Thesis (Ph.D.)--York University, 2008. Graduate Programme in English. / Typescript. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 353-370). Also available on the Internet. MODE OF ACCESS via web browser by entering the following URL: http://gateway.proquest.com/openurl?url_ver=Z39.88-2004&res_dat=xri:pqdiss&rft_val_fmt=info:ofi/fmt:kev:mtx:dissertation&rft_dat=xri:pqdiss:NR39045

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Washington, 2001. / Vita. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 357-384).

Cricket in a Fist is composed of seven stories about a secular Jewish family settled in Canada. The central character, Ginny Reilly, is raised by her mother and grandmother, who emigrated from the Netherlands after surviving the Holocaust. When she is thirty-seven, Ginny suffers a head injury that causes temporary memory loss and a permanent personality change, and she becomes a self-help guru. Following a cultural crisis such as the Jewish Holocaust, a family may disconnect itself from cultural memory, and a family without cultural memory, like an amnesiac patient, must reformulate a sense of identity. As the characters in Cricket in a Fist grapple for an unblemished identity in Canada, they try to dismiss their unruly history. Analogously, the conscious formation of self is the basis of Ginny’s self-help philosophy, which urges wilful forgetfulness as a means to cast off all traces of irresolvable ambiguity and traumatic memory.

Time and place are the media through which the eternal is manifested for the comprehension of fallible man. It is the response to environment which has determined and shaped the human attitude toward ultimate mysteries. The patterns of nature are translated by the artist and philosopher into the ritual behaviour of man. The challenge of adversity and the joy of the morning or the new season are motivation for the restless desire to overcome the imperfections of human and geographical landscape. The Canadian prairie, virgin and elemental, as old as the world and as new as the twentieth century, determines a particular kind of response which is both immediate and universal. It provides the traditional challenge of the desert with the inherent possibility of a Promised Land for the regenerate. The writers who have translated the prairie experience into words have tended to fuse traditional with personal mythology, elevating the moment in mutable time to time eternal. The prairie, for them, is at once the desert of the Old Testament and the modern wasteland. The response, although archetypal, has relevance for the individual. The quest motif, which is an aspect of the romantic tradition of all cultures, is central to prairie fiction. The optimism of the journey toward the light is felt even in moments of darkness, during drought or a dust storm. There is a prevailing sense, in the Canadian prairie novel, that man, through regenerate behaviour, will overcome. As he wanders through the physical and metaphysical landscape of the prairie, the individual regenerate behaviour, will overcome. As he wanders through the physical and metaphysical landscape of the prairie, the individual learns to know God and to know himself. As environment takes on traditional aspects of Godhead, the fictional characters find their analogues in the Bible and in traditional mythological figures. The sick king, the fisherman, the god, the messiah and the prairie farmer become fused in the symbolic struggle for identity. The names of the original pioneers in the Old Testament are given new vitality by the particularly contemporary dilemmas of their modern namesakes. In the major fiction of the Canadian prairie, the quest takes on many aspects. Sometimes it is a direct search for transcendental reality, as in Who Has Seen the Wind by W.O. Mitchell, and sometimes it is an effort to find heaven on earth, outside of the spiritual context, as in Margaret Laurence's The Stone Angel. Mitchell's journey after the meaning of God in Who Has Seen the Wind is primarily simplistic. He believes in the direct route. Reality is a means and not an impediment to supernatural revelation. For Sinclair Ross, whose characters in As For Me and My House are obsessed with transcendental reality, the quest is not so simple. Psychological realities distort divine ecstasy into grotesques. The Promised Land is circumscribed with irony. Margaret Laurence, who has rejected the vertical quest after God, is concerned with the voyage toward self knowledge. Her paths lead into the self. The individual is responsible for his own salvation. A tragic example of irresponsibility related to the horizontal quest motif is that of Abraham in Adele Wiseman's novel The Sacrifice. The questor is not always successful, but the knowledge he gains contains the promise of salvation. That promise is often realized in the messianic motif which is a corollary of the quest. Outsiders with the power to heal, like Gwendolyn MacEwen's magician and George Elliott's kissing man, have the traditional properties of the saviour. Their love embodies the promise of spring and the new season. The major and minor fiction of the prairie share a common vocabulary of optimism which is inherent in the quest literature of every tradition. Landscape is the objective correlative through which man learns by association about God and about himself. His struggle to comprehend particular environmental mysteries is analagous to the universal quest after truth. / Arts, Faculty of / English, Department of / Graduate

