<p> This dissertation argues for a greater recognition of the impact &ldquo;the animal turn&rdquo; has had on literary studies. The study analyzes a group of influential North American writers critically engaged with fascist formulations of bodily expendability and the entanglement of violence that crosses species boundaries. Narrative accounts of human genocide and nonhuman animal slaughter are key sites of the intersectionality of oppression in theoretical formulations by scholars of Critical Animal Studies. Such narratives offer the opportunity to explore the possibility of homology while acknowledging the limits of any analogy. Literature of &ldquo;the animal turn&rdquo; explores the entanglements of subjectivation across humanist and speciesist divides, one that determines in advance if it is permissible to systematically exploit and kill nonhuman animals with impunity. Emphatic in the different experiences of oppression, the narratives analyzed nonetheless identify and critique this speciesist discourse resulting in a tension that acknowledges a shared complicity in discursive violence while calling out for a new response to the question of the animal. This new response, I argue, requires a merger of the humanities and sciences: what I call a new <i>Humanimalities</i>. </p><p> Close readings of Gregory Maguire&rsquo;s <i>The Wicked Years</i>, Octavia E. Butler&rsquo;s <i>Xenogenesis</i>, Margaret Atwood&rsquo;s <i> MaddAddam</i> trilogy, Randall Kenan&rsquo;s A <i>Visitation of Spirits</i>, Leslie Marmon Silko&rsquo;s <i>Ceremony</i>, Art Spiegelman&rsquo;s <i>Maus</i>, and Yann Martel&rsquo;s <i> Beatrice and Virgil</i> draw out implicit and explicit critiques of what Jacques Derrida characterized as the &ldquo;sacrificial structure&rdquo; of the Western subject. By highlighting literature&rsquo;s critical engagement with the discourse of species, this dissertation explores the complicated navigations of selected narratives as they attempt to resist calculations of expendability without resorting to what one critic has characterized as an, &ldquo;egalitarian pluralism of life forms and lifeways." Each narrative struggles with a utopian impulse of the total liberation for which Critical Animal Studies calls, an acknowledgement of the different experiences of non-human animal hierarchies, and an acknowledgement of their own narrative&rsquo;s complicity in animal genocide.</p><p>

Focusing on the texts of James Cook, Samuel Hearne, Alexander Mackenzie, Archibald Menzies, David Thompson, and George Vancouver, Mapping the Nation: Exploration and the English-Canadian Literary Imagination argues that exploration writing is a subgenre of travel writing defined by its empirical perspective and function. Incorporated into the English-Canadian literary canon while being disparaged for its lack of literary qualities, exploration writing is used by English-Canadian literary histories, encyclopaedias, and companions to prove an environmentally deterministic developmental thesis of the national literature. The developmental thesis permeates anthologies that offer excerpts of exploration writing and discussions that pertain to the influence of exploration writing on later English-Canadian literature that returns to it. Returning to exploration writing addressing land exploration are Farley Mowat’s People of the Deer (1952), John Newlove’s “The Pride” (1965) and “Samuel Hearne in Wintertime” (1966), Don Gutteridge’s The Quest for North: Coppermine (1973), Marion R. Smith’s Koo-Koo-Sint: David Thompson in Western Canada (1976), and Brian Fawcett’s “The Secret Journal of Alexander Mackenzie” (1985). Returning to exploration writing addressing oceanic exploration are Earle Birney’s “Pacific Door” (1947), Damnation of Vancouver (1952), and “Captain Cook” (1961); P. K. Page’s “Cook’s Mountains” (1967); George Bowering’s George, Vancouver: A Discovery Poem (1970); Gutteridge’s Borderlands (1975), and George Bowering’s Burning Water (1980), Audrey Thomas’s “The Man with the Clam Eyes” (1982) and Intertidal Life (1984). Each text represents an individual interpretation of exploration writing that operates through genre and forms of return such as allusion, imitation, paraphrase, and quotation. / Thesis (Ph.D, English) -- Queen's University, 2009-03-10 13:39:01.062

Canada’s Multiculturalism Act insists that Canada embraces its ethnic and racial diversity. At the same time, the broader discourse of multiculturalism tends to figure Canada as a tolerant but essentially white nation that accommodates minority cultures. In an attempt to expand established arguments about the ways in which the ideology and practice of official multiculturalism elides our history of racism and violence and perpetuates racist myths and stereotypes, this dissertation examines the depiction of a civil, multicultural nation in women’s fiction produced during Canada’s multicultural period of the 1980s and 1990s. With an eye to understanding the particular challenges that women who have been subject to racially-motivated violence and discrimination face in relating their experience, it considers the innovative ways in which fiction by Joy Kogawa, Anne Michaels, Eden Robinson, Bharati Mukherjee, Anita Rau Badami, and Catherine Bush grapples with the effects of systemic racism. While these writers explore the gendered trauma of women who have been subjected to racism, they do not depict their protagonists primarily as victims. Instead, they show these women forging innovative strategies to overcome trauma and victimization, and their silencing and debilitating effects. In exploring the merits of those strategies to understand how they might help us to grapple with the legacy of systemic racism and of the multicultural discourse that has sometimes masked racism in this country, I argue that literature can foster empathy in its readers, while demanding that we acknowledge our complicity with a social and political system that has frequently been racist, exclusionary, and even violent. Throughout the dissertation, I argue that the strategies for overcoming the traumatic effects of racism employed by these authors not only challenge conceptions of Canada as a civil, nonracist society, but also offer ways of extending our understanding of Canadian civility and diversity. In doing so, I suggest that Canadian literature can offer its readers the opportunity to accept responsibility for the abuses of our collective past and conceive of a more accepting, equal society.

