Pierre Daviault is a household name in the field of translation in Canada. He holds a prominent place thanks to his contribution to the profession itself and to the teaching of professional translation, which he pioneered. He wrote numerous linguistic books to fill a gap in his time---there was no Petit Robert or Robert & Collins in the 1940s. Daviault also developed the very first professional translation course for the University of Ottawa, in the heart of Canada's capital, a bilingual country. Daviault was a published author in other realms of knowledge. His love for the French presence in Canada explains his two biographies of well-known characters of Nouvelle-France. Other works include short stories about famous and less known people of his time and ventures into the literary world in the form of two adventure novels. The entire career of Pierre Daviault spanned from the 1920s to the mid-1960s and revolved around one subject: the French language. Everything he did or created over his long and successful career related, in one way or another, to this passion.

This thesis examines how the personal narrative of former Liberal leader Stephane Dion was shaped in the mediated environment of a minority Parliament. It is based on William James' (1890) consciousness of self and George H. Mead's (1934) notions of the self and the communicative gesture, coupled with work on narratives and self-presentation. These were combined with political image and the role of opponents and journalists in creating a leader's personal narrative. The thesis employs a qualitative research design with a microscopic conceptual approach and inductive reasoning for a textual analysis utilizing a narrative criticism method of rhetorical criticism, followed by in-depth interviews with journalists and political strategists. The analysis digs into the depiction of Dion in the English print media from the period of December 3, 2006 to September 6, 2008. Although the individual had the personal narrative as a politician with honesty and integrity, the analysis identifies that the dominant narrative of Dion was that he was a weak leader. The research finds the Liberal leader's opponents help reshape his narrative, which is granted legitimacy by journalists covering the political scene, and reinforced through the actions of Dion himself. In addition, the thesis outlines the challenges an opposition leader faces under the scrutiny of a minority Parliament and raises questions of what this means for Canadian political culture.

This thesis considers the religious identity that Lucy Maud Montgomery constructed in The Selected Journals of L.M. Montgomery. As an adequate theoretical model to study religion in modern autobiography is not available, this thesis approaches the Selected Journals with a "social construction" model (adapted from autobiography theory on gender) in a consideration of her religious identity. Montgomery's religious self-constructions---as unorthodox, Presbyterian, and a seeker of truth---are considered in successive chapters through close readings of passages from her journals. Though her separate self-constructions are apparently paradoxical, I argue that Montgomery's overall religious identity is nonetheless fairly consistent with her most crucial religious self-construction---that of being a seeker of truth---and that she ultimately presents herself in her journals as having faith centred on hope. In conclusion, I offer reflections on the need for the development of an autobiography theory in which religion is regarded as an important aspect of identity.

Le XIXe siècle, en France, a donné le jour à la Modernité dans les Arts. Ce qui a débuté comme un courant esthétique, s'est doté d'une sensibilité au présent et au changement. Il fallait "être de son temps" et les deux Honoré ont repondu à l'appel. Le but de cette thèse est d'établir des rapprochements entre Balzac l'écrivain et Daumier l'artiste qui indépendamment l'un de l'autre, ont sû utiliser cette maxime dans la création d'une "comédie humaine". Tout en reconnaissant qu'à certains moments, la littérature où la peinture à influence l'autre ou parfois s'est faite la complice de sa rivale, nous nous sommes néanmoins soumise à des procédés d'équivalence nécessaires au rapprochement d'arts interdisciplinaires. Nous avons également assemblé certains critères qui, pour nous, définissent une "caricature", qu'elle soit picturale ou scripturale. Les deux Honoré ont été tous deux, de grands caricaturistes. Nous pourrions apporter plusieurs théories pour expliquer le rapprochement entre les descriptions que chacun des Honoré donne de ses personnages dont la physionomie ou la démarche révèle ce qui se cache dans leur for intérieur. Notre étude nous a révèle qu'à l'arrière plan des images de Balzac et de Daumier, se dessine l'ombre de ces sciences à la mode, la Phrénologie et la Physiognomonie. Les deux Honoré en ont observé les codes pour esquisser leurs personnages. Nous avons monté un catalogue contenant des reproductions de lithographies de gravures et de peintures de Daumier qui ont servi au rapprochement des deux artistes. Ce volume accompagne notre thèse. Les illustrations viennent démontrer que la plupart des ressemblances entre les deux oeuvres se trouvent dans les types ou stéréotypes de la contemporanéité que les deux artistes ont réussi a étoffer pour en faire des représentants vraisemblables des tendances, des modes, des thèmes et des vices de leur siècle.

