western culture. The rationale for introduction to works emerging from the Chinese diaspora is to enable students to situate their personal experiences within the context of different cultures, but ones that nonetheless have accommodated Chinese communities and values. Bearing this in mind, choosing English language works from within the Chinese diaspora is a natural progression and is based on the assumption that its content shares the same cultural identity that Taiwanese students are already familiar with. My hope is to provide teaching strategies for literature teachers of Taiwan to consider. The learning culture in Taiwan tends to dissociate the self and sentiments from the learning experience. Accordingly, it is hard for them to express their own feelings within the learning environment. In this thesis I try to address these problems through examination of Rosenblatt's transactional theory (1995), and exemplification of the theory through Nussbaum's literary exegesis of Henry James' Golden Bowl. I then attempt a parallel study of Wayson Choy's The Jade Peony (1995) as an example of how a work from the Chinese diaspora might be used in a Taiwanese classroom. I argue that the application of transactional theory could enhance meaning making in English literature classes for Taiwanese students. The thesis concludes with a discussion of strategic emphases for teachers of English literature in Taiwan.
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LaRocque, Emma. "Native writers resisting colonizing practices in Canadian historiography and literature." Thesis, National Library of Canada = Bibliothèque nationale du Canada, 1999. http://www.collectionscanada.ca/obj/s4/f2/dsk1/tape9/PQDD_0020/NQ45006.pdf.
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Sugars, Cynthia Conchita. "The uncompromised New World, Canadian literature and the British imaginary." Thesis, National Library of Canada = Bibliothèque nationale du Canada, 1998. http://www.collectionscanada.ca/obj/s4/f2/dsk1/tape11/PQDD_0016/NQ44602.pdf.
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Beneventi, Domenic A. "Spatial exclusion and the abject other in Canadian urban literature." Thèse, Connect to resource online, 2004. http://ulib.iupui.edu/utility/download.php?file=AATNR01128.pdf&ipfilter=campus_cas.
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Thesis (Ph.D.)--Université de Montréal, 2004.<br>Title from screen (viewed on July 23, 2009). Department of Comparative Literature, Université de Montréal. Includes bibliographical references (leaves [235]-265).
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Speranza, Monica. "Information Overload: Reading Information-as-Waste in Contemporary Canadian Literature." Thesis, Université d'Ottawa / University of Ottawa, 2021. http://hdl.handle.net/10393/42341.
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This thesis investigates three contemporary Canadian texts— Ruth Ozeki’s A Tale for the Time Being, Margaret Atwood’s Oryx and Crake, and Rita Wong’s forage—that treat information as an object that can be wasted and recuperated. Using information theory and a new sub-field of critical waste theory called “Discard Studies,” I explore how the authors studied in this thesis place these two lines of thought alongside one another to examine how the concept of recycling information challenges the material, cultural, and ideological structures that distance humans from their waste. Specifically, I read the event of recycling as an interruptive act that triggers a reassessment of the (im)material connections that tether humans to their waste, vast (inter)national networks of exchange, and environmental crises related to our garbage.
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Tania, Aguila-Way. "Fraught Epistemologies: Bioscience, Community, and Environment in Diasporic Canadian Literature." Thesis, Université d'Ottawa / University of Ottawa, 2015. http://hdl.handle.net/10393/31901.
