Au dix-septième et au dix-huitième siècles, l'existence imaginaire ou véritable des sociétés idéales sur le continent américain posait une question intéressante. Si l'on étudie ce thème du point de vue historique ou littéraire, on y trouvera des renseignements sur la pensée de l'époque. L'idée de telles sociétés' eut une influence considérable sur l'esprit européen. La conception du Nouveau Monde s'est formée autour de l'image, quelquefois fantaisiste, de ses habitants. [...]

Le nom d'André Dhôtel fit du bruit pour la première fois lorsque, en 1955, il remporta le Prix Femina pour son roman 'Le pays où l'on n'arrive jamais'. Qaoiqu'il ait déjà publié à cette époque une douzaine de romans, entre autres 'David' qui lui valut le Prix Sainte-Beuve en 1948, sa réputation comme romancier n'était encore guère établie auprès du grand public. [...]

"Storied Voices in Native American Texts: Harry Robinson, Thomas King, James Welch and Leslie Marmon Silko" approaches Native American literatures from within an interdisciplinary framework that complicates traditional notions o f literary "origins" and canon. It situates the discussion of Native literatures in a Native American context, suggesting that contemporary Native American writing has its roots in Native oral storytelling traditions. Each of these authors draws on specific stories and histories from his or her Native culture. They also draw on European elements and contexts because these are now part o f Native American experience. I suggest that Native oral tradition is already inherently novelistic, and the stories that lie behind contemporary Native American writing explicitly connect past and present as aspects o f current Native reality. Contemporary Native American writers are continuing an on-going and vital storytelling tradition through written forms. A comparison of the texts o f a traditional Native storyteller, Robinson, with the highly literate novels of King, Welch and Silko, shows how orally told stories connect with the process o f writing. Robinson's storytelling suggests how these stories "theorize" the world as he experiences it; the Native American novel continues to theorize Native experience in contemporary times. Native writers use culturally specific stories to express an on-going Native history. Their novels require readers to examine their assumptions about who is telling whose story, and the traditional distinctions made between fact and fiction, history and story. King's Green Grass. Running Water takes stories from Western European literary traditions and Judeao-Christian mythology and presents them as part of a Native creation story. Welch's novel Fools Crow re-writes a particular episode from history, the Marias River Massacre, from a Blackfeet perspective. Silko's Almanac of the Dead recreates the Mayan creation story o f the Popol Vuh in the context o f twentiethcentury American culture. Each of these authors maintains the dialogic fluidity of oral storytelling performance in written forms and suggests that stories not only reflect the world, but that they create it in the way that Robinson understands storytelling as a form of theory.

Throughout history, women have suffered from the mind/ body dualism, a major component of Western patriarchal ideology, which has consigned the body to women and the brain to men. Women's role is relegated to procreating, a "natural" act of the body that produces offspring, while men create, a conscious undertaking of the mind that brings something new into being. Women artists frequently confront continuous challenges to their creativity having to choose between mothering and artistic creation. Theorists like de Beauvoir saw the two as incompatible, three novels by Nancy Huston: La Virevolte (1994), Instruments des tenebres (1996) and Prodige (1999), seem in some ways to confirm that dilemma. Yet elsewhere this bilingual author affirms not only the possibility of combining them, but the importance of doing so to produce works that are feminine. Her work challenges the view of motherhood as metaphor in French feminist theory, as Huston relates that theory to practical concerns more often associated with anglophone feminist theory. A range of feminist works on maternity will be employed to examine the changing positions adopted in these novels, where the division between creation and maternity is primordial, but this split implies different results in each case. Instead of the traditional or feminist figure of motherhood, based on maternal love or instinct, the reader is confronted with specific types of conflict between mother and child.

In the early 1890s, Ingeborg von Bronsart (1840-1913) was hailed by the German musical press as the "first lady" of the German stage. Her first two extant dramatic works —Jery und Bately (Singspiel, 1873) and Hiarne (grosse Oper, 1891) — had captivated audiences and were met with enthusiasm from critics. By 1904, Arthur Elson noted that Bronsart was "one of the few really great women composers." Yet by the time her last opera, Die Siihne, premiered in 1909, the magic had faded. Critics rejected the work as unimaginative, while audiences stayed away. Bronsart and her works quickly disappeared from the repertoire and from history. Employing manuscript and contemporary published sources, Chapter One examines Bronsart's life and the rich artistic circles in which she lived and worked. Chapters Two, Three and Four are devoted to each of Bronsart's three extant operas. The individual works are considered with respect to their genesis as well as to more general matters of plot and dramatic structure. Because little is known about Bronsart's music, in order to obtain a better understanding of her style a substantial portion of my discussion concentrates on the musical analysis and dramatic interpretation of each opera. Focusing on the specific numbers and scenes that I consider to be of significant interest, I examine the vocal writing, harmonic language, formal structures, unity and continuity. The thesis concludes with an exploration of broader historiographical issues of reception, gender, genre and aesthetic value, laying the foundation for a renewed interest in this unique composer and her works.

