Not available / text

This dissertation investigates Chinese women's rhetorical practices in the early twentieth century. Tracing the formation and development of a new rhetoric in China, I examine women's writings that were denigrated in the May Fourth period. I argue that as an important part of the new rhetoric, women's texts explored women's issues and created the modern self in the May Fourth period by critiquing a patriarchal tradition that excluded women's experiences from its articulation.I begin by challenging the assumptions that rhetoric is a Western male phenomenon. Situating my study in the area of comparative rhetoric, I critique the previous scholarship in the field and delineate the research methodologies used in this dissertation. In Chapter 2 I locate women's rhetorical practices within the specific social and historical contexts of the May Fourth period. I contend that the May Fourth women's literary texts are rhetorical, considering the different conception of rhetoric in the Chinese rhetorical tradition as well as the social impact these texts created at that historical juncture. In Chapter 3 I extrapolate Lu Yin's feminist rhetorical theory and practice from her sanwen (essays) and fiction. I argue that by emphasizing tongqing (sympathy) in her literary theory, Lu Yin's discourse offers an example of how gendered and culturally specific rhetorical concepts and strategies influence the reader and exert social changes. Chapter 4 provides a case study of Bing Xin, another well-known woman writer in the May Fourth period. I argue that by advocating a "philosophy of love" throughout her lyrical essays and fiction, Bing Xin injected a distinctive female voice in the male-dominated discourse in which women and children were either belittled or silenced. Bing Xin's view of writing as expressing the writer's individuality as well as her unique feminine prose style transformed this classical genre into a more vigorous rhetorical form. Using my case studies as reference, I conclude by drawing out the implications of Chinese women's rhetorical experiences for the studies of rhetoric and comparative rhetoric. I show how such a cross-cultural study of particular rhetorics can help further our exploration of human rhetorical practices in general.

Alain Robbe-Grillet's Les Gommes, Michel Butor's L'Emploi du temps as well as Claude Simon's La Bataille de Pharsale are all New Novels in which Greek and Latin "mythemes" play various roles in the reception of the text by its reader. These roles represent our object of study. As a result of the possibilities and, more specifically, the many difficulties involved in reconstructing the original mythological plot, the reader realizes that the mythemes form a sort of "secondary plot" which both reflects the "first plot" (the novel's narrative) and determines its complexity. In this way, the mythemes guarantee a certain balance in the reader's level of understanding. However, they still bring out important problems: for example, they contribute to the redefining of certain familiar classical concepts and to the production of manifold interpretative choices. It follows that the mythemes are instrumental in making the reader the privileged spectator of the reconstruction of the horizon of expectations.

Being an integral part of cultural modernity, literary modernity is an on-going, self-negating, and self-rejuvenating process. It has always been engaged in a dialectical relationship with tradition and is inseparable from the quest for reality based on artistic autonomy and communicative intersubjectivity. In the first half of my thesis, I attempt to show how and why literary tradition has played a decisive role in the process of literary modernity, how and why the Chinese literary tradition is different from its Western counterpart; how and why Chinese literary modernity is influenced by, but different from Western literary modernity; and what is the specific path that Chinese writers have been taking to achieve literary modernity, as is distinct from the route that has been followed in the West, i. e., from romanticism to realism to modernism and to postmodernism. The second half of my thesis comprises a detailed study of two of China's foremost writers, Lu Xun and Shen Congwen, by way of illustrating my arguments. The first two chapters investigate some core concepts in the Western and Chinese literary traditions and the formative roles that they have played respectively in. shaping the process of literary modernity in the West and China. In our study of Chinese literary modernity and modern Chinese writers, we should pay special attention to the important role of the Chinese literary tradition, while taking into consideration the impact of Western literature and China's historical contingency. The interactions between these three factors constitute the special character of China's literary modernity. The third and the fourth chapters deal with respectively the fiction of Lu Xun and Shen Congwen, as well as their conceptions of literature. Through a close investigation of a few selected stories by these two writers, I wish to demonstrate how their works embody the general ideas of literary modernity, and at the same time reveal the peculiar features of China's own literary modernity. In conclusion, I suggest that modernity and tradition have always been intertwined in a complex, dynamic, and dialectic relationship, which has proved to be not only the motive force, but also the unfailing source for the achievements of modern literature, both Chinese and Western; and subjective reflection should be integrated with the lifeworld, and combined with inter subjective communication.

