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This report examines maximalist voice in the nonfiction work of James Agee, Lester Bangs, and David Foster Wallace. The term maximalist voice is meant to capture a set of authorial strategies for depicting a vast, complex American reality with an equally complex literary style, one that is simultaneously didactic, chaotic, and intimate. In particular, this report examines Agee’s Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, Bangs’s Psychotic Reactions and Carburator Dung, and Wallace’s Consider the Lobster. In using “voice” as an analytic lens, this report highlight those qualities of the three author’s nonfiction writing that draw upon the particular conventions of oral communication. It concludes by arguing for increased use of voice as a way to analyze literary writing. / text

There is no abstract available for this thesis.

Dans la seconde moitié des années soixante naissent aux États-Unis le rock et la critique rock.Les participants de ces deux sphères s'unissent jusqu'à former une camaraderie, mais de cette rencontre surgit aussi un troisième champ. Ni vraiment musical, ni totalement critique, celui-ci est avant tout « littéraire ». Il nous met au défi de parler de critique rock pour mieux discuter de littérature et non de musique. C'est dans ce paradoxe apparent que Lester Bangs évolue par exemple. Génie tutélaire de ce petit groupe d'auteurs formés au sein des premiers fanzines et magazines rock, il ne décrit pas seulement les mythes rock ; il interroge aussi leur écriture. Plus avant, ce qui se dessine dans ses textes est le portrait du jeune écrivain « débutant » issu de la grande tradition du « journalisme littéraire ». Cela crée des liens entre les conditions d'accès à l'écriture dans la presse et le devenir « écrivain » en littérature. De même, trouve-t-on des annonces et des échos de ces discours dans le « cinéma direct » américain de l'époque, ainsi que dans la critique rock française. Le film Dont Look Back de Donn Alan Pennebaker par exemple montre déjà dès 1965 la nécessité de la création d'une critique non-journalistique sur le rock. Puis, Yves Adrien s'inspire de l'œuvre de Lester Bangs. Et enfin aujourd'hui à plus de quarante ans de distance, toujours Nick Tosches, Peter Guralnick, Greil Marcus et Lenny Kaye reconstruisent en paroles cette première expérience d'écriture et de publication. Aussi, cette thèse étudiera la création inattendue d'un champ littéraire au sein de la critique rock sur un plan mythographique : bien qu'éphémère, celui-ci s'avèrera fécond / In the second half of the sixties, rock music and rock criticism emerge in the United States. The protagonists of the two spheres gather to create a sense of camaraderie, but a third field also arises from that encounter. It is first and foremost a literary one, neither really musical, nor completely criticism-oriented. As a result, it challenges us to discuss rock criticism in order to better understand literature rather than music. Lester Bangs in particular dwells within that apparent paradox. As the figurehead of this little group of authors formed in early rock fanzines and magazines, he not only describes the rock myths but also discusses the way they are written. The portrait of the “aspiring writer” originating from the tradition of “literary journalism” also appears in his texts. This links the conditions of writing in the press to the situation of the fresh writer-to-be in literature. Similarly, auguries and echoes of such discourses can be found during the same period in American “direct cinema” and French rock criticism. For instance Donn Alan Pennebaker already underlines in 1965 the need for a non-journalistic criticism on rock in his documentary Dont Look Back. Later, Yves Adrien follows Lester Bangs works. Finally, forty years on, Nick Tosches, Peter Guralnick, Greil Marcus and Lenny Kaye continue today to reshape verbally this initial experience of writing and publishing. This thesis studies the unexpected birth of a new literary field through mythography. Though short-lived, it was nonetheless fecund

Recent historians who have written about the development of Methodist religious identity in Upper Canada have based their narratives primarily on readings of documents concerned with ecclesiastical polity and colonial politics. This study attempts to complicate these narratives by examining the way religious identity in the province was affected by the cultural production and distribution of books as denominational status objects in a wider North American market before the middle of the nineteenth century. The first chapter examines the rhetorical strategies the Methodist Book Concern developed to protect its domestic market in the United States from the products of competitors by equating patronage with denominational identity. The remaining chapters unfold the influence a protracted consumption of such cultural commodities had on the religious identity of Methodists living in Upper Canada. For more than a decade after the War of 1812, the Methodist Book Concern relied on a corps of Methodist preachers to distribute its commodities north of the border. This denominational infrastructure conferred the accidental but strategic advantage of concealing the extent of the Concern’s market and its rhetoric from the colony’s increasingly anti-American elite. The Concern’s access to its Upper Canadian market became compromised, however, when Egerton Ryerson initiated a debate over religious equality in the province’s emergent public sphere in the mid-1820s. This inadvertently drew attention to Methodist textual practices in the province that led to later efforts on the part of Upper Canadians to sever the Concern’s access to its market north of the border. When these attempts failed, Canadian Methodists found ways to decouple the material and cultural dimensions of the Concern’s products in order to continue patronizing the Concern without compromising recent gains achieved by strategically refashioning themselves as loyal Wesleyans within the colony’s conservative political environment. The result was the emergence of a stable and enduring transnational market for Methodist printed commodities that both blunted the cultural influence of British Wesleyans and prepared the ground for a later secularization of Methodist publishing into and beyond the middle decades of the nineteenth century.

Recent historians who have written about the development of Methodist religious identity in Upper Canada have based their narratives primarily on readings of documents concerned with ecclesiastical polity and colonial politics. This study attempts to complicate these narratives by examining the way religious identity in the province was affected by the cultural production and distribution of books as denominational status objects in a wider North American market before the middle of the nineteenth century. The first chapter examines the rhetorical strategies the Methodist Book Concern developed to protect its domestic market in the United States from the products of competitors by equating patronage with denominational identity. The remaining chapters unfold the influence a protracted consumption of such cultural commodities had on the religious identity of Methodists living in Upper Canada. For more than a decade after the War of 1812, the Methodist Book Concern relied on a corps of Methodist preachers to distribute its commodities north of the border. This denominational infrastructure conferred the accidental but strategic advantage of concealing the extent of the Concern’s market and its rhetoric from the colony’s increasingly anti-American elite. The Concern’s access to its Upper Canadian market became compromised, however, when Egerton Ryerson initiated a debate over religious equality in the province’s emergent public sphere in the mid-1820s. This inadvertently drew attention to Methodist textual practices in the province that led to later efforts on the part of Upper Canadians to sever the Concern’s access to its market north of the border. When these attempts failed, Canadian Methodists found ways to decouple the material and cultural dimensions of the Concern’s products in order to continue patronizing the Concern without compromising recent gains achieved by strategically refashioning themselves as loyal Wesleyans within the colony’s conservative political environment. The result was the emergence of a stable and enduring transnational market for Methodist printed commodities that both blunted the cultural influence of British Wesleyans and prepared the ground for a later secularization of Methodist publishing into and beyond the middle decades of the nineteenth century.