Dynasties of Demons: Cannibalism from Lu Xun to Yu Hua focuses on the issue of representations of the body in modern Chinese fiction. My interest concerns the relationship, or correspondence between "textual" bodies and the physical "realities" they are meant to represent, particularly where those representations involve the body as a discursive site for the intersection of state ideology and the individual. The relationship between the body and the state has been a question of profound significance for modern Chinese literati dating back to the late Qing, but it was Lu Xun who, with the publication of his short story "Kuangren riji" (Diary of a Madman), in 1918, initiated the literaty discourse on China's "apparent penchant for cannibalizing its own people. In the first chapter of my dissertation I discuss L u Xun's fiction by exploring two distinct, though not mutually exclusive issues: (1) his diagnosis of China's debilitating "spiritual illness," which he characterized as being cannibalistic; (2) his highly inventive, counter-intuitive narrative strategy for critiquing traditional Chinese culture without contributing to or stimulating his reader's prurient interests in violent spectacle. To my knowledge I am the first critic of modern Chinese literature to write about Lu Xun's erasure of the spectacle body. In Chapters II, III and IV, I discuss the writers Han Shaogong, Mo Yan, and Yu Hua, respectively, to illustrate that sixty years after Lu Xun's madman first "wrote" the prophetic words, chi ren A (eat people), a number of post-Mao writers took up their pens to announce that the human feast did not end with Confucianism; on the contrary, with the advent of Maoism the feasting began in earnest. Each of these post-Mao writers approaches the issue of China's "spiritual dysfunction" from quite different perspectives, which I have characterized in the following way: Han Shaogong (Atavism); Mo Yan (Ambivalent-Nostalgia); and Yu Hua (Deconstruction). As becomes evident through my analysis of selected texts, despite their very significant differences (personal, geographic, stylistic) all three writers come to oddly similar conclusions that are, in and of themselves, not dissimilar to the conclusion arrived at by Lu Xun's madman.

A detailed study of the poetry (shi R#) of Ouyang Xiu (1007-1072). Though Ouyang Xiu was one of the major cultural figures of the northern Song period (960-1126), later generations have rather neglected his poetry. After a brief introduction explaining this neglect, my study begins with a biographical sketch, outlining Ouyang's public career and concentrating on events that may have shaped his development as a poet. Chapter two deals with Ouyang's poems on mountains, one of his most favoured topics. I describe three kinds of mountain poems: dynamic, forceful works; tranquil works; and those which compare different kinds of mountains in an intellectual manner. Frequently domestic or cultural objects — stone screens, calligraphic rubbings, music — provide the inspiration for Ouyang's mountain poetry. Chapters three and four turn from the "cosmic" level of mountains to the "domestic" world, to discover whether other everyday objects exert a similar effect on his imagination. Chapter three deals with activities: poems on tea and wine drinking; eating; sleeping; music and calligraphy. These works tend to jump back and forth between the mundane and the transcendent, as Ouyang traces each subject to its source in the natural world. Chapter four treats the buildings, gardens, pets and plants in Ouyang's immediate environment. Techniques of caricature and witty argumentation increasingly appear in his mature verse. Water is a central figure in Ouyang's mountain poems. Chapter five reverts to the "cosmic" level to discuss Ouyang's poetry on water in its many transformations: storms, snow, reflected moonlight, rivers and the ocean. In his mature works, Ouyang increasingly mixes levels of discourse — prosaic and lyrical, pure and crude — to indicate the complexity of human reaction to outside events. The concluding chapter summarizes the evolution of Ouyang's poetic style. I define wit, noting its centrality in the English poetic tradition. I carefully analyse Ouyang's recorded comments on poetry: he constantly advocates breadth and variety of mood and subject matter, including even laughter and joking, crudity and baseness. I suggest possible influences on his style, especially Mid-Tang poets like Han Yu and Bai Juyi, and his own contemporary, Mei Yaochen. Finally, I yoke together the concept of wit and Ouyang's phrase "competing with Creative Transformation": like the English witty poets, Ouyang transforms harsh realities into ingenious artistic structures, and finds vitality in the midst of suffering and destruction.

The thesis links the writings of the Italian Italo Calvino and the Chinese Ma Yuan through the Taoist symbol of the Tao and the Borgesian concept of the Aleph, an imaginary point in space containing all points in space and time. Based on Zhuangzi’s parable of the Emperor Hun-tun (Chaos) who lost his original state of chaos when he had sensory openings poked into him, the vision of the Aleph/Tao represents the return to that chaotic state of undifferentiated knowledge one experiences when one closes all sensory perceptions. This unnameable vision allows one to transcend all apparent conceptual dichotomies as it lies in the realm of intuition rather than language. Calvino, like Borges, posits that the chaos of the universe cannot be represented through the sequential language system, but nevertheless demonstrates this ineffability through language. Ma Yuan celebrates the chaos of life by writing about a mythological Tibet, upholding the uniqueness of that culture as a subtle subversion to the Chinese political and territorial takeover. Chapter One and Two, respectively, discuss the “Overlapping Conceptual Spaces” in Calvino’s Invisible Cities and Ma Yuan’s ‘The Temptation of the Gangdisi’. Chapter Three looks in greater detail at the images of the Aleph and the Tao in the two main texts against the backdrop of Borgesian thought. In accordance with the concept of the Aleph/Tao whose definition is continuously unsettled by contradictory conjectures, the fourth chapter undoes the conclusions reached in the previous chapters. This chapter discusses Calvino’s Cosmicomics and Ma Yuan’s shorter Tibetan stories in the light of comic parody. That which was earlier posited as the ineffable in these stories is elaborated in a profusion of words. The Conclusion discusses from a Taoist point of view the predominantly male voice in the writings of the two authors. While both advocate the spiritual sameness of all phenomena in an undifferentiated knowledge of the world, they nevertheless write from the male perspective of the yang pursuing and wanting to possess the yin.

An electronic (HTML) thesis on late University of British Columbia professor Wilson Duff, an anthropologist central to the construction of Northwest Coast art in the 1960s and 1970s. It brings together textual fragments (historic and contemporary, archival, interview transcripts) within a framework which attempts to balance truth (original authorial intent and the context and academic debates of that period) with the impossibility of truth (the notion of partial, situated truths and critical, presentist re-readings of Duffs work some twenty-five years later). The narrative structure is simultaneously linear and pure hypertext, depending on the reader's choices. No two paths will be the same.

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