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This dissertation examines the intersection between diasporic subjectivities and scientific knowledge production in the works of Shani Mootoo, Madeleine Thien, Larissa Lai, and Rita Wong. I read these authors as participating in a burgeoning scene of diasporic Canadian writing that draws on concepts and tropes derived from the life sciences to think through a broad constellation of issues relating to contemporary diasporic experience, from the role of biogenetic discourses in the diasporic search for ancestry, to the embodied dimensions of diasporic memory and trauma, to the role of diaspora communities in the decolonial struggle against the emergent forms of “biopower” that contemporary bioscience has enabled. As the first study to address this burgeoning topic in diasporic Canadian literature, this dissertation asks: Why are diasporic Canadian authors taking up bioscience as a key topos for the exploration of contemporary diasporic experiences? How is this engagement with the life sciences re-shaping current conversations about diasporic kinship, memory, and embodiment, and about the role of diasporic communities in contemporary struggles for environmental justice? Complicating frameworks that understand bioscience only as an instrument of what Foucault calls “biopower,” I argue that the works of Mootoo, Thien, Lai and Wong prompt us to rethink the ways in which queer, feminist, anti-racist, and environmental struggles might constructively interface with the life sciences to challenge emergent forms of biological essentialism and biopolitical control. I demonstrate that, by using bioscientific tropes to highlight the complex and open-ended life processes that shape the human body and the wider environment, these authors construct epistemologies that attend to the global networks of biopower through which neoimperialism operates while also acknowledging the interconnected ways in which living organisms and material substances destabilize these global flows. I argue that, in so doing, these authors position diasporic knowledge production as a crucial locus for the rethinking of relations between politics and ecology, and between humanist and scientific ways of knowing, that science studies scholars like Donna Haraway and Bruno Latour and decolonial critics like Boaventura de Sousa Santos have identified as a central to contemporary struggles for environmental justice. Each chapter explores the work of one diasporic Canadian author in relation to a single, historically specific site of scientific knowledge production. Chapter one examines how Mootoo’s Cereus Blooms at Night combines notions of gothic excess with a materialist emphasis
on the material agencies that inhere through bodies and environments in order to disrupt the gendered and racial discourses propagated by imperial botany. Chapter two explores how Thien’s novels Certainty and Dogs at the Perimeter draw on current debates around the neurobiology of memory and emotion to grapple, on one hand, with the fragmentation induced through diasporic trauma and, on the other, with the uncertainty of global risk culture. Chapter three examines how Lai’s Salt Fish Girl disrupts popular and scientific discourses concerning the genetic basis of diasporic ancestry to advance a model of kinship that is rooted not in a shared
ethnic heritage, but in a shared immersion in a complex web of interactions that includes genetic, evolutionary, and environmental forces. Finally, chapter four examines how Rita Wong’s forage mobilizes contemporary debates around the spread of genetically modified organisms to stage a productive encounter between diasporic, Indigenous, and scientific knowledges. I argue that, in the process of engaging with these various scientific debates, these writers stage trenchant
critiques of the colonial legacies and neo-imperial investments of contemporary bioscientific culture while also modeling more fruitful, ethical, and hopeful ways of engaging with scientific knowledge.
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Morrissey, Lynda. "Portraits of 'past actuality': The tragedy and triumph of Japanese-Canadians as portrayed in historically based Canadian literature." Thesis, University of Ottawa (Canada), 2002. http://hdl.handle.net/10393/6323.
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This thesis addresses the concerns of both historiographic theorists who are skeptical of the power of narrative to present historical information reliably, and of literary critics who are suspicious of any text that lays claim to factual or truthful representation. Through the analysis of texts that blend the self-referential uncertainty of modern (or postmodern) literature with the utilitarian objectives of historiography---works of literature that strive to represent, faithfully, events from history---the thesis assesses the relative truth value of the historical project and evaluates the role of narrative in effectively imparting historical information. I begin with an overview of the theoretical debate over the form of historical writing and the source of historical knowledge, since classical times, followed by an analysis of primary texts in the context of current trends in literary and historiographic theory. These texts, which pertain to the history of Japanese-Canadians since the attack on Pearl Harbor in December 1941, include Joy Kogawa's novels Obasan and Itsuka, and Dorothy Livesay's documentary poem for radio entitled Call My People Home. In addition I provide an analysis of a historiographic text, Mutual Hostages, that contradicts the prevailing perception of this historical event. As revisionary history, this text provides the opportunity to examine a competing narrative and its mechanism for establishing and communicating historical information. Through the analysis of these works, this thesis demonstrates that narrative is appropriate to historiography, and that figurative speech---as in poetic and rhetorical devices---can be more effective than literalist speech in representing historical events.
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Hulan, Renée. "Representing the Canadian North : stories of gender, race, and nation." Thesis, McGill University, 1996. http://digitool.Library.McGill.CA:80/R/?func=dbin-jump-full&object_id=40363.
