Since the mid-1980s, the study of Canadian postmodern historical fiction has been dominated by Linda Hutcheon’s “historiographic metafiction.” Emphasizing historiography and textuality, critics of historiographic metafiction have flattened the past to text and image, inadvertently severing its active connection with the present and removing it from historical process. This is problematic for the ideological intentions of the texts in question because it is an awareness of the past/present dialectic that incites awareness that present action can lead to future change. This thesis, therefore, examines three novels that have overwhelmingly been viewed as historiographic metafiction for their inclusion of researcher-historian characters: Findley’s The Wars, Bowering’s Burning Water, and Marlatt’s Ana Historic. By opening up these texts to criticism that acknowledges history as process, I demonstrate that there is no need to limit these novels to this problematic framework and that researcher-historian characters are valuable for more than their foregrounding of historiography.

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.

This thesis examines the attitudes to love and sex reflected in eight Canadian novels dating from 1925 to 1969. The first three, Frederick Philip Grove's Settlers of the Marsh, Morley Callaghan's They Shall Inherit the Earth, and Hugh MacLennan's The Watch That Ends the Night, were chosen not only as works centrally concerned with love, but also as good examples of their writers' treatment of sexuality in other novels. And since Grove, Callaghan, and MacLennan are generally held to be the major Canadian writers of at least the first half of this century, collectively their novels form an accurate picture of the traditional, mainstream attitude to sex, insofar as it can be seen operating in and through fiction. Chapter One introduces the reader to the ways in which twentieth-century Canadian fictional attitudes to love and sex are directly contiguous with those of Victorian England: the fundamental duality of body and soul; the "worship" of the good woman as the embodiment of the Christian virtue of self-sacrificing, pure love; the resulting splitting off of aggressive sexuality from feelings of tenderness; and the subsequent driving underground of the repressed sexual urges and their emergence into perverse forms. Chapter Two traces Grove's insistence upon a tender, asexual Victorian ideal and his deliberate efforts to eliminate what he regards as degrading and destructive, that is, any sexual urges not strictly passive and subordinate to spiritual love and monogamous procreation. Chapter Three discusses Callaghan's attempt to break away from this traditional duality of love and sex, and then demonstrates how his fusion of body and soul actually breaks down into just another version of the old split so that sex is good only so long as it remains in the service of self-sacrificing love. It also establishes how Callaghan's notion of love comes to depend ultimately upon covert sadomasochism in which both the male and female unconsciously and destructively attempt to break out of sexual roles too rigid and narrow to serve their complex human needs. Chapter Four looks at MacLennan's apparent affirmation of life and sex, and maintains that his mystical message is really a sadomasochistic impulse in which life becomes the unconscious and obsessive pursuit after pain and death. The relationship which emerges between the sexes in all three of these novels is that of dominant female and dependent, resentful, frightened male. Grove, Callaghan, and MacLellan all portray women as essentially stronger than their men: the "good" ones dominate by means of protective, maternal power and the "bad" ones through aggressive, self-gratifying sexuality. The male responses to these powerful women are deeply ambivalent: they seek infantile security and gratification at the breasts of the "good" women, while they simultaneously attempt to establish their potency, autonomy and safety by overtly destroying the "bad" mothers and covertly punishing the "good" ones. Thus Grove, Callaghan and MacLennan all create fictional worlds in which sadomasochism inadvertently works against their notions of idealized love. Chapters Five and Six examine Sheila Watson's The Double Hook and Mordecai Richler's The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz, concentrating on their more contemporary treatment of sexaulity and particularly on their response to the archetype of the castrating mother. Watson pioneers the way out of the Victorian past by exploring aggression as a potentially positive mode of behaviour, and by seeing in the traditional role of the self-sacrificing woman the kind of tyranny-by-guilt which covertly holds sway in the earlier works. Richler also rejects the notion of the efficacy of suffering and thus has his young hero attain manhood partially through his repudiation of the "security" offered in a relationship with a self-sacrificing woman. Moreover, his satire repeatedly focuses on the covert sexual reality which underlies idealistic pretensions, and thus makes the same comment as this thesis is making about the novels of the traditional mainstream. Chapter Seven analyzes the ways in which Leonard Cohen's Beautiful Losers, Margaret Laurence's The Fire-Dwellers and Robert Kroetsch's The Studhorse Man all work through various responses to the repressive limitations of Victorian ideals: Cohen dramatizes an ideal of polymorphous perversity, Laurence "masculinizes" her heroine and "feminizes" her male protagonists, and Kroetsch insists upon an unidealized, aggressively sexual response to life. Nevertheless, as Chapter Seven demonstrates, even contemporary imaginations continue to focus on the woman as castrating mother and the man as threatened son. Thus in the final analysis, the differences between the attitudes of contemporary writers and those of their predecessors lie not in an abandonment of the traditional archtype, but only in the degree to which they are conscious of, and deliberately choosing to work with, sado-masochistic sexuality. / Arts, Faculty of / English, Department of / Graduate

