This thesis contends that there has often been a critical tendency to understate the challenges to the genre of autobiography that occur in Audrey Thomas's three novels: Songs My Mother Taught Me, Mrs. Blood, and Blown Figures. Chapter one qualifies autobiography in terms of its reliance on the liberal humanist subject as both author and protagonist. In the context of poststructuralist criticism, the author cannot be the unified, unique, original locus of truth that the liberal humanist subject is posited to be. Thus, as the subject collapses the foundation of autobiography collapses. Chapter two is a detailed analysis illustrating that the three novels stylistically and thematically deny the existence of the liberal humanist subject. thereby exemplifying the poststructuralist challenge to autobiography. The Canadian canons reliance on mimetic literature---of which pure autobiography would be the prime example---is offered as an explanation for critics' understatement of the texts' denial.

Most inquiries into the nature of literary value have focused on how the academy shapes literary taste and determines the reputation of individual authors. This thesis examines how ideas of literary canon can impact a writer at the creative level. Michael Ondaatje's interest in the cultural significance of authorship makes him ideal for this topic of study. The first essay discusses how Ondaatje's repeated quotation of his own texts can be viewed as a metafictional commentary on the anxieties of literary innovation. It shows how the idea of literary influence and the author's relationship to the canon can be embodied as a formal and thematic characteristic of the literary text. The second essay shows how Ondaatje responds to traditional conceptions of the English-Canadian canon as an editor of a national anthology of short fiction. Early national anthologists beginning with E. H. Dewart in his Selections from Canadian Poets (1864) consolidated a set of evaluative criteria that reflected aspects of nineteenth-century English-Canadian nationalism. This essay examines two national anthologies that represent an alternative to this tradition. John Simpson's The Canadian Forget Me Not for MDCCCXXXVII (1837) is a representation of popular nineteenth-century bourgeois literary taste that predates this legitimating rhetoric. Michael Ondaatje's From Ink Lake (1990) renders an ironic commentary on this hundred-year-old legacy of canon formation.

This study seeks to show that in the work of Oscar Wilde, form and content, though manifestly separate, are latently connected. In Wilde's aesthetics, form and content are more than mere critical generalities---they are also metaphors for, respectively, art and nature, order and chaos, two conflicting but interdependent principles. Form in Wilde's work is a metaphor for the artist's defense against the largeness and ambiguity of nature and life. Therefore, to create, Wilde needs to insist on form over content, art over nature. Form in Wilde's work manifests itself in a deliberately artificial style, a style revealed by, for example, epigrammatic dialogue and posing of characters. However, because of this emphasis on form, nature and life will make an uncanny figurative return in Wilde's fiction, a return symbolized, for instance, by emotional ambivalence, intellectual ambiguity, and even acts of murder. In Wilde, form and content are interdependent because the content is latent in the principle of form, which stands for the human struggle against the perceived disorder of nature and life, a struggle which nevertheless is revelatory of that same chaos.

Marie Laberge began her career as a playwright at the end of the 1970's. Presently, with 15 plays to her name, she holds an important place in women's theatre in Quebec and in Quebecois theatre in general. Not only is Marie Laberge a successful playwright, she is also a novelist. / This work examines the feminist ideas and the female experience as presented in Marie Laberge's plays and novels. / Initially, the important themes of women's theatre in Quebec and Marie Laberge's position and role within this movement will be explored. The dominant themes of the feminist movement in Quebec since 1970 will be highlighted. The concept chronotope, defined by the Russian theorist Mikhail Bakhtine, will be employed in the thesis to assist with the evaluation of the female experience. / Three periods of Marie Laberge's work will be defined as feminist action, moderated feminism and absence of feminism. To properly study these three phases, one text from each, which best represents the ideas of that period, will be analyzed in detail. Once the ideas relevant to this study are exposed, they will be explored in relation to the other works in each phase and to the feminist movement in Quebec during the same period. / In conclusion, the growth of the feminism in Marie Laberge's work will be summarized and compared to the feminist movement in Quebec and its evolution.