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This thesis addresses the teleological relationship between national identity and national consciousness in the specific definition of Canada as a northern nation by giving a descriptive account of representative texts in which the north figures as a central theme, including: ethnography, travel writing, autobiography, adventure stories, poetry, and novels. It argues that the collective Canadian identity idealized in the representation of the north is not organic but constructed in terms of such characteristics as self-sufficiency, independence, and endurance; that these characteristics are inflected by ideas of gender and race; and that they are evoked to give the 'deeper justification' of nationhood to the Canadian state. In this description of the mutually dependent definitions of gender, racial, and national identities, the thesis disputes the idea that northern consciousness is the source of a distinct collective identity for Canadians.
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Aujla, Angela. "Contesting identities in diasporic spaces, multigenerational South Asian Canadian women's literature." Thesis, National Library of Canada = Bibliothèque nationale du Canada, 1999. http://www.collectionscanada.ca/obj/s4/f2/dsk2/ftp03/MQ51290.pdf.
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Fee, Margery. "Aboriginal Writing in Canada and the Anthology as Commodity." ECW, 1999. http://hdl.handle.net/2429/11646.
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Flavell, Helen. "Writing-between : Australian and Canadian ficto-criticism /." Access via Murdoch University Digital Theses Project, 2005. http://wwwlib.murdoch.edu.au/adt/browse/view/adt-MU20051222.114143.
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Bellamy, Connie. "The new heroines : the contemporary female Bildungsroman in English Canadian literature /." Thesis, McGill University, 1986. http://digitool.Library.McGill.CA:80/R/?func=dbin-jump-full&object_id=72826.
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Baker, Jennifer. "Like a Virgil: Georgic Ontologies of Agrarian Work in Canadian Literature." Thesis, Université d'Ottawa / University of Ottawa, 2019. http://hdl.handle.net/10393/39179.
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In this dissertation, I argue that two dominant perspectives on farming in Canada—the technoscientific capitalist perspective on modern industrial farming and the popular vision of hard-won survival on the family farm—both draw on narrative and aesthetic strategies that have deep roots in distinct, but related variations of the georgic tradition, which arrived in Canada in the eighteenth century and continues to shape literary representations and material practices today. Critics of Canadian literature have tended to subsume the georgic under the category of pastoral, but I argue that the georgic is a separate and more useful category for understanding the complex myths and realities of agricultural production in Canada precisely because it is a literary genre that focuses on the labour of farming and because it constitutes a complex and multi-generic discourse which both promotes and enables critique of dominant agricultural practices. I argue that, despite its sublimation beneath the pastoral, the georgic mode has also been an important cultural nexus in Canadian literature and culture, and that it constitutes a set of conventions that have become so commonplace in writing that deals with agricultural labour and its related issues in Canada that they have come to seem both inevitable and natural within the Canadian cultural tradition, even if they have not been explicitly named as georgic.
By analyzing a variety of texts such as Oliver Goldmith’s The Rising Village, Isabella Valancy Crawford’s Malcolm’s Katie, Susanna Moodie’s Roughing It in the Bush, Frederick Philip Grove’s Settlers of the Marsh, Martha Ostenso’s Wild Geese, Al Purdy’s In Search of Owen Roblin, Robert Kroetsch’s “The Ledger,” Christian Bok’s Xenotext, Rita Wong’s Forage, and Phil Hall’s Amanuensis, I recontextualize Canadian writing that deals with agrarian work within two distinct but related georgic traditions. As Raymond Williams and others have shown, the georgic’s inclusion of both pastoralizing myths and material realities makes it useful for exploring ecological questions. The georgic is often understood in terms of what Karen O’Brien has called the imperial georgic mode, which involves a technocratic, imperialist, capitalist approach to agriculture, and which helped theorize and justify imperial expansion and the technological domination of nature. But as ecocritics like David Fairer, Margaret Ronda, and Kevin Goodman have argued, the georgic’s concern with the contingency and precariousness of human relationships with nonhuman systems also made it a productive site for imagining alternatives to imperial ways of organizing social and ecological relations. Ronda calls this more ecologically-focused and adaptable georgic the disenchanted georgic, but I call it the precarious georgic because of the way it enables engagement with what Anna Tsing calls precarity.