The dissertation examines the nomadism of contemporary migrant writers who deliberately resist location and deterritorialize the dérive and déracinement of the nomad. Through nomadism, these writers elude the fixed identity categories—le nègre, le migrant, l'autre—often imposed on them by the country of adoption. These three writers—Edwidge Danticat, Dany Laferrière, and Linda Lê—each write out the diasporic and exilic dislocations of nomadism: linguistic, geopolitical and schizo-social. The hybrid methodology informing this study includes postcolonial, poststructuralist and feminist theories. The first four chapters establish the theoretical parameters for reading nomadic literatures, and the final chapter offers nomadic readings of contemporary Haitian and Vietnamese migrant literatures in France, Quebec, and the United States. These subtitles are problematic; yet, I theoretically problematize these terms and the national boundaries (geopolitical, psychological, and schizo-social) that they signify. Thus, the terms—Vietnamese and Haitian, specifically as situated in France, Québec and the United States of America—are read less as discrete geographical or national domains, and more as a transmuting (if also transnationalist) impulse, a setting of the two states into creative tension. I examine the multi-cultural and plurilingual ‘border crossings’ which occur in nomadic migrant writers, such as Lê, who writes out the linguistic and identitary vicissitudes of migration. Similarly, I explore how two francophone Haitian writers—an émigré in Québec (Laferrière) and the other a refugee/immigrant in the United States (Danticat)—take flight in different languages: the first in a minor usage of French, the latter in a minor usage of English. My analysis of these writers emphasizes several core themes: espaces exilaires; the deterritorialization of fixed identitary categories (whether around issues of gender, nationality, sexuality, or race); the destabilization of language, both the mother-tongue and the colonial (‘colonizing’) language; and the literary and cultural nomadism of migrant writers who ultimately resist immigration. Each migrant writer nomadically deterritorializes the spaces and tropes of migratory writing—territories of old, new, natal, adopted, native, acquired, immigrant, migrant and citizen. Through my readings, I show that even in texts by migrant writers, who move from one place to another, a sort of nomadism persists.

This study examines the novels of Caryl Phillips, J. M. Coetzee, and Michael Ondaatje, writers originally from post-colonial countries—St. Kitts, South Africa, and Sri Lanka respectively—who explore the ambivalences engendered by colonialism rather than conforming to a one-dimensional understanding of postcolonial literature which focuses exclusively on the reactionary nature of this type of writing. What enables these writers to transcend the simple binarisms of colonizer and colonized and to concentrate on the ambiguities of the postcolonial condition is their use of postmodern stylistic elements which emphasize complexity and irresolution. Phillips embraces postmodern fragmentation by segmenting his fiction into multiple, often unrelated stories. In opting to juxtapose fragments of stories, Phillips matches his narrative form to his thematic interest in the dislocation experienced by people of the African diaspora. The first chapter examines The Final Passage, Higher Ground, and The Nature of Blood to demonstrate that fragmentation becomes more deeply embedded in Phillips's narrative structure as his novels advance. Coetzee's fiction is reflective of a postmodern aesthetic in its unreliability and indeterminancy. This stylistic feature enables Coetzee to address postcolonial concerns in South Africa where the reliability of any subject position has been undermined by rigid racial divisions. The second chapter analyzes Coetzee's various types of narrative voices: the untrustworthy narrator whose views are clearly objectionable (Dusklands); the unreliable narrator whose perspective is limited (Waiting for the Barbarians); and the unreadable narrator who escapes any certainties (Life & Times of Michael K). The third chapter explores Michael Ondaatje's use of a self-conscious playfulness with language. Ondaatje incorporates magic realism, intertextuality, and a poetic perspective in his novels, which are either situated in one particular setting (In the Skin of a Lion) or in a plurality of locals (The English Patient, to highlight the bizarre and traumatic circumstances that mark the postcolonial experience of exile and to depict the way that his characters' lives tend to be mythic in scale as a consequence. In turning to the intersection of the postmodern and the postcolonial, Phillips, Coetzee, and Ondaatje convey a highly nuanced understanding of postcolonial existence and of the human condition.

