It was the purpose of this study to introduce a selected representative body of literature by the Canadian author Leonard Cohen to local audiences.

My dissertation project maps three characters, Lucy, Evie, and the Fur Queen in three contemporary Canadian novels Not Wanted on the Voyage (1984), Salt Fish Girl (2002), and Kiss of the Fur Queen (1998), respectively, whose embodiments and genders do not conform to norms and who are also the only characters able to imagine a different kind of world. These novels, which I read as magical realist dystopias each maps out a process by which normatively gendered characters can begin to imagine a different social order than the one they have inherited. What is significant about these novels, though, is that this imagining would not be possible without the work of the gender non-conforming characters. My dissertation argues that when a major identity category, like gender, is unsettled, possibilities arise for other major social structures, such as the nation, to be questioned. These novels, each arising out of different racialized and cultural backgrounds, all settle on gender and embodied non-normativity as a site of possibility for imagining a different kind of world. Using education and collaboration, these characters are revolutionary figures who, instead of tearing down dominant geo-political structures in ways that risk replicating dominant geo-political structures or reforming existing ones, argue for a slow revolution in which spaces are built without reference to dominant structures. These spaces are decentralized insofar as the novels suggest that they will need to leave room for revision and change, rather than advocating for a static idea of what utopia is, and they will be built collaboratively, so that there is no one authority. These novels do not suggest that building a different world will be easy, but they show that fast solutions will not work and instead map out the difficult process of learning that is necessary in order for it to happen. / Thesis / Doctor of Philosophy (PhD) / My dissertation project maps three characters, Lucy, Evie, and the Fur Queen in three contemporary Canadian novels Not Wanted on the Voyage (1984), Salt Fish Girl (2002), and Kiss of the Fur Queen (1998), respectively, whose embodiments and genders do not conform to norms and who are also the only characters able to imagine a different kind of world. These novels, which I read as magical realist dystopias each maps out a process by which normatively gendered characters can begin to imagine a different social order than the one they have inherited. What is significant about these novels, though, is that this imagining would not be possible without the work of the gender non-conforming characters. My dissertation argues that when a major identity category, like gender, is unsettled, possibilities arise for other major social structures, such as the nation, to be questioned. These novels, each arising out of different racialized and cultural backgrounds, all settle on gender and embodied non-normativity as a site of possibility for imagining a different kind of world. Using education and collaboration, these characters are revolutionary figures who, instead of tearing down dominant geo-political structures in ways that risk replicating dominant geo-political structures or reforming existing ones, argue for a slow revolution in which spaces are built without reference to dominant structures. These spaces are decentralized insofar as the novels suggest that they will need to leave room for revision and change, rather than advocating for a static idea of what utopia is, and they will be built collaboratively, so that there is no one authority. These novels do not suggest that building a different world will be easy, but they show that fast solutions will not work and instead map out the difficult process of learning that is necessary in order for it to happen.

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No description available.

This study examines the ethnic minority experience and its effects on approaches to childhood in Shyam Selvadurai's Funny Boy, Joy Kogawa's Obasan, and Nino Ricci's Lives of the Saints. The novels' protagonists, Arjie, Naomi, and Vittorio, are marginalized not only geographically, but also in terms of age, language, race, and sexual orientation. In addition to having been written and narrated by members of ethnic minorities, the novels concentrate on characters belonging to the age of minority. Using these "child focalizers" in order to depict defamiliarized, displaced, and minor perspectives, the authors write in the genre I call minor literature, a term adapted from Deleuze and Guattari's concepts of such literature. In focalizing various linguistic deterritorializations and socio-political displacements through the eyes of minor children, the authors disturb and deconstruct social nor.ms and conventions. In the thesis I analyze the minor child focalizer's vulnerabilities to, and subversions of, major languages, social conventions, and codes of behaviour. I argue that the children's identities as ethnic minorities intensify and complicate their various displacements, and allow for the authors to comment on the radical experience of multiple deterritorialization. I establish three categories in my discussions of these novels as minor literatures and their protagonists as minor focalizers: the disturbance and manipulation of language, the minoradult's alignment with the child's subject position, and the transgressive nature of identity-performance. The children's manipulation of language, bodily expressions and performances of gender and language are all means of resistance to major adult impositions of expected identities and behaviours. I demonstrate how the processes by which these children "resist" impositions of identities expose the artificialities of those identities. / Thesis / Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

Wayde Comptons poetry collection Performance Bond is a union of hip-hop aesthetics and visual poetry to create a space for Vancouvers black community. Although the majority of the poems in Performance Bond are lyric, visual poems have a significant and varied presence in the book. Compton creates his visual poetry by including such materials as photographs and signs, concrete poetry and pseudo-concrete poetry, graffiti, a simulated newspaper facsimile of an original Vancouver Daily Province article, voodoo symbols, and typed characters that do not necessarily form words. Despite a contemporary population of over two million people, the greater Vancouver area of today does not have a centralized black community similar to that found in other North American cities like New York, Chicago, Los Angles, Toronto, or Halifax. To reconcile the absence of a centralized black community in Vancouver, Compton turns to sampling black culture from across the world (with an obvious concentration on the United States) in order to develop and represent his own black identity. The similarities between visual poetry and hip-hop culture, particularly their emphasis on spatial representation, facilitate Comptons continuing project to create a place for the black community in Vancouver.

Wayde Comptons poetry collection Performance Bond is a union of hip-hop aesthetics and visual poetry to create a space for Vancouvers black community. Although the majority of the poems in Performance Bond are lyric, visual poems have a significant and varied presence in the book. Compton creates his visual poetry by including such materials as photographs and signs, concrete poetry and pseudo-concrete poetry, graffiti, a simulated newspaper facsimile of an original Vancouver Daily Province article, voodoo symbols, and typed characters that do not necessarily form words. Despite a contemporary population of over two million people, the greater Vancouver area of today does not have a centralized black community similar to that found in other North American cities like New York, Chicago, Los Angles, Toronto, or Halifax. To reconcile the absence of a centralized black community in Vancouver, Compton turns to sampling black culture from across the world (with an obvious concentration on the United States) in order to develop and represent his own black identity. The similarities between visual poetry and hip-hop culture, particularly their emphasis on spatial representation, facilitate Comptons continuing project to create a place for the black community in Vancouver.

Thesis (M.A.)--Carleton University, 2001. / Includes bibliographical references (p. 118-123). Also available in electronic format on the Internet.

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PhD (Translation), Faculty of Humanities, University of the Witwatersrand, 1998