For several critics, Milan Kundera's novels illustrate the disenchantment of the world and the demystification of all myths. In this thesis, we accept this point of view while insisting on the persistence of sacred elements in the works of Kundera. We formulate the hypothesis of the "inoculation" of a sacred part (i.e. myths, scenes and figures of the Holy Bible, etc.) in the prose of the novel---"le caractere concret, quotidien, corporel de la vie", as Kundera wrote---in order to anchor this often unstable matter and alleviate the brevity of the character's life. Our analysis of three novels (The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, The Farewell Party and The Joke) reveals an oscillation between the sacred and the prose within the works of Milan Kundera. This movement is illustrated, in the text, by the motif of the baroque angel.

This thesis examines the role of imagination in "The Prelude," within the context of recent criticism. In accordance with the impact of new historicism on contemporary Wordsworth studies, considerable attention is given to new historicist readings. It is argued that new history's methodological approach generally undervalues the complex texture of subjectivity in "The Prelude." New historical critiques tend to interpret the Wordsworthian imagination merely as a narrative strategy that enables the poet to displace or elide socio-historical realities. However, "The Prelude" does not entirely support such a reading. On the basis of Wordsworth's autobiography and related prose works, it is asserted that the poet's consciousness of creative decline and mortality potently informs his sense of imagination, and eventuates in a mode of self-perception that precludes subjective autonomy and socio-historical displacement.

Fragonard's Progress of Love is among the most impressive decorative commissions of the eighteenth century, and this despite its sudden cancellation by Madame du Barry. Called upon to produce a series of panels for her pavillon at Louveciennes (designed by Claude-Nicolas Ledoux), Fragonard succeeded in uniting the gardens of the Villa d'Este with the landscape at Louveciennes. Recapturing the essence of villeggiatura and the vistas first experienced during his stay in Tivoli, Fragonard initiated an interplay of the real and painted setting. The Progress of Love became an escape, enticing Du Barry and her lover with its sensuous verdure. But reality destroyed all illusion, and Fragonard's fortune went the way of Du Barry's romance. Forced to choose between the tell-tale Progress of Love and an innocuous though fashionable replacement by Joseph-Marie Vien, Du Barry opted for propriety in her maison de plaisance. Years before, when spurned by Louis XV, Madame de Pompadour resorted to the iconography of friendship. Du Barry, facing a more serious predicament, drew upon the same iconography. However, even with l'amour et l'amitie ensconced in the last panel of the Progress of Love, fate ultimately displaced Fragonard's lovers at Louveciennes.

This thesis pieces together the years of Jacques Ferron's intellectual development, from 1921 to 1949, through both biographical (contextualisation of the author's life) and institutional (emergence strategies and literary creations) approaches, and through an analysis of the autobiographical and of descriptions of childhood memories in his works. / The first section focuses on the writer's childhood. Product of both the liberal bourgeoisie and of a rural society, Jacques Ferron inherits a certain mistrust regarding nationalism; however, born in an era where the elite had a great deal of influence over local culture, he is influenced by this trend. In the second section, the author's adolescence is examined, along with his years of study at College Jean-de-Brebeuf. This period of his life briefly emphasizes his "aristocratic" leanings and accentuates, against the attitude of the time, his predispositions towards individualism. His appreciation of beauty leads to a loss of interest in politics, and his early literary essays take no political stand whatsoever. The third part concerns the tumultuous years which precede the settling down of Dr. Ferron in Longueuil. In 1941, the young man enrolls in medical school at Laval University, and then spends a year in the Canadian army; discharged in 1946, he moves to Gaspesie. His first stories, born of a tension between the two cultural universes that influenced his sensibility, are from this period. Faced with poverty, all around him, he declares himself a Communist and from this moment on, considers it essential that the elite give up their privileges and stand up for the most destitute around them. / The autobiographical, in Ferron's works, will be coloured by these choices made in his youth. The author often evokes his childhood through self-analysis; he does not speak willingly of his years of study, nor of his stay in the army, but deals abundantly with his years in Gaspesie. It turns out, all things considered, that this literary "revisionism" is the very form of literary creation found in this author's works. The journey of young Ferron illustrate the paradox of a man born in a well-to-do family, taught to appreciate fine art, predestined to an uneventful career, and who one day turns away from this destiny owing to his social convictions.

In this thesis entitled "Guy de Maupassant: l'engendrement du romanesque", the author proposes to demonstrate that Maupassant's six novels constitute a "trajectory", a progression driven and informed by an underlying logic. Proceeding from a psychoanalytical point of view, the author has uncovered another novel, an unspoken novel, that unfolds with Maupassant's novelistic production. This "other novel" expresses the engendering of the subject, which can be defined as the son-subject's liberation from the primal maternal dominion, thanks to the process of identification with the father. / Maupassant's six novels mark various stages in this trajectory. The primal novel Une vie establishes the problematics of the maternal dominion. In Bel-Ami can be seen the formation of the matrix of identity, which coincides with the emergence of the son-subject. The two central novels, Mont-Oriol and Pierre et Jean, illustrate the traumatic experience of paternity and filiation; the latter novel shows the relinquishment of narcissistic defense mechanism. Subsequently, in Fort comme la mort, the repressed narcissistic wound can be analysed. With the final novel, Notre coeur, the son-subject achieves the father position, thus escaping the madness associated with the double-bind of the ambivalent mother. / Previous criticism devoted to the works of Guy de Maupassant has focussed on the thematic obsession of paternity and filiation. This thesis sets out to demonstrate that this obsession is also the very principle driving the engenderment of the novel.

Canadian intellectual Marshall McLuhan (1911--1980) left a controversial legacy. This dissertation addresses the four chief paradoxes that his work poses for contemporary commentators: the core meaning of his texts; the tradition in which his contribution now seems most intelligible; the divergent response to his work; and the enduring yet fragmentary impact of his contribution to popular and academic life. Taking a rhetoric of inquiry approach, modified by Gerald Holton's writing in the history of science, this reappraisal argues for McLuhan's significance as a theorist of communications as techno-cultural transformation or "mediamorphosis"; for his seminal role within the Toronto School of Communications; and for his inspiring relevance within the interdiscipline of communications, despite the forging of a negative academic consensus against his work in the early 1970s. McLuhan united the ancient arts of grammar and rhetoric into a techno-cultural hermeneutics that constitutes an unexhausted approach to the study of the impacts of media and technologies on sensibilities, literacies and culture.

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