Precarity, as Tsing explains, describes life without the promise of mastery or stability, which is a condition that leaves us in a state of being radically dependent on other beings for survival. “The challenge for thinking with precarity,” she writes, “is to understand the ways projects for making scalability have transformed landscape and society, while seeing also where scalability fails—and where nonscalable ecological and economic relations erupt” (42). By tracing the interplay between imperial and precarious georgic modes in Canadian texts that have mistakenly been read as pastoral—from Moodie’s settler georgic to the queer gothic georgic of Ostenso’s Wild Geese to the provisional and object-oriented georgics of Robert Kroetsch and Phil Hall—I argue that the precarious georgic strain has always engaged in this process of thinking with precarity, and that it holds the potential for providing space to re-imagine our ecological relations.
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Mourad, Fatima. "Anti-Systemic Departures in Lebanese-Canadian Writing: Mouawad and Hage." Thesis, Université d'Ottawa / University of Ottawa, 2020. http://hdl.handle.net/10393/41259.
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This thesis examines the antisystemic writing of Wajdi Mouawad and Rawi Hage, two of the most compelling authors to emerge out of the Lebanese-Canadian diaspora. In their Canadian setting, the writers’ politics of unbelonging serves a countercultural purpose by rearticulating the race, class, and gender disparities eschewed in multicultural discourse. As writers of a growing Lebanese diaspora, they recall the collective injuries sustained during the Lebanese civil war (1975-1990) and which remain underexamined by Lebanese society and government. In this way, Mouawad and Hage assume a subversive position in both the Lebanese and the Canadian contexts by reinscribing histories and experiences that risk erasure.
In my analysis of Mouawad’s play Scorched and Mouawad’s novels De Niro’s Game and Cockroach, the differential allocation of precarity and grievability proves the common thread that runs through all three texts. Mouawad and Hage’s representation of their character’s disproportionate exposure to harm and suffering coincides with the broader claims of antisystemic politics. My intervention brackets these texts’ thematic concerns with the critical theories that best explain some of Mouawad and Hage’s more radical depictions of immigrants under duress.
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Baldauf, Stephen A. "Artaud : the new pragmatic body of the anti-paradigmatic text /." The Ohio State University, 1996. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=osu1374148540.
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Boudreau, Douglas L. "Conceiving the nation ; literature and nation building in Renaissance France and Post-Quiet Revolution Quebec /." The Ohio State University, 1999. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=osu1374762627.
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Leandoer, Katarina. "From colonial expression to export commodity : English-Canadian literature in Canada and Sweden, 1945-1999 /." Uppsala : [Uppsala universitet], 2002. http://catalogue.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/cb39228587k.
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Chalykoff, Lisa. "Space and identity formation in twentieth-century Canadian realist novels : recasting regionalism within Canadian literary studies." Thesis, National Library of Canada = Bibliothèque nationale du Canada, 2000. http://www.collectionscanada.ca/obj/s4/f2/dsk2/ftp02/NQ56523.pdf.
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Gonçalves, Vansan. "Obasan, by Joy Kogawa, and Alias Grace, by Margaret Atwood: fictional representations of Canadian identity and History." Universidade do Estado do Rio de Janeiro, 2013. http://www.bdtd.uerj.br/tde_busca/arquivo.php?codArquivo=5318.
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Esta dissertação investiga de que maneiras a representação do sujeito canadense pode ser encontrada em dois romances representativos da literatura canadense contemporânea: Obasan, de Joy Kogawa, e Alias Grace, de Margaret Atwood. Esta investigação também demonstra que a busca pela definição da identidade canadense tem sido tema constante e relevante da cultura deste país. A indefinição quanto ao que significa ser canadense também tem permeado a literatura canadense ao longo dos séculos, notadamente desde o século XIX. A fim de observar a representação literária da busca pela definição da identidade canadense, esta investigação aborda os conceitos relativos à representação de grupos subalternos tradicionalmente silenciados. A análise comparativa dos romances citados contempla a relação entre memória e trauma autobiográficos, assim como as semelhanças narrativas entre ficção e história. Esta investigação também verifica de que maneiras a literatura pós-moderna emprega documentação oficial, relatos históricos e dados (auto) biográficos a serviço da reescrita da história através da metaficção historiográfica<br>This dissertation investigates the ways through which the representation of the Canadian subject might be observed in two representative novels of contemporary Canadian literature: Obasan, by Joy Kogawa, and Alias Grace, by Margaret Atwood. This investigation also demonstrates that the search for the definition of a specific Canadian identity has been a constant and relevant theme to the countrys culture. The lack of definition concerning the meaning of being Canadian has also permeated Canadian Literature throughout the centuries, most notably since the XIX century. In order to observe the literary representation of the Canadian search for identity, this investigation makes use of the concepts related to the representation of traditionally silenced subaltern groups. The comparative analysis of the abovementioned novels contemplates the relationship between autobiographical memory and trauma, as well as the narrative similarities between fiction and history. This investigation also verifies the ways postmodern literature employs official documentation, historical accounts and (auto) biographical information in the rewriting of history through historiographic metafiction
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Baldridge, Kalyn Rochelle. "L'auguste Autrichienne| Representations of Marieantoinette in 19th Century French Literature and History." Thesis, University of Missouri - Columbia, 2017. http://pqdtopen.proquest.com/#viewpdf?dispub=10629008.