Cette thèse est consacrée à Médéric Lanctôt (1838--1877), journaliste, essayiste, politicien canadien-francais. L'étude s'échelonne de la naissance de Lanctôt en décembre 1838 à son décès prématuré en juillet 1877. La méthode suivie jalonne les étapes majeures de la vie de Lanctôt, de ses débuts comme journaliste au Courrier de Saint-Hyacinthe à la fin de sa carrière à Hull. La thèse analysé les rapports qui existent entre le journaliste engagé et l'homme d'action dans la societé canadienne-francaise du XIX e siècle. Le travail se veut une recherche de l'homme certes, mais aussi une quête sur les raisons qui ont amené certains historiens à l'identifier comme l'un des premiers idéologues à tenter de relier les problèmes socio-économiques à la question nationale. En d'autres mots nous souhaitons rapatrier les divers dossiers sur Lanctôt: le dossier ouvrier, associé à l'histoire du mouvement syndical; le dossier politique, lié à l'histoire constitutionnelle du Canada; le dossier économique, lié à l'histoire économique du pays; le dossier journalistique imbriqué dans l'histoire littéraire. Méconnu peut-être à cause de ses écrits éparpillés dans l'univers ordonné du monde universitaire, Médéric Lanctôt mérite la révision de son cas pour qu'il soit enfin réhabilité et qu'il trouve sa juste place dans l'histoire intellectuelle du pays.

Scholars approaching the work of Sir Charles G. D. Roberts face two problems: first, a critical mass that divides his work along genre lines and second, limited theoretical frameworks on which to build a discussion, namely, British Romanticism or American Transcendentalism. An alternative critical lens through which to explore Roberts's oeuvre is supernaturalism. Chapter 1 offers a summary of Roberts scholarship and a discussion of current critical frameworks. Chapter 2 contextualizes Roberts's interest in the supernatural through an examination of occult currents of thought during the late nineteenth century and early twentieth century, as well as Roberts's friendships, letters, and related publications. Chapters 3 to 5 proceed chronologically through an examination of how the supernatural manifested itself in his prose fiction: Chapter 3 explores his earliest supernatural stories from Earth's Enigmas; Chapter 4 discusses his Acadian works; Chapter 5 explores his later prose fiction, beginning with The Heart of the Ancient Wood and ending with his last novel, In the Morning of Time. Chapter 6 acts as a corollary to the other chapters through a chronological examination of Roberts's major collections of verse. A reexamination of Roberts's personal writings and acquaintances during key moments in his life reveals a bio-critical void in scholarship that has effectively obscured his affinity for esoteric ideas and for artists who held similar interests. An investigation of his works also reveals that the supernatural manifested itself in his poetry and prose fiction throughout his career. Evidence suggests that the supernatural was a pervasive influence on his life and that he found in esoteric traditions perspectives on the afterlife that could help him articulate his spiritual struggles.

The orchestral conductor Heinz Unger (1895-1965) was born in Berlin, Germany and was reared from a young age to follow in his father's footsteps and become a lawyer. In 1915, he heard a Munich performance of Gustav Mahler's Das Lied von der Erde conducted by Bruno Walter and thereafter devoted the rest of his life to music and particularly to the dissemination of Gustav Mahler's music. This doctoral dissertation is conceived as a contextual biography that explores the manner in which the strands of German Jewish identity converge and are negotiated by a musician who, as a consequence of persecution, lived a sizeable portion of his life in a Double Diaspora (in the Jewish Diaspora as well as exiled from his European home) yet never cut the ties to a German Jewish tradition informed by the strains of a European cultural heritage. It is a work that discusses the process of Jewish emancipation in Central Europe and in so doing sheds light on the complex issues of ethnicity, "race," nationalism, secularization, and culture and thought as they developed in the modern period and impacted upon Europe and beyond in the first half of the twentieth century. In tracking Heinz Unger's many movements and activities around the world and covering his eventual emigration to Canada, the work simultaneously probes the manner in which European cultural values manifested themselves in disparate parts of the world. It is also a detailed examination of the values that Mahler's oeuvre represents and of one musician's negotiation of these sites of meaning by way of his commitment to Gustav Mahler's music. The first three chapters serve as an extended introduction that in turn surveys Jewish identity in the Diaspora, constructions of Jewish music and their meaning, and the specific cultural significance of Mahler's music in a German Jewish context. The following five chapters are cast as a biography of Heinz Unger (based on the Heinz Unger Fonds at Archives Canada, Ottawa, Ontario) that explores the manner in which the German Jewish musician understood and expressed his dual identity by way of his allegiance to music.