No description available.

This thesis explores, through a neo-Marxist/cultural materialist lens, how discourses of class conflict in three pieces of contemporary Canadian fiction — Megan Gail Coles’ Small Game Hunting at the Local Coward Gun Club (2019), Tracey Lindberg’s Birdie (2015), and André Alexis’s Fifteen Dogs (2015) — are suppressed in broader public discussions of the texts, particularly on the CBC Radio program Canada Reads. Through close-reading the texts and their respective Canada Reads seasons for how class is operating “equiprimordially” (Ashley Bohrer) — an intersectional conceptualization of class that views class and its relations to other systems of oppression such as race, gender, sexuality, and settler-colonialism as co-constitutive, not separate — I argue that Canada Reads serves as a cultural arm of the neoliberal Canadian state’s project of erasing the political saliency of class conflict so that it may continue to reproduce its conditions of existence. To demonstrate this, I first outline the history of Canadian state cultural policy in relation to class, as well my theoretical framework. I then close read the thesis’s three pieces of fiction to determine how they mobilize class in relation to Canadian state narratives of class. Following this, I close read each book’s respective Canada Reads broadcast to see if class is taken up at all in the discussions. I then examine Canada Reads as a “mass reading event” (MRE) [Danielle Fuller and DeNel Rehberg Sedo] and explore alternative modes of shared reading that escape the nationalist logic of Canada Reads and thus have potential for bringing class discourses forward. Ultimately, the thesis demonstrates that Canada Reads as a model of shared reading is too deeply tied to the liberal humanist values of the Canadian state for any radical class discourse to emerge from it. Radical class discourses in literature that could spur collective, transformative action must come from elsewhere. / Thesis / Master of Arts (MA) / This thesis examines how messages of class conflict in three pieces of Canadian fiction — Megan Gail Coles’ Small Game Hunting at the Local Coward Gun Club, Tracey Lindberg’s Birdie, and André Alexis’s Fifteen Dogs — are suppressed in broader public discussions of each piece, particularly on the CBC Radio program Canada Reads. Reading both the books and the Canada Reads seasons each book appeared on through a neo-Marxist lens that places class in relation to other systems of oppression, such as gender, race, sexuality, and settler-colonialism, I argue that Canada Reads serves as a cultural arm of the neoliberal Canadian state’s project of erasing the political saliency of class conflict — something that it requires in order to reproduce itself. Based on this finding, I turn at the end to alternative models of shared reading that could serve as spaces that recognize class messages in literature.

No description available.

This dissertation examines the themes of regionalism, feminism and traditionalism as discussed by Camille Lessard-Bissonnette in her journalism, from 1906 to 1938, and in her novel, Canuck, published in 1936, in order to determine if the experience of immigration influences the treatment of these three themes. An immigrant herself, Lessard-Bissonnette was poised between two cultures. Moreover, her writing spans a period of burgeoning feminism. As a result, her depiction of her two homes,--Quebec and the United States,--her views on the rights and roles of women, and her maintenance of traditional perspectives and values from her culture of origin comprise the primary focus of this analysis. In addition, a biography outlining the writer's life and contextualizing her work, and a comparative study of the novels of three other Franco-American women writers round out this dissertation. The methodological approach is one which encompasses a variety of disciplines: sociology and anthropology illuminate a discussion of the effects of industrialization upon the institution of the family; research in women's studies informs an examination of female fictional development, women's part in labor history, and the role of gender specificity in the elaboration of nationalism, and; the field of ethnic studies sheds important light on recurrent themes in immigrant literature. The result of this dissertation is the revelation that Lessard-Bissonnette's regional loyalty eventually shifts from French Canada to be extended primarily to her pays d'adoption. Synchronous with this development is the author's increased participation in American public life, including the feminist movement. At the same time, however, the influence of her pays d'origine's traditionalism continues to be reflected in her preoccupation with family life, the preservation of language, faith and culture, and the expression of loyalty to the Quebec homeland. The conclusion of this dissertation, therefore, is that Lessard-Bissonnette's views, as expressed in her fictional and non-fictional work undergoes an evolutionary process. This is the result of an immigrant's slow but steady acculturation and is indicative of social change in the Franco-American community of which the writer is a member.

No description available.