This study asks whether the use of non-English words in the novels of Canadian Mennonites perpetuates a cultural binary, and concludes that it does not. The use of the non-English word, rather than enforcing a binary between "us and them", ultimately reveals that cultural boundaries are permeable and unstable. Recent reader-response theory, which sees the reader as always influenced by a context, is central to this inquiry. Analysis of readers' responses in the form of questionnaires constitutes part of the support for my assertions, while an examination of typography, orthography, interlingua, and theme in three novels by Canadian Mennonites provides the balance. Chapter one lays the theoretical framework for the investigation. It discusses: reader-response theory and the impossibility of accessing a stable textual meaning coincidental with the author's intention, the challenge of the non-English word to the concept of universality, and the distinction between proper “English" and non-institutional "english". Chapter two examines some readers' responses to non-English words and finds that “inside" readers have interpretations in common with "outside” readers, and that variations exist between the interpretations of “inside" readers. A binary model is too simplistic to encompass the range of contexts from which readers read. Chapter three discusses typography, orthography, and interlanguage in relation to (Low) German, and suggests the importance of these features to a discussion of the texts. Chapters four through six examine Rudy Wiebe's The Blue Mountains of China (1970), Anne Konrad's The Blue Jar (1985), and Armin Wiebe's The Salvation of Yasch Siemens (1984) respectively. Each novel's thematic concern with cultural boundaries serves as a framework for interpreting its physical and linguistic features. Chapter seven concludes by examining the influence of my own fragmented identity on the development of my argument, and revisits the issue of authorial intent in our politically less-than-perfect world. A lengthy appendix serves as a pluralistic glossary to the texts, and contains the responses to my questionnaires. A brief section outlines some of the appendix's interesting patterns and trends. An index to the appendix is provided since the appendix is not arranged alphabetically.

The vast corpus of testimonial literature that has been produced in Latin America since the 1960s, reaches a peak in the 1970s and continues to the present day. The dissertation investigates this phenomenon in Chile, Argentina and Uruguay, through the examination of a group of literary works that range from personal testimonies to documentary novels. This genre is defined by a pact of truth established with the reader in relation to the experience that is being narrated. The first chapter describes testimony as a collective discourse that responds to a counter-hegemonic cultural project which opposes the doctrine of “National Security” that prevailed in the region during that period. Chapter II presents the guidelines that will frame the dissertation, preparing a synthesis of several existing models based upon diverse criteria: social, semantic, syntactic and functional. In establishing the relationship between narration, history and testimony, the thesis emphasizes that narrative techniques are needed in order to tell any story, even those which were not developed with a literary purpose. Testimony is not an exception, because it transforms experience into stories, applying to remembrances the structure of a plot. The texts are organized accordingly, taking into account the types of narrativization employed, and this taxonomy is connected with the reception theory and the contributions of the social criticism, in order to provide a comprehensive understanding of the genre. Chapters III, IV and V examine various works from the three countries mentioned above, establishing a connection between the historic-social situation, the collective symbols, the artistic production of that period, and testimonies. The conclusion suggests that the return of Latin American literature to its hybrid origins implies transformations such as the democratization of writing and the disappearance of the author as the centre of the literary production. It also claims that this corpus provokes a change in the direction of contemporary writing in those countries, generating a necessary catharsis and a new elaboration of a fragmented collective identity.

No description available.

Generation X has often been defined as being without role models or inspiration. Nevertheless, it is possible to detect a sizeable amount of intertextual references in several Quebecer books written by authors of that generation. In Quebec, these young writer's influences are as distinct as they are diverse, varying from Kerouac to Hemingway and from Sartre to Camus. But concerning their Quebecer role model, one name continually returns, that of Rejean Ducharme. / The goal of this thesis is to illustrate the presence of ducharmesque universe in three Generation X novels, namely Le souffle de l'harmattan by Sylvain Trudel, Vamp by Christian Mistral and La rage by Louis Hamelin. Within these novels, we will attempt to find the trail of three typical elements to Ducharme's work: the rejection of conformity, the contempt towards a consumer society, and the substitution of a utopian universe for reality. / According to Francois Ricard, Ducharme belongs to what he calls the "generation lyrique", which is the eldest baby boomers, while Generation X is composed of Baby Boom's youngest members. Interestingly enough, one should expect such a generational conflict between these two cohorts to incite Generation X writers to despite their predecessor. Hence, this thesis will conclude with a few tentative explanations as to why Generation X authors were so driven to choose Rejean Ducharme, a member of the "generation lyrique", to be their role model.