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<p> Maria Antonia Josepha Joanna, or as she is most well-known, Marie-Antoinette (1755-1793) spent her entire life under the watchful eye of many. Fashioned from birth as an Austrian aristocrat, she was transported to France at age fourteen to meet and marry the future king of France. From the onset of her arrival, French writers made attempts to capture what they observed. However, personal bias, political leanings, and accepted rumor led them to do more than record what they saw. Rather than simply narrate a scene, these early witnesses of Marie-Antoinette became the interpreters of her thoughts, motives and feelings. As these interpretations grew, they became widely accepted as truth and eventually became the agents leading to Marie-Antoinette’s demise, as previous biographers and historians of Marie-Antoinette have amply discussed.</p><p> In this dissertation I suggest going beyond an analysis of the literature that led to Marie-Antoinette’s death, and examining the numerous times that Marie-Antoinette’s story was reinterpreted during the century after her death. I will examine nineteenth-century texts from several different authors and genres, including: the historical biographies of Christophe de Montjoye, Lafont d’Aussonne, Alcide de Beauchesne, Edmond and Jules Goncourt, and Horace de Viel-Castel; the eye-witness testimonies of Jean-Baptist Cléry, Henriette Campan, and Rosalie Lamorlière; the historical fiction of Elisabeth Guénard Brossin de Méré and Alexandre Dumas; and finally the archival compilations of Emile Campardon and Gaston Lenotre. I will examine each author’s choice of genre, as well as how contemporary trends in literature, historical studies and even politics influenced their interpretation of Marie-Antoinette.</p><p>
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Nadler, Janna Hyman Roger. "Displaced and minor children in selected Canadian literature : an analysis of ethnic minority child narratives as "minor literatures" in Funny Boy, Lives of the Saints, and Obasan /." *McMaster only, 2004.
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Van, Bolderen Patricia. "Literary Self-Translation and Self-Translators in Canada (1971-2016): A Large-Scale Study." Thesis, Université d'Ottawa / University of Ottawa, 2021. http://hdl.handle.net/10393/42749.
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This thesis constitutes a first large-scale study of literary self-translators and self-translations in Canada, with self-translation understood as interlinguistic and intertextual transfer where the same legal person is responsible for writing the antecedent and subsequent texts. Three main questions guide this investigation: To what extent is Canada fertile ground for self-translation? What does it mean to self-translate in Canada? Why does self-translation in Canada matter? After situating Canada-based research within broader self-translation scholarship, I engage in a critical analysis of the definition and implications of self-translation and contextualize the theoretical, sociopolitical and methodological rationale for studying Canada and adopting a macroscopic approach to examining self-translations and their writers in this country. The thesis predominantly revolves around self-translation artefacts produced by three groups of writers who self-translated in Canada at least once between 1971 and 2016: 1) those self-translating exclusively between English and French; and those self-translating into and/or out of 2) Spanish; or 3) standard Italian. Exploring the theme of collaboration, I propose a new typology of collaborative self-translation, attempting to account for both process- and product-related considerations. In examining the theme of frequency, I identify self-translators and discuss their relative distribution vis-à-vis language, generation, country of birth and location within Canada; I also map out a conceptual framework for defining and counting self-translation products, proposing new ways of understanding and classifying writers in light of their self-translational productivity. In considering the theme of language, I analyze how writers and their self-translations can be characterized in relation to language variety, language combinations and language directionality. In this thesis, I argue that Canada is a significant hub of heterogeneous self-translational activity, and that large-scale, quantitative and product-oriented study constitutes a useful research approach that can generate rich findings and complement other forms of investigation. The thesis also contains an extensive appendix in which I identify Canadian self-translators and their self-translations.