The unique stylistic particularity of the novel as a literary form is that it is the presentation of the speaking human and his words (Bakhtine, 1978). The speaker in a novel is an exponent of a specific ideology and his words serve to express this ideology. For all its ideological components, the novel's dialogues form the characteristic feature of the narrative gender. The characters fill concrete social roles and they speak from within the limits of those roles, their speech emerging from different social languages. Prosper Merimee's short story, Arsene Guillot (1927: 85-145), offers an ensemble of character's constrained voices, of speakers imprisoned by their own social positions. The novel is developed as a sequence of carnivalesque reversals. Paradoxically, the text establishes a prostitute as an admirable figure (Arsene Guillot) and deposits a pious French bourgeoise from her social acknowledgements. Philippe Hamon, in his book Texte et Ideologie (1984), presents a theory of the semiotic of character's normative knowledge. This factorisation of the ideology notion, in separated normative elements, form a group of knowledges composing the text's ideology-effect. With the assistance of the critical concepts of speech universe, power and position struggle, discourse insignia and speaker's desire of fulfillment elaborated by Francois Flahault (1978), we apply the ideas of Hamon to the non-exclusive study of the dialogues in Arsene Guillot. Our pragmatic analysis emphasizes on how the dialogue contributes to the construction of the novel's ideology-effect.

The purpose of the analytical part of this master's paper is to specify the signification of the voyage motive considered as the theme of some of the stories in Jacques Ferron's Contes. This theme consists in being at the basis of both travel narratives and tales structure. It is a matter of studying, on the one hand, how the author is spiritually in line with these stories and on the other hand, how he distinguishes himself by his singular use of them. / Two tales, "La vache morte du canyon" and "Cadieu" are analyzed, in the first part, according to literary theories applied on travel narratives. Ferron's versions of this type of stories are particular in that they favour the theme of the return from banishment. The second part of this work treats of the tale "Les Mechins", in which the themes remind the rituals of initiation in tribal societies. The effective displacement achieved by the hero appears as an interiorized voyage rather than a social one. The author transposes, from preexisting but inadequate material to explain the modern society, a new vision of the becoming of the self. / In the creative part of the paper, eleven tales present the introspective reflexion of individuals who have to get over an important period into their life. The flow of the river along which the characters live is a fundamental element determining the way they can go through the learning process. The goal is to reconcile with personal and peculiar destiny.

L'ecole selon Rejean Ducharme offers a new view of Ducharme's widely acclaimed novels. Through analysis of three of the author's major works (Le Nez qui voque, L'Hiver de force and Va savoir ), we will discover Ducharme's fascination with the function of formal education as embodied in the cultural structure of the school and we will see the central role that this issue plays throughout his various narratives. Although unexplored by academics, Ducharme's vision of the school touches an significant number of issues at various levels of complexity. In our introduction, we examine the challenge of defining the issues and the scope of the school, and we consider a variety of frameworks for our analysis. The initial portion of the thesis itself takes us through Ducharme's writings, following the thread of this theme and identifying important references. Following this inventory, our second section examines the ways Ducharme's school addresses issues of authority in popular culture through its vision of Literature and History. We also see links to the other classic ducharmian themes of "subversion and salvation". Finally, we propose a model of the fanciful ducharmian school as it emerges from the text of these three novels. Our summary looks at Ducharme's ultimate observation, that in his school, lessons are never fully learned and school is never over.

In this thesis, we have attempted to bring to the fore the existence of a tacit or explicit link between the descriptions of works of art and the love relationships depicted in several of Marguerite Yourcenar's works of fiction. We start with the premise that the work of art with which the protagonist associates his beloved represents either the perception he has of the latter, or the power relationship implicit in their union. In that perspective, we explore the use of simile and metaphor as well as that of mythological figures and certain elements of neoplatonic philosophy. / Each of the three chapters is dedicated to a specific form of art (statuary, painting, and music) with which the protagonist establishes a connection either between the person he is emotionally involved with, or the love he feels for him/her. For the purposes of our analysis, we have referred to studies on narcissism, as well as critical texts dealing with the relationship between writing and painting and with the function of music in literature; for the analysis of narrative point of view and focalization, we are primarily indebted to the work of Gerard Genette.

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