At first glance, the long tradition of Quebecois adaptations of Shakespeare might seem paradoxical, since Quebec is a francophone nation seeking political independence and has little direct connection to the British literary canon. However, it is precisely this cultural distance that allows Quebecois playwrights to play irreverently with Shakespeare and use his texts to explore issues of nation and gender which are closely connected to each other. Soon after the Quiet Revolution, adaptations such as Robert Gurik's Hamlet, prince du Quebec and Jean-Claude Germain's Rodeo et Juliette raised the question "To be or not to be free" in order to interrogate how Quebec could take action to achieve independence. In Macbeth and La tempete, Michel Garneau "tradapts" Shakespeare and situates his texts in the context of the Conquest. Jean-Pierre Ronfard's Lear and Vie et mort du Roi Boiteux carnivalize the nation and permit women to rise to power. Adaptations since 1990 reveal awareness of the need for cultural and gender diversity so that women, queers, and immigrants may contribute more to the nation's development. Since Quebec is simultaneously colonial, neo-colonial, and postcolonial, Quebecois playwrights negotiate differently than English Canadians the fine line between the enrichment of their local culture and its possible contamination, assimilation, or effacement by Shakespeare's overwhelming influence, which thus allows them to appropriate his texts in service of gender issues and the decolonization of the Quebec nation.

Since Elaine Showalter's proposal of "gynocriticism", a considerable amount of work has been done in English-speaking countries to establish the existence o f a "female tradition" in literature. In France, where feminist critics have focussed on new ways "to write the feminine", there has been relatively little interest in reexamining the production of lesser-known women writers. The canon of French literature remains comparatively unchallenged, and few people are aware o f the many women who wrote at the beginning of the twentieth century. This dissertation is a contribution to the rereading of three of such authors, looking at the representation of femininity in relation to feminism. Three novels, one by Sidonie Gabrielle Colette, one by Marcelle Tinayre and one by Lucie Delarue-Mardrus. The careers of these "femmes de lettres", all established before World War I, were comparable, yet two o f them have been forgotten. These novelists remained ambivalent in relation to feminist efforts at that time to achieve the emancipation o f women. Despite their own relative freedom and lack of conformity in their lives, and the criticism o f established norms embedded in their narratives, all three kept their distance from feminism as a movement. The three texts compared here all have conservative endings, in spite of other elements that challenge the status quo. A t the core of their ambiguity is the tension between two concepts which remain in conflict today: on one hand the feminist agenda aimed at greater freedom and autonomy for women is based on the idea that gender roles are constructed, whereas on the other hand the concept of femininity is inseparable from the idea of an "essential" woman, represented, in the early 1900's in France by a particular nationalist concept of the French Woman. A close look at critical texts published in the first part o f the twentieth century shows the weight of that concept in the evaluation o f women's writing of that period. The growth in the number and reputation o f women writers ("femmes de lettres") was accompanied by a declaration o f the need to maintain French femininity ("l'etre femme"), and individual women authors like Colette, Delarue-Mardrus and Tinayre were caught in a dilemma. They all proclaimed their allegiance to the French ideal of femininity, while contributing to its denial and renewal by their own performance as successful women writers. Their representation of femininity as performed in their novels (as it was in their lives) shows the various ways in which it was possible to negociate a compromise between being feminine and challenging that concept through writing. These texts also demonstrate that women's literary production of that period in France is far more diversified than standard anthologies of French literature would lead us to believe. Colette appeals to reader's senses and aims to seduce, Tinayre appeals to reason and aims to convince, while Delarue-Mardrus appeals to the emotions and aims to move. All three, combine the "feminine" and the "feminist" in different ways, constructing literary models that represent a range of responses to a similar problem: how to remain a woman while contesting the notion of "woman".