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Ham, Linda. "Reason in the rhyme: The translation of sound and rhythm in children's books." Thesis, University of Ottawa (Canada), 2007. http://hdl.handle.net/10393/27850.
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Because child readers are still in the process of fully acquiring their language, children's books and their translations are closely linked to orality and the oral culture. Strong sound, rhyme and rhythm, which are habitual features of children's literature, also figure as important agents in the acquisition of language. Therefore, these linguistic principles might indicate a pedagogical skopos in the translation of children's literature, that of aiding in child language acquisition.
Theory on sound translation and commentaries from translators of children's literature provide arguments for the importance of retaining sound and rhythm in translation. Analyses of three French-Canadian children's books translated into English provide practical observations of how sound and rhythm are translated in actual texts.
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Meagher, Stephen. "Subjects, Inscriptions, Histories: Sites of Liminality in Three Canadian Autobiographical Fictions." Thesis, McGill University, 1995. http://digitool.Library.McGill.CA:80/R/?func=dbin-jump-full&object_id=92142.
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This thesis explores how Beatrice Culleton's In Search of April Raintree, JoyKogawa's Obasan, and Michael Ondaatje's Running in the Family trouble, by emulating and transgressing the protocols of the literary autobiography, formulations of the historical "subject" aligned to those conventions. Consequently, the primary site of interpretation of this thesis is the delineation of the se texts' narrators as "subjects" who both write and are written by history. This thesis will demonstrate how these "autobiographical fictions" in scribe histories which question "official" accounts and probe gender and race articulations both within those official inscriptions as weIl as in their own historically constructed communities. These textual (dis )placements are interpreted in the context of the critical discourses of postmodernism and post-colonialism.<br>Cette thèse examine comment les ouvrages In Search of April Raintree, de Beatrice Culleton, Obasan, de Joy Kogawa, et Running in the Family, de Michael Ondaatje, perturbent, par leur respect et leur transgression des règles de l'autobiographie littéraire, les formulations du "sujet" historique liées aux conventions propres à ce genre. Le site principal d'interprétation réside donc dans la délimitation des contours des narrateurs de ces textes en tant que "sujets" qui, tout à fois, écrivent l'histoire et sont écrits par elle. Cette thèse démontre que ces "fictions autobiographiques" inscrivent des récits qui remettent en question les comptes rendus "officiels" et examinent les articulations au sexe et à la "race", tant à l'intérieur de ces inscriptions officielles que dans leurs propres collectivités historiquement constituées. Ces dé(placements) textuels sont interprétés à la lumière des discours critiques du post-modernisme et du post-colonialisme. fr
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Marotta, Jennifer Susan. "Constructing the norm, medical advice literature to Canadian adolescents, c. 1873-1922." Thesis, National Library of Canada = Bibliothèque nationale du Canada, 1998. http://www.collectionscanada.ca/obj/s4/f2/dsk2/tape17/PQDD_0009/MQ31227.pdf.
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Kean, Erin M. "Relative Families: Kinship and Childhood in Early Canadian Juvenile Literature, 1843-1913." Thesis, Université d'Ottawa / University of Ottawa, 2019. http://hdl.handle.net/10393/39177.
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This thesis examines representations of Indigenous and non-Indigenous children that circulated through various reports, magazines, and fictional stories that were produced for and about children in Canada’s settler colonial context. Particularly, I focus on the archives of two related institutions, the interdenominational Canada Sunday School Union’s annual reports (1843-1876), and the Shingwauk Industrial Home’s monthly juvenile magazine, Our Forest Children (1887-1890), as well as two juvenile adventure narratives, Canadian Crusoes (1852) by Catharine Parr Traill and “The Shagganappi” (1913) by Emily Pauline Johnson (Tekahionwake). Through the nineteenth century, childhood emerged as a stage of development in the making of a racialized adult identity; I find that these archives and texts record uneasiness about racialized systems of feeling and reveal the colonial management regime’s preoccupation with strengthening certain affective bonds of relationality in order to naturalize dominant, Eurocolonial practices of kinship.
