Little is known about the literary quarrel in Quebec between the regionalists and the "exotics". This study, based mainly on a systematic analysis of periodicals, examines in detail and as objectively as possible the different arguments presented by the participants. After outlining the development of the two opposing parties, it describes their confrontation in 1918-1920 and the subsequent diversification that ends the quarrel in the thirties. This conflict can be divided into four distinct periods, beginning with the reaction of critics like Camille Roy and Louis Dantin to Emile Nelligan's poetry in 1904 and going up to the "canadianisme integral" of 1930. The argument concerned much more than literature, having important ideological implications related to French-Canadian nationalism at the beginning of the twentieth century. It is in this relationship between literature and French Canadian society that the specific nature of this debate can be £ound.

Queer Outbursts' investigation of the Vancouver publication concentration (node) contributes to the fields of Canadian literature, queer and lesbian literature, Asian Canadian literature, and women‘s literature through three interwoven tasks. The first two tasks develop and combine node theory and node methodology to produce an original approach to materializing micro-histories minoritarian literatures. The third task demonstrates the nodal approach by materializing a node in Canadian queer women‘s writing centred in the relational geography of Vancouver in the mid-1990s. The queer aesthetics of the novels under consideration are inseparable from the queer bodies and the material contexts that produce them; literary works are not discrete, static creations springing spontaneously from the mind of an inspired isolated writer. Node work reflects this understanding as it oscillates between material, social, and literary analyses and archival fieldwork. The literary and political context of the Vancouver publication node is historicized through a close reading of the 1988 conference, Telling It, which convened authors from First Nations, Asian, and Lesbian communities in the first public and explicit linking of the issues of racialization and sexuality. Social analysis of the node relies on both actor-network theory and Pierre Bourdieu's analysis of cultural production. Literary analysis is focussed on Larissa Lai‘s When Fox Is a Thousand as the primary representative text, and the social analysis is primarily based on the material circumstances of Fox‘s production and distribution. Close reading of Lai‘s novel demonstrates how the political concerns of the enabling communities are taken up literarily. It also demonstrates an inter-nodal connection, through Lai‘s literary strategies that engage the work of Nicole Brossard, which represents another node of Canadian queer women‘s writing circa 1980 and centred in Montréal. Secondary close readings of three other node novels reveal a common ethical interest in community and difference that is expressed through a literary strategy that I have named "literary thirdspace". Shani Mootoo‘s Cereus Blooms At Night, Persimmon Blackbridge‘s Sunnybrook, and Daphne Marlatt‘s Taken each opens to a site of possible literary thirdspace that explores the qualities necessary to live difference productively within community: hybridity, instability, kindness, witnessing, safety, and radical acceptance.

Thesis (Ph.D.)--McMaster University, 2003. / Includes bibliographical references (p. 244-250). Also available via World Wide Web.

Thesis (Ph.D.)--York University, 2003. Graduate Programme in English. / Typescript. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 433-469). Also available on the Internet. MODE OF ACCESS via web browser by entering the following URL: http://wwwlib.umi.com/cr/yorku/fullcit?pNQ99228

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Teacher, Detective, Witness, Activist: On Pedagogy and Social Justice in Asian Canadian Literature undertakes a critical consideration of the relationship between pedagogy, social justice, and Asian Canadian literature. The project argues for a recognition of Asian Canadian literature as a creative site concerned with social justice that also productively and problematically becomes a tool in the pursuit of justice in literature classrooms of Canadian universities. The dissertation engages with the politics of reading and, by extension, of teaching social justice in the literature classroom through analyses of six high-profile, canonical works of Asian Canadian literature: Joy Kogawa’s Obasan (1981), SKY Lee’s Disappearing Moon Café (1990), Kerri Sakamoto’s The Electrical Field (1998), Madeleine Thien’s Certainty (2006), Ruth Ozeki’s A Tale for the Time Being (2013), and Rita Wong’s forage (2007). These texts are in many ways about the reproduction of national, colonial, and neo-colonial pedagogies, a reproduction of teachings informing subject formation and citizenship from which higher education is not exempt. The dissertation analyzes the texts’ treatment of familial and national reproduction, and the narrative temporalities this treatment invokes, in order to think through the political and social reproduction that occurs in classrooms of Canadian post-secondary education. This project raises a number of questions: Do literature instructors engage their students as investigators in the pursuit of justice? And, if so, what type of justice do we seek to reproduce in doing so? What happens when instructors engage students in the work of witnessing fictional testaments of historical trauma, albeit indirectly, as readers? How might we acknowledge and work through the resistance to learning that traumatic testimony can invoke? And finally, might it be productive to think of the work that literature instructors do as a form of activism? Can social justice be conceived of as a pedagogical project that unfolds in the literature classroom? / Dissertation / Doctor of Philosophy (PhD) / This dissertationt turns to the literature of Asian Canada to think through how we learn and are resistant to learning from historical injustice and about social justice. Chapter One argues that Joy Kogawa's Obasan, Kerri Sakamoto's The Electrical Field, and SKY Lee's Disappearing Moon Cafe each play with the detective fiction genre in their treatments of anti-Japanese and -Chinese racism in Canada to upset a definition of justice as stable and finite. Chapter Two examines Madeleine Thien's Certainty and Ruth Ozeki's A Tale for the Time Being as works of trauma fiction that can tell us a lot about the resistance difficult knowledge can provoke. Chapter Three turns to a book of poetry, Rita Wong's forage, to contemplate the temporal and emotional dimensions of everyday, anti-racist and ecological activism; this chapter highlights the limits of discourses of social justice predicated on risk and anxiety.