This thesis is based on collaborative research conducted over ten years with three elders of Athapaskan/Tlingit ancestry, in the southern Yukon Territory, Canada Mrs. Angela Sidney, Mrs. Kitty Smith and Mrs. Annie Ned are also authors of this document because their oral accounts of their lives are central to the discussion. One volume examines issues of method and ethnographic writing involved in such research and analyses the accounts provided by these women; a second volume presents their accounts, in their own words, in three appendices. The thesis advanced here is that life history offers two distinct contributions to anthropology. As a method, it provides a model based on collaboration between participants rather than research 'by' an anthropologist 'on' the community. As ethnography, it shows how individuals may use the traditional dimension of culture as a resource to talk about their lives, and explores the extent to which it is possible f or anthropologists to write ethnography grounded in the perceptions and experiences of people whose lives they describe. Narrators provide complex explanations for their experiences and decisions in metaphoric language, raising questions about whether anthropological categories like 'individual', 'society' and 'culture' are uniquely bounded units. The analysis focusses on how these women attach central importance to traditional stories (particularly those with female protagonists), to named landscape features, to accounts of travel, and to inclusion of incidents from the lives of others in their narrated 'life histories'. Procedures associated with both life history analysis and the analysis of oral tradition are used to consider the dynamics of narration. Particular attention is paid to how these women use oral tradition both to talk about the past and to continue to teach younger people appropriate behavior in the present. The persistence of oral tradition as a system of communication and information in the north when so much else has changed suggests that expressive forms like story telling contribute to strategies for adapting to social, economic and cultural change. / Arts, Faculty of / Anthropology, Department of / Graduate

This dissertation is a comparative, interdisciplinary, and transregional study of the connections between textual and iconographic representations of the Buddha Shakyamuni’s extended biography, and a re-assessment of its role and significance for the spread of Buddhism from India through Central Asia to China between the third century BCE to around the sixth century CE. My research relies on diverse sources: early Buddhist canonical sources; the earliest textual versions of the Buddha’s life stories in Chinese, Sanskrit, and Pali; art historical and archaeological material remains from early stupa sites and cave temples in India, Central Asia, and China; and also other visual material such as Buddha images, stelae, votive stupas, portable shrines, etc. Utilizing a multidisciplinary approach, I propose a new interpretative framework to re-evaluate the connections between the Buddha’s life stories and his body. In this dissertation, I suggest a new approach to “reading” the Buddha’s extended biography, which I posit is not merely a story of his life, but essentially is a story of his body. With that thesis in mind, I also shed new light on the role and function of the Buddha’s biography in the production and use of images, proposing a new hypothesis to re-examine the design and construction of early stupa sites and cave temples. This study suggests a common iconographical programme that lasted for several centuries and demonstrates how this programme connects to the story of the Buddha and his body.

As the Twelver Shi'a coalesced into an increasingly distinct community between the 10th and 12th centuries CE, a new type of religious literature emerged. Writers began to collect narratives of the lives and deaths of the twelve infallible imams into single works. This study analyzes these early works, which have served as a template for similar Shi`i compilations written in the centuries since. The goal of this analysis is to shed light on how the historical narratives of a given community emerge in relationship to the ways in which that community construes religious meaning. I focus on five formative Arabic works from this period: [1] <italic>Ithbat al-wasiya</italic> attributed to al-Mas'udi; (d. 345/956); [2] <italic>Kitab al-irshad</italic> by al-Mufid (d. 413/1022); [3] <italic>Dala'il al-imama</italic> attributed to Ibn Jarir (d. early 5th/11th c.); [4] <italic>I'lam al-wara'</italic> by al-Tabrisi; (d. 548/1154); and [5] <italic>Manaqib Al Abi Talib</italic> by Ibn Shahrashub (d. 588/1192). As the first study to isolate and analyze collective biographies of the imams, this dissertation discusses unique structural and thematic patterns in these early works that were related to the concerns of the writers' community--patterns that helped produce generic expectations that remain in place to the present day. Grouping these texts into one genre allows us to better discern the religious vision upheld by this literature. My analysis begins with birth narratives, showing how these symbolic and fantastic stories highlight concrete and practical concerns of the writers. Second, I explore the importance of the imams' bodies, which function as sites of both intense devotion and great anxiety. The final two chapters explain the many and varied forms of betrayal suffered by the imams in relationship to the pervasive social grievances that are a subtext to the biographies. The memory of the imams cultivated in this literature and the emotional sensibilities projected through it provide insight into how systems of meaning are constructed. The Shi'i community used this literature to stake religious claims on the cosmic meaning and the eternal relevance of all aspects of the imams' lives, claims that made remembering their stories of critical importance.