Alexander Pushkin devoted the last five years of his life to research in the imperial archives in St. Petersburg publishing a number of works dealing with such historical figures as Peter the Great, Catherine the Great, Boris Godunov, and the rebel leaders Mazepa and Pugachev. This thesis examines Pushkin's historiographical methodology and conclusions and considers Pushkin's writings from the viewpoint of the historian rather than the literary critic. It offers a chronological study of the four fictional and non-fictional works in which Pushkin analysed major figures and events in Russian history and traces the importance he attributed to them for the development of the Russian national consciousness. The themes of rebellion against the state and political legitimacy predominate in this investigation and shed light on how Pushkin's study of history reinforced and, in some instances altered, his own fundamental political and social beliefs.

The first part of this master's thesis in French Literature is as a short story collection. Inspired by people's social and family situations, these short stories try to render the conflict that structures these situations and gives life to characters. In general, this conflict always takes place between real and imaginary worlds. / The second part of this thesis is an analysis of two Stefan Zweig short stories. In my analysis, I try to determine at which moment a character passes from being simply a character on paper to a "living" character. Thereby, I hope to disprove Florence Goyet's theory that a short story character is merely subjugated to a structure. I use the theory of reception, as Vincent Jouve used it to study novels.

Marguerite Yourcenar was a prolific writer and we can deduce that in the course of her writings, the revised version played a very important role. Thus, several pieces of works such as D'apres Rembrandt, D'apres Greco, D'apres Durer gave birth to L'OEuvre au noir, Anna soror..., Un homme obscur and Une belle matinee. Denier du reve was rewritten twenty years later. The collection of short stories Nouvelles orientales underwent numerous changes during the course of more than fifty years. / The "double" theme marks the different narratives of this work and the revised phenomena contributes to the emergence in all its elements. Therefore, all through this thesis, we will show the events which reveals the presence of the "double" such as a story within a story (mise en abyme) and flashbacks that are present in the narration, the theme of remembrance, the different microcosms contained in the macrocosms, but also the opposing split personalities present in most of the protagonists. In addition, we can discover that these characters are united in creation and in all elements of the cosmos. Also, we have the production of opposing forces between creation and man. In Yourcenar's work, especially in Nouvelles orientales, we notice that in the "double" an absolute quest is presented in its different play of mirrors. It is as if this fusion of the human with the universe brings each character to be part of the Universality, beyond time, space and the world of the material.

The first part of this Master's thesis is a story presented as an inner monologue where three periods of the narrator's life (the winter when she was nine years old, a recent trip to Ireland and her return to Montreal) interlace as three parallel miscarried lives. At times through entire episodes, at times through the echo of sentences once spoken or heard, Pamela's past lives contaminate the story of her forced return to Montreal to attend her father's funeral. They intermingle in a duplicate narrative, a fabled dialogue between times. / In the second part, we intend to analyse the theme of the double in two of Romain Gary's novels: Au-dela de cette limite votre ticket n'est plus valable and Gros-Calin. The study demonstrates that the subject uses doubling to engender his self so that he can avoid the determinism that condemns him to a non-existence. Gary's hero refuses any god other than the one within himself: an infinite and immortal double from whom he has become seperated against his will at birth. He reinstates his unlimited potential as a creator by returning to a time before this world, a time not determined by external forces. He then undertakes to give life to his divine double by projecting him on others. The hero hopes that he will thus be endlessly reborn. The embodied ideal double, however, soon turns into the original which the hero imitates, becoming a double himself.

Various characters tell the story of their participation in a series of events that take place in and around a casino, in a strange, almost magical atmosphere. The narration deals with the theme of illusion, as well as that of the danger and beauty of dreams and reality merging. / The second part of this master's thesis is a critical paper that focuses on the way in which dreams and oeniric writing unfold in the works of Milan Kundera. The method entails understanding and defining dream writing through a typology that categorizes the different types found according to their function. The varying degrees culminate when dreams and reality merge: how does the line that distinguishes the two become blurred? Can it be defined or delimited, and above all, on which thematic ground?