This dissertation studies representations of diaspora, sexuality and gender, and affect in Shani Mootoo's Cereus Blooms at Night (1996), Wayson Choy's The Jade Peony (1995), Shyam Selvadurai's Funny Boy (1994), and Dionne Brand's In Another Place, Not Here (1996). There is a notable absence of explicitly named sexual and gender identities in these novels. I argue that this absence is a function of diasporic doubleness: the identities are lost in the trauma of relocation and ongoing cultural translation; they have never been inscribed in collective memories about originary lands or have been inscribed only negatively; or they cannot be concretized in language because, under the disorienting conditions of diasporic mobility, nothing that matters is ever concrete. Mootoo, Choy, Selvadurai, and Brand choose against assigning distinct sexual or gender identities to their characters in part because they refuse to reproduce the social, legaL psychologicaL and medical categories through which discursive power flows. This suspension of naming, however, is not only a matter of counter-discursive opposition. Considered in the context of collective displacement, this suspension also produces an opportunity for queer diasporans to strengthen communal bonds across the fragmentary prejudices and differences that are internal to diasporas. By focusing on emergent experiences of sex-gender desire, Mootoo, Choy, Selvadurai, and Brand create room for affiliation between characters-queer and not-who might otherwise remain separated by the power and politics that flow through language. Whereas Western cultures are philosophically founded on binary separations of mind and body, human and animal, civilization and chaos, and thinking and feeling, affect theorists recognize that humans are first and foremost feeling entities, and that sensation is an integral part of any human experience. The key tenant of affect theory, that the economy of the physical body is a rich resource of agency, motivation, and hope, enables me to find common ground between the quite different interests of diaspora theory and queer theory in literary-cultural analysis. / Thesis / Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

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<p> Studies of children in Canadian fiction have tended to be very general, and often label the individual characters as certain "types" of literary children, already familiar to the reader. By far the most popular and common type of child in twentieth-century Canadian fiction is the pastoral child, who plays an integral role in the literature's nostalgic focus on memory, the past and a Romantic communion with nature. The treatment of the use and effect of this pastoral child, however, has been superficial and tentative. Numerous articles on the individual characters exist, but an attempt to tie together these· pastoral children in an extended and detailed study is lacking. </p> <p> The Romantic child, as established by Wordsworth, provides a logical and effective source and focus for a study of this group of pastoral children in Canadian fiction. The pastoral or Romantic child in Canadian fiction is a descendant of the Wordsworthian child, and enjoys an active and participatory relationship with nature. The relationship epitomizes the imagination and vision which are lacking in the child's society. This child is not merely "pastoral" in a nostalgic sense, but plays a role as society's critic, opponent and mitigator. The large gulf between the sublime nature and the insular society of twentieth-century Canada is bridged to some extent and in some fashion by this Romantic child. The onus on the Canadian Romantic child is to invest society with the imagination and vision he or she derives from nature. </p> <p> The development of the Romantic child in Canadian fiction stresses the Wordsworthian concept of the imagination transforming the common and concrete object. Such an approach refutes accusations of sentimentality and false nostalgia which often surround the pastoral child. A close examination of the actual process involved in the child's Wordsworthian communion with the natural world reveals and accentuates the importance of the child's vision and imagination in a society which seldom values such qualities. Such an examination also ties together these various characters, providing a means by which to define and study the uniquely Canadian Romantic child.</p> / Thesis / Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

Présenté à l'origine comme thèse (de doctorat de l'auteur--Université Laval) sous le titre: Symptômes du colonialisme et signes de libération dans le roman québécois, 1944-1965. / Comprend un index. Bibliogr.: p. 205-217.

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published_or_final_version / English / Master / Master of Philosophy