The purpose of this thesis was to posit an explanation of recurrent liminal imagery in Eden Robinson’s novel Monkey Beach by exploring the ways that the text can be read as an expression of diasporic awareness. The Haisla in Monkey Beach experience a form of exile that is atypical because it occurs within the limits of their homeland. This thesis explores the dimensions of this exile by examining the ways that the Haisla community’s connection to its homeland has been altered in the wake of colonial contact. What this study revealed is that although Monkey Beach exposes disruptions in the connections between the Haisla and their homeland, the adaptation of Aboriginal storytelling techniques to the form of the novel represents both a positive continuation of indigenous traditions and an active resistance of cultural erasure.

This thesis is the first major study of censorship of and in English Canadian literature. While there are several reasons scholars have focused on censorship in Europe and the United States, it is the ascendancy in quality and quantity of Canadian writing leading to its further use in institutions where censorship takes place---such as schools and libraries---that necessitates a study of censorship in Canadian literature now. This rise in censorship has prompted Canadian authors increasingly to write about the subject. In this thesis I study censorship issues raised both explicitly md implicitly by Timothy Findley, Margaret Atwood, Margaret Laurence, Beatrice Culleton and Marlene Nourbese Philip. All of these writers have been subjected to censorship attacks and have responded to these attacks and grappled with the philosophical implications of censorship in their fiction and non-fiction. My investigation of censorship in these texts sheds new light on the works of literature themselves, but the literary texts also suggest a new way of looking at censorship. Each of my chapters offers arguments challenging the traditional Enlightenment model of censorship as an oppressive government practice against its citizens, a definition resulting in the mistaken views that censorship has been largely eradicated in the West and that, when it does surface, it is to be condemned on principle. This view can be contrasted with a "constructivist" model of censorship as the delegitimation of expression by social forces. My findings support a definition which draws on both models wherein censorship is the exclusion of some discourse as the result of a judgment by an authoritative agent based on some ideological predisposition. The key word in this definition is "judgment" which, when recognized as the primary activity in censorship, must change the way we approach censorship controversies. For if censorship is the exercise of judgment, and judgment is enmeshed in the fabric of huma

The purpose of this thesis was to posit an explanation of recurrent liminal imagery in Eden Robinson’s novel Monkey Beach by exploring the ways that the text can be read as an expression of diasporic awareness. The Haisla in Monkey Beach experience a form of exile that is atypical because it occurs within the limits of their homeland. This thesis explores the dimensions of this exile by examining the ways that the Haisla community’s connection to its homeland has been altered in the wake of colonial contact. What this study revealed is that although Monkey Beach exposes disruptions in the connections between the Haisla and their homeland, the adaptation of Aboriginal storytelling techniques to the form of the novel represents both a positive continuation of indigenous traditions and an active resistance of cultural erasure.

The subject of this study is French-Canadian literature of the middle nineteenth century. This study effectuates an analysis starting with the very idea which constitutes the genesis of this national literature, that is, Messianism. This research consists of applying on a vast corpus of writing the principle concepts developed by the sociology of religions in the study of historical and contemporary Millenarist movements. / The first chapters consolidate the sources of the providencial mission of the French-Canadian people within the greater Catholic tradition of French literature. Bossuet, de Maistre, Chateaubriand, Rameau de Saint-Pere were the thinkers who aroused interest among the writers of French Canada, and are thus subject of consideration. / The second part of this study attempts to acknowledge the ripening of a local intellectual tradition, by considering diverse ideological writings which started by denying the specificity of literature, before eventually manifesting and incorporating literary qualities. / Finally, a study based on same concepts examines works of the period by Frechette, Casgrain, Tache, de Gaspe, Gerin-Lajoie and Buies; works that are clearly literary in nature. / The results of this study clarify within a global perspective the set of questions which have always been posed about French-Canadian literature while at the same time connect literature to the development problems of this society.

Thesis (Ph.D.)--University of Alberta, 2000. / Mode of access: World Wide Web. Includes bibliographical references.