My argument through this thesis follows and extends critical approaches to discourses of kinship from scholars interested in deploying Indigenous and postcolonial critiques of Western kinship traditions (Gaudry 2013, Justice 2018, Morgensen 2013, Rifkin 2010). These scholars variously draw on Michel Foucault’s theory of biopower, which they find to be central to the production and proliferation of the institution of settler colonialism in North America, and query how the biopolitical management of Indigenous people was constructed through particularized institutions (such as the residential school) and discourses (such as blood quantum). My project builds on this work by focusing on the representation of child-centered affect in Canada’s settler-colonial context. While kinship figures as a dominant narrative through this thesis, I argue that the figure of the child emerged as the node through which the colonial management regime worked out competing forms of kinship in Canada’s settler-colonial context.
In the first chapter, I close read the content of the annual reports that were published by the Canada Sunday School Union. I focus specifically on the “technologies of transparency” that reveal the kinds of investments that were made in the lives of real-life settler children in Canada. The Union’s interest in tracking the circulation of Sunday school libraries, for instance, reflects an impulse to inculcate Christian feeling within the nuclear family. The second chapter builds on the colonial management regime’s investment in the emotional lives of children, but shifts the focus to the lives of the Indigenous children who attended the Shingwauk Industrial Home in Sault Ste. Marie through the late 1880s. I demonstrate how Reverend Edward F. Wilson utilized the generic codes of popular British juvenile magazines of the period to showcase how the home’s Indigenous students learn how to articulate appropriate expressions of Christian feeling. In chapter three, I draw attention to Catharine Parr Traill’s undertheorized juvenile adventure novel Canadian Crusoes. I argue that Traill represents vignettes of an Indigenous kinship practice in order to stage the incorporation of a young Kanien’kehá:ka woman into the Euro-Canadian family. Finally, the fourth chapter examines how Emily Pauline Johnson represents the incorporation of mixed-race children into the Canadian nation in her juvenile adventure novel, “The Shagganappi.” While scholars read “The Shagganappi” as a tale of successful racial-intermixture, I argue that such readings only serve to reinscribe the fantasy that Canada is comprised of a “mythical métissage” (Gaudry 85).
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Bouchard, Valérie. "Femme-sujet ou femme-objet Le corps féminin chez Marie-Sissi Labrèche, Nelly Arcan et Clara Ness." Thesis, University of Ottawa (Canada), 2007. http://hdl.handle.net/10393/27504.
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Dans plusieurs romans québécois récents, nous observons une tendance chez les auteurs féminins à exploiter le corps de la femme dans des écrits, souvent à connotation érotique. Ce corps devient un outil de séduction et sert au personnage féminin dans une quête quelconque (attention, affection, admiration, etc.) Cette approche surprend si nous considérons la démarche entreprise par les féministes des années 1970-80 pour libérer la femme de l'emprise qu'exercaient les hommes sur son corps et pour la faire passer d'objet à sujet, entre autres au sein d'une littérature féministe. Nous abordons donc, dans cette analyse d'oeuvres de nouvelles écrivaines, la conception du personnage féminin ainsi que son rôle, pour savoir si ce dernier renvoie à une fonction de sujet où s'il exerce plutôt un retour à la fonction d'objet, idéologie véhiculée par les valeurs patriarcales. À l'aide de romans contemporains, Borderline de Marie-Sissi Labrèche, Putain de Nelly Arcan et Ainsi font-elles toutes de Clara Ness, nous constatons que les personnages féminins donnent l'impression d'être sujets par la façon dont ils usent de leur corps pour se forger une identité et une personnalité forte. Par contre, les romancières récupèrent des idées misogynes entourant la femme, la ramenant à sa condition de femme-objet dont le corps sert au plaisir des hommes. Des études sur l'érotisme et la pornographie permettent de déterminer les limites et les différences entre ce qui est conçu pour le regard masculin et ce qui renvoie aux intérêts féminins. De plus, les théories sur l'agentivité qui étudient le pouvoir et le contrôle qu'exercent les personnages féminins sur leur propre vie nous permettent de mieux délimiter les frontières entre femme-objet, femme-objet "volontaire" et "assumée" et femme-sujet.