My study is an investigation of the discourse of madness in Timothy Findley's fiction, where madness is defined as a discursive element that is both structural and thematic. The work encompasses Findley's short stories, novels, a work of non-fiction, and personal archival material. I argue that what has been called a diverse body of work (Hunter) is, in fact, solidly cohesive in its use of the discourse of madness that systematically subverts patterns of authority. My purpose is to reveal a discursive structure that both supports and subverts narrative coherence, locating its degree of disruption within a psychodynamic exchange. / My theoretical model situates the reader as the recipient of and participant in the initiating text's psychodynamic discourse, and so implicates the reader in the subversion of authority. The study amalgamates psychocriticism and reader response theory to demonstrate that Findley's writing actively engages the reader in a visceral exchange that I liken to that encountered within the psychoanalytic interview (Bollas). With the addition of the psychoanalytic component, my research moves substantially beyond the position taken by Wolfgang Iser on reader response and by Norman Holland, both of whom acknowledge the value of psychocriticism but maintain a dualistic (reader/text) model. While Iser and Holland assign the status of co-production of the text to the activity of reading, both neglect to address specific production value to the activity of writing which, in effect, leaves the reader as lone producer. / By introducing the "idiom" of the author my theoretical model becomes triadic so that my reading can move beyond the simple oscillation between text and reader to engage the author in a way that amplifies important questions of status raised by the psychodynamic model, such as: "Who is reading whom?" "Who is the analyst and who the analysand? Who is maintaining or manipulating authority?" These, in turn, raise further questions regarding subject/object relations and the ways in which transference-countertransference between selves and others, subjects and objects, conscious and unconscious states take place. In addressing these questions in terms of the triadic process of reading, which re-instates the initiating author, the value and originality of this study becomes apparent in its investigation of biographical material to literary production.

This thesis offers a feminist analysis of women and gender in the novels of Buchi Emecheta, Ama Ata Aidoo, Tsitsi Dangarembga, Delphine Zanga Tsogo, Calixthe Beyala, Werewere Liking, Mariama Ba, Miriam Tlali and Bessie Head. My analyses appropriate and rethink western feminist theories of gender and post-colonial literary theory. I maintain that the texts analyzed are also theoretical, since feminist theory is embedded in the polysemy of the texts themselves. The study demonstrates that identity and sexuality are not static sites of oppression for women. They are contesting terrains where the subversion of difference, and the construction of identity, subjectivity and sexuality, are interlocking issues. Women's positional perspectives and varying subject positions are shown to be their strengths.

No description available.

In the first segment of the critical part of my thesis, my thought lays on "L'art du roman" of Virginia Woolf. In the second part, while recognizing certain qualities in the critical work of the English writer, I take side in favor of the literary theories of Celine and Sartre. In the last part of this text, I am exposing my views according to which the Quebec's literature would have greater advantage of being more "engage". The creating part of my thesis takes shape as a "roman engage". The story is about a disillusioned nationalist Quebecer, graduate and unemployed, who decides to change his personality to be like an English Canadian to better start his career in Toronto. Though all the sustained efforts he made to become Canadian, he realizes that he is first and above Quebecer. In ... Dent pour dent, the political message plays a fundamental role, but the esthetical aspects like humor, repetition and rythm are in the first place.

Heart of Darkness, Chance, and Lord Jim can be described as philosophical works if considered in light of "ordinary language" philosophy. Conrad wrestled with skepticism much as Wittgenstein later would, but his struggle with the "bewitchment" of skeptical thinking took a narratival form. His champion was Marlow, raconteur of the three novels, who recurrently loses and recovers his words and his capacity to tell (to judge, to narrate). In these works the Marlovian investigation of human convention, linguistic and otherwise, is shown to be a necessary but perilous task. The possibility that we may be dissatisfied with the ordinary or transcendental conditions of living is dramatized in all three novels, often (but not only) by threats to marriage. Heart of Darkness demonstrates the loss of linguistic attunement that may follow upon taking human relation to be a problem of knowledge, and links this to Kurtz's world-devouring repudiation of the ordinary. Chance explores in melodramatic form the "germ of destruction at the source of our strength", and unmasks men's denial of women as one face of skepticism. Lord Jim presents skepticism, Romanticism, and fantasy as different versions of ontological dissatisfaction, and shows how a return to the ordinary requires a practice of reading and remembering (our words).