Often designated as "le poete de la parole parlee", Jacques Brault, author of a substantial and rigourous work dealing with poetry, language, writing and art, is one of the most significant modern writers of Quebec. In our literature, rare are the figurative expressions inventing their own trajectory and rarer still is the emblematic used to evoke simultaneously the essence of a generation, a work, a writer, a style. The expression "la parole parlee" says it all. / This figure of speech, intimately linked to though and writing, has progressed from a rhetorical to a living expression throughout the eleven years on which our study focuses. In the analysis of this period, "la parole parlee" stands out as the obscure leitmotiv which favours a dialogue between the critical and the creative in the act of writing. Finding its own way, the work discovers a refrangible and versatile universe and the unique voice of Jacques Brault.

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This thesis explores the form, meaning and development of the escapist theme in Euripides' tragedies. The dramatist's corpus reveals an intense preoccupation with escapism and exhibits it in a wide range of escape wishes and escape choral odes. Most of these, because they fail of their objective, point to the inability of the tragic hero to escape his or her fate as determined by the dark forces of tragedy. Escapism intensifies the well-known Euripidean element of pathos, but in some of the plays its use becomes quite sophisticated evoking irony, ambiguity and paradox. In this way, it sheds light upon the tragic event from a different perspective. In the end, however, the Euripidean oeuvre betrays a strong affirmation of reality in spite of its escapist tendencies. Euripides' innovative use of escapism is, in fact, an ingenious modification and adaptation of older poetic, and as this thesis argues, ritual forms. Finally, the pervasive presence of escapism in Euripides is not irrelevant to the wider political and social atmosphere of late fifth-century Athens.

This thesis analyses the intratextual literary symbols of Jacques Poulin's writings, and illustrates the autorepresentative characteristic of his production. Inspired by the three levels for the analysis of autorepresentation established by Janet M. Paterson, this essay demonstrates how Poulin's writings do, in fact, compose a system. / The author's choice to stage a character writer experiencing difficulties in his creative effort, is representative in itself: Poulin obviously wished to attract the reader's attention to the literary discourse of his writings. The concrete circumstances of the act of creation are therefore revealed by the fictitious writer. This essay suggests that the presence of auctorial figures complexify the text and generate a theory of the act of writing inherent to Poulin's works. If it shows how the author's discourse corresponds to an autotheorisation of the act of writing, it also shows how the reader's discourse works as instruction. The fictitious reader, by revealing his conception of the act of reading, indicates how Poulin's novel's should be read. / Finally, this essay suggests that Poulin's production is not only filled with literary references, but also with numerous references to itself. This network of autoreferences implies that Poulin's writing must be considered and studied as a whole.

Jacques Godbout, writer and filmmaker, always had a critical look over Quebec society in his thirty-five-year career. The object of our study is to analyse the socio-political representation of Quebec through Godbout's essays and novels. / Since the early sixties, with an anticlerical crusade, Godbout asserted himself by promoting many reforms in the education system especially, and endorsing the philosophy of Parti pris: secularism, socialism, and independence. Since then, his articles and essays mostly revolved around secularism, americanization, consumerism, and effects of television. These issues are also part of his novels, which are always linked to Quebec reality, and often serve to express his theses in a different perspective. / Recent critiques reproached Godbout with his laxity in dealing with the Quebec independence issue. Therefore, we decided to propose an analysis which would cover the essays and the novels in order to seize the nature of Godbout's ideas and to see their evolution. In a word, we tried to bridge the universe of the essay writer and that of the novelist.

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This thesis explores Audrey Thomas's adaptation of Impressionist methodologies to analyse verbal discourse. It confirms that Impressionism is the major visual influence on Thomas's work, and clarifies the complex relationship between the tenets of the movement and Thomas's literary concerns. Since the author's intentions in using visual methodologies are most clearly and thoroughly formulated in Latakia and Intertidal Life, the principal analytic focus of this study is these two texts. First Thomas's critical understanding of Impressionism is verified, and the tenets of the movement which are central to Thomas's writing are defined. Once the sociopolitical issues backgrounding Thomas's adaptation of Impressionism are clarified, the author's actual application of the visual methodologies to challenge both social alienation and the alienating characteristics of verbal communication are analysed. This thesis proves that an understanding of Thomas's adaptation of Impressionism is necessary for a thorough comprehension of her struggle against the sociopolitical infringements of her own artistic medium.

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This study examines the function of oral narratives in Michael Ondaatje's representation of history. Ondaatje employs a variety of thematic, structural and stylistic oral narrative strategies in this inquiry. In the course of this work he faces the challenge of translating the open oral quality of the "tale" to the page. Ondaatje's longer prose works counter the printed text's tendency towards stasis through oral narrative and paralinguistic devices. Gradually, the aesthetics of public storytelling inform the process of historiographic revision. Within the oral model, ostensibly verifiable historical facts are no longer subjected to the laws of linear causality; therefore, any central single voice must relinquish its conventional claim to authority. Instead, several "speakers" tell of a shared history. Whereas conventional historiography often focuses on the effect of major historic forces, Ondaatje's oral model reveals how those on the periphery shape and define a given incident. Ultimately, the various participatory agents create the central event in the telling. The study concludes that Ondaatje employs oral narrative strategies to revise monolithic notions of history and to offer an open representation which draws attention to complexities ignored by conventional accounts.

In Andre Langevin's five novels, the theme of isolation keeps on coming back. The characters however try by different means to establish a communication with other people but their attempts almost always fail, due to some sort of fatality. / This thesis sheds light on the different attempts by Langevin's characters to establish a relationship with those who surround them. The corpus is composed of Poussiere sur la ville (1953), Le temps des hommes (1956), L'Elan d'Amerique (1972), the latter belonging to the come back of the novelist after a silence of about twenty years. The dialogues and non verbal communications as they are established among the characters will successively be analyzed. The third novel, L'Elan d'Amerique, brings unique forms of this theme as it introduces a new style of the author, which has been compared to the "nouveau roman's". / From one novel to the other, the topic of incommunicability as developed by Langevin, takes new forms as the novelistic scope expands. But this research reveals that, in these three novels, a failure is always witnessed by the characters who never succeed in establishing satisfactory or lasting relationships with others.