"Uncharted Lands" is a collection of three short stories, each of which could be described as ethnic but should be considered Canadian. The Afterword explains why, examines the process of writing ethnicity through memory, and explores the position of ethnic minority literature in the evolution of Canadian culture.

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This thesis offers an analytical discussion of contemporary fictional and autobiographical narratives by migrants who write in a language other than their mother tongue and/or grew up in a bilingual environment. While not all literature by ethnic minority writers is necessarily concerned with the experience of growing up in or living between cultures, the present study deals with those writers whose texts self-reflexively and counter-discursively seek to define and express individual identity at the interface of two or more cultures. The writers discussed not only move spatially between places but also shift emotionally and intellectually between different languages and cultures as well as literary texts from these cultures. The focus is on language and the literary text itself as it becomes the site for an interaction of cultural codes. The methodology adopted draws eclectically on theories which explore the space between" from anthropological, linguistic, post-colonial and feminist perspectives. The thesis examines different textual paradigms of countering dominant discourses as found in ten representative texts from Australia, Canada, Germany and the United States which have been chosen to cover a range of cultural experience. The texts discussed are: Angelika Fremd's Heartland and Josef Vondra's Paul Zwillinq; Caterina Edwards' The Lion's Mouth, Henry Kreisel's The Betrayal and Rachna Mara's Of Customs and Excise; Franco Biondi's Abschied der zerschellten Jahre: Novelle and Akif Pirincci's Tranen sind immer das Ende: Roman; Sandra Cisneros' The House on Mango Street, Eva Hoffman's Lost in Translation: A Life in a New Language and Richard Rodriguez' Hunger of Memory: The Education of Richard Rodriguez. It is shown that self-reflexive negotiation of Self and Other in the text takes different forms depending on the writer's ethnic and racial background, his/her gender and the adopted country's social and political attitudes toward the newcomer. Re-writing, however, which is understood as an intentional, political dialogue with specific texts, is a recurrent counter-discursive strategy in the texts discussed. Finally, the thesis argues that the re-writing of traditional literary genres, such as Novelle, short story cycle, autobiography, Bildungs roman and quest novel, rather than of a particular text, as in other post-colonial contexts, is the most prevalent form of "writing back" in migrant literature. Texts written by migrants not only creatively revise literary conventions, challenge the concept of “national literature" and undermine canonically established categories, but also defeat attempts to approach a text with a single "appropriate" theory to reveal the strategies and the effects of cultural hybridity.

This thesis offers an analytical discussion of contemporary fictional and autobiographical narratives by migrants who write in a language other than their mother tongue and/or grew up in a bilingual environment. While not all literature by ethnic minority writers is necessarily concerned with the experience of growing up in or living between cultures, the present study deals with those writers whose texts self-reflexively and counter-discursively seek to define and express individual identity at the interface of two or more cultures. The writers discussed not only move spatially between places but also shift emotionally and intellectually between different languages and cultures as well as literary texts from these cultures. The focus is on language and the literary text itself as it becomes the site for an interaction of cultural codes. The methodology adopted draws eclectically on theories which explore the space between" from anthropological, linguistic, post-colonial and feminist perspectives. The thesis examines different textual paradigms of countering dominant discourses as found in ten representative texts from Australia, Canada, Germany and the United States which have been chosen to cover a range of cultural experience. The texts discussed are: Angelika Fremd's Heartland and Josef Vondra's Paul Zwillinq; Caterina Edwards' The Lion's Mouth, Henry Kreisel's The Betrayal and Rachna Mara's Of Customs and Excise; Franco Biondi's Abschied der zerschellten Jahre: Novelle and Akif Pirincci's Tranen sind immer das Ende: Roman; Sandra Cisneros' The House on Mango Street, Eva Hoffman's Lost in Translation: A Life in a New Language and Richard Rodriguez' Hunger of Memory: The Education of Richard Rodriguez. It is shown that self-reflexive negotiation of Self and Other in the text takes different forms depending on the writer's ethnic and racial background, his/her gender and the adopted country's social and political attitudes toward the newcomer. Re-writing, however, which is understood as an intentional, political dialogue with specific texts, is a recurrent counter-discursive strategy in the texts discussed. Finally, the thesis argues that the re-writing of traditional literary genres, such as Novelle, short story cycle, autobiography, Bildungs roman and quest novel, rather than of a particular text, as in other post-colonial contexts, is the most prevalent form of "writing back" in migrant literature. Texts written by migrants not only creatively revise literary conventions, challenge the concept of “national literature" and undermine canonically established categories, but also defeat attempts to approach a text with a single "appropriate" theory to reveal the strategies and the effects of cultural hybridity. / Arts, Faculty of / English, Department of / Graduate

published_or_final_version / English / Doctoral / Doctor of Philosophy

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Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of California, Santa Cruz, 2000. / Typescript. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 276-287).

This study traces the development of prose, poetry, drama, and (creative) nonfiction written in English by Canadians of Ukrainian descent during the twentieth century. The thesis argues that, although Ukrainian Canadian literature has been underrepresented in Canadian and Ukrainian Canadian studies, it makes a substantial contribution to ongoing debates about the ways in which individuals (re)define their sense of self, community, history, and home in the process of writing. Chapter One provides an overview of Ukrainian Canadian history, and outlines the development of a Ukrainian Canadian literary tradition. Chapter Two examines the assimilationist rhetoric articulated by such non-Ukrainian Canadian writers as Ralph Connor, Sinclair Ross, and Margaret Laurence, as well as that of Vera Lysenko (author of Yellow Boots, 1954, the first English-language novel by a Ukrainian Canadian). Chapter Three focuses on Maara Haas's novel The Street Where I Live (1976), George Ryga's play A Letter to My Son (1981), and Andrew Suknaski's poetry (published in Wood Mountain Poems, 1976; the ghosts call you poor, 1978; and In the Name of Narid, 1981), and explores these writers' responses to the policies and practices of multiculturalism. Chapter Four identifies the shift toward transnational or transcultural discourses of individual- and group-identity formation in Janice Kulyk Keefer's and Myrna Kostash's writing, especially that which records their travels "back" to Ukraine. The central argument of the thesis is that if Ukrainian Canadians are to maintain meaningful ties to their ethnic heritage, they must constantly—if paradoxically—reinvent themselves as Ukrainians and as Canadians. In examining this paradox, the study draws parallels between Lysenko and Kulyk Keefer, both of whom rely on conventional narrative techniques in their writing and privilege nation-based models of identity that marginalize the experiences of ethnic minorities. Haas, Ryga, Suknaski, and Kostash, by contrast, experiment with multiple languages and genres: shaped, thematically and formally, by their experiences as hybrid subjects, their texts illustrate that ethnicity is less product than process; less fixed than fluid; constantly under construction and open to negotiation. The concluding chapter of the thesis, reflecting on the past and the present of Ukrainians in Canada, calls for the next generation of writers to continue re-imagining their communities by pushing the boundaries of existing language and forms.