Postcolonial theorists tend to read metaphor generally as a trope of power that synthesizes its inherently binary structure of tenor and vehicle to produce totalizing meanings. Although some critics have emphasized the importance of metaphor in postcolonial and Canadian studies, theorists like Homi Bhabha and Gayatri Spivak tend to approach metaphor either in exclusively structuralist or in predominantly deconstructivist terms. In contrast to these approaches, this study examines how texts from different postcolonial traditions of writing reconfigure metaphor for political and cultural reasons. It reads metaphor as a trope of cultural crisis that produces contiguous histories and crosscultural identities that contest clearly defined national boundaries. While it is impossible to resist metaphor's self-deconstructive tendencies, this project shows that we can resist and rearticulate its oppressive effects by conceptualizing metaphor's operative modes in performative and postcolonial terms. Performative metaphors generate, while keeping in suspense, the social and psychological constraints that impact on the construction of identity. The cultural significance of performative metaphors lies in their potential to replace the metaphoric binary structure of vehicle and tenor with metaphor's ability to reiterate and destabilize dominant discourses of race, gender, and nationalism. In the context of ethnic Canadian and Caribbean writing, performative metaphors foreground questions of naming, memory, and cultural translation; they also challenge those rhetorical and literary forms through which cultural and national identities are imagined and represented in “authentic” and “original” terms. A performative understanding of metaphor, as developed in this dissertation, articulates an ethical imperative that, first, accounts for the physical and representational violence enacted on the subaltern body and, second, acknowledges the ways in which subaltern subjects produce cultural knowledge with a difference. Methodologically, this study combines feminist theories of performativity with postcolonial theory, Caribbean and Canadian literary criticism. It discusses Judith Butter's theory of performativity in the context of ethnic Canadian historiographical writing, Caribbean performance and epic poetry. A critical examination of texts by Derek Walcott, David Dabydeen, Austin Clarke, M. G. Vassanji, and Sky Lee demonstrates that metaphor is one of the most important tools for a postcolonial critique of identity and nation formation. / Graduate

This study purports to explain why French Canadians, in spite of their heritage of French culture and literature, have failed over the past four centuries, to create one single masterpiece, to give birth to one literary genius. In examining the various productions of the literature of French Canada, whether they be poems, novels or plays, one cannot but notice that they are almost completely devoid of those analyses of love, of the great passions which constitute the basis of life, and consequently of the great world literatures. It is generally conceded that literature faithfully mirrors the customs and habits of a nation. The first French colonists, who settled along the Saint Lawrence River, had not brought to the New World only Civilization and Christian faith, but also French culture and literary genius. In spite of frontier conditions, there gathered together in Quebec a small, but witty, gay and brilliant society, and the masterpieces of Racine, Corneille and even Moliere were performed. The first works written about Canada appeared by and by, almost all of them of a considerable literary value. However, in spite of the strong influence of France and of the French spirit, there was another influence slowly growing in the scattered settlements and villages, and struggling with all its might and resolution to get control over the spiritual and temporal life of the population: the influence of the Church that was far more concerned with the souls of its flock than with a national literature, which, after all, might even become dangerous. The Catholic Church did not lose its dominating influence over the French Canadians after the British conquest; on the contrary, the Clergy became their virtual leader. Thus, for almost two centuries after the English victory on the Plains of Abraham, Quebec lived behind a spiritual and intellectual iron curtain dropped by the ecclesiastics who controlled the colony’s thinking, acting, writing until the first decades of the twentieth century. French Canadian literature, of course, bears the indelible imprint of this clerical domination, and nowadays, when the Church has lost a great deal of its former power and influence, the change in French Canadian literature, is obvious. Literature - for the Canadian Clergy - was nothing but a handmaid of their religion. It follows that history, the novel, poetry, criticism and drama, became a means, and a means only, for religious propaganda. History - less dangerous from the moral point of view - was, in consequence, the most popular. French Canadians can boast of many "Histoire du Canada", where their historians reveal with few exceptions, of course, their own philosophy which is essentially religious. The novel, so much read and admired in Europe, was considered in French Quebec as a "weapon forged by Satan himself to destroy Mankind". It was almost non-existent until the beginning of the twentieth century. Only two types were allowed: the historical novel and the "propaganda novel". Poetry was tolerated, yet the poets were not allowed to sing of anything else but of the soil, the race, the glorious past, God and the altar, simple piety, idyllic country and community life and nature... All other objects - love and passions generally, were condemned as immoral. The rôle of "criticism" - if we can speak of criticism - , was decidedly militants the Canadian "official" critics fought against "liberal ideas", against "Voltairiens", "philosophes"… A French Canadian National Theatre was allowed in Quebec but recently. Thus, the internal struggle between Free Thought and a rather narrow-minded "Canadian Catholicism" is perhaps one of the most interesting aspects of French Canadian literature, and can, to a certain point, give some inkling of its future development. / Arts, Faculty of / French, Hispanic, and Italian Studies, Department of / Graduate