Generation X has often been defined as being without role models or inspiration. Nevertheless, it is possible to detect a sizeable amount of intertextual references in several Quebecer books written by authors of that generation. In Quebec, these young writer's influences are as distinct as they are diverse, varying from Kerouac to Hemingway and from Sartre to Camus. But concerning their Quebecer role model, one name continually returns, that of Rejean Ducharme. / The goal of this thesis is to illustrate the presence of ducharmesque universe in three Generation X novels, namely Le souffle de l'harmattan by Sylvain Trudel, Vamp by Christian Mistral and La rage by Louis Hamelin. Within these novels, we will attempt to find the trail of three typical elements to Ducharme's work: the rejection of conformity, the contempt towards a consumer society, and the substitution of a utopian universe for reality. / According to Francois Ricard, Ducharme belongs to what he calls the "generation lyrique", which is the eldest baby boomers, while Generation X is composed of Baby Boom's youngest members. Interestingly enough, one should expect such a generational conflict between these two cohorts to incite Generation X writers to despite their predecessor. Hence, this thesis will conclude with a few tentative explanations as to why Generation X authors were so driven to choose Rejean Ducharme, a member of the "generation lyrique", to be their role model.

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This thesis interrogates how Lawrence Hill’s The Book of Negroes represents histories of violence ethically by utilizing Emmanuel Lévinas’s philosophy of ethics as a methodology for interpretation. Traditional slave narratives like Olaudah Equiano’s autobiography and postmodern neo-slave narratives like Toni Morrison’s Beloved animate the violence endemic to slavery and colonialism in an effort to emphasize struggles in conscience, the incomprehensible atrocities, and strategies of rebellion. However, this project illustrates how The Book of Negroes supplements these literary goals with Hill’s own imagination of how slaves contested the inhumanities thrust upon them. Through his aesthetic choices as a realist, Hill foregrounds the possibilities of pacifism, singular identities, and altruistic agency through his protagonist Aminata Diallo. These three narrative elements constitute Lévinas’s ethical peace, which means displaying a profound sensitivity towards the historical Other whom imperial discourses and traditional representations of catastrophes in Black history might obscure. / Graduate / 0325 / 0328 / 0352 / jaslife12@hotmail.com

My aim in this project is to demonstrate how the reconfiguration of custom in the writings of Michel de Montaigne and Francis Bacon opened up a new discourse of collective identity that found its most developed expression in the writings of the French and English people who first colonized North America. Among the authors whose work I examine are Marc Lescarbot, Thomas Morton, Anne Bradstreet, Marie de l'Incarnation, Pierre Esprit-Radisson, and Mary Rowlandson. Their texts, I argue, radically reconceptualize identity, making it something that one performs rather than something one simply is. In charting custom's development I reveal how its radical potential was neutralized by the emerging opposition between nature and culture, illuminating the central role that the nascent concept of the nuclear family played in this transition. My dissertation thus closes with the work of the "American" authors Cotton Mather and Joseph-François Lafitau, who refined the meaning of custom to the brink of irrelevance at the turn of the eighteenth century, transforming it from the source of one's sense of communal belonging to a mere index of how far a given community had fallen from the state of grace. An epilogue on the Letters of an American Farmer by Hector St. John de Crèvecoeur demonstrates the aftermath of this transformation and gesture towards the afterlife of custom as a critical term.