Mémoire (M.A.)--Université du Québec à Trois-Rivières, 2004. / Bibliogr.: f. 147-150.

Mémoire (M.A.) - Université du Québec à Trois-Rivières, 1998. / Bibliogr: p. [160]-178.

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.

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The work of Jacques Ferron could well be defined by a paradox: to go forward one has to revisit one's past. Indeed, in his texts, Ferron, significantly, returns to his roots---literary and political---to understand, explain, and criticize his nation which at the time was preparing for the Quiet Revolution. Assuredly, Contes du pays incerain (1962) and Contes anglais (1964) are the two works in which are found the greatest number of references to great texts of the Western literary tradition. Ferron transposes classical and traditional Culture into his own and adapts many myths, biblical texts, and folk tales. Moreover, these two collections of tales, united in 1968 under the title Contes, but still independent of each other, allow one to understand, by their titles alone, that the author describes through them his vision of the nation, a bipolar Quebec where uncertainty is opposed to Englishness. From there it is only a short step to linking the present to the past: defining uncertainty and Englishness---signs of the collections' identity, signs, ultimately, of Ferron's vision of the nation---by looking into the processes of reactualization of Ferron's literary roots. Using an approach based on John J. White's method, this thesis proposes a mythocritical reading of Ferron's Contes. This approach allows one to retrace the path the author followed to understand his society. To understand Ferron's vision of the nation developed throughout his texts, one has to go back to the author's literary sources; to know to what extent uncertainty and Englishness are opposed, one has to analyse how each collection of tales transforms and gives new meaning to the myths and legends that are the foundation of the Western culture.

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Jacques Ferron, Quebecois writer famous for his incisive and polemic style, has created his literary works with numerous genres of great diversity. Although the author has never published any poetic works, the manuscripts found at the National Library of Quebec demonstrate all the interest Ferron had for the poetic genre. In fact, the Jacques-Ferron Archives contain over fifty poetic texts, which are being edited for this study. The first part, which presents Ferron's unpublished poems, also exposes the editorial principles that guided the task of transcribing the manuscripts. In the second part of this study, I reflect upon the idea of "conscience generique " (generic conscience), priorly established by Michal Glowinski. Once having demonstrated that Jacques Ferron used his poetic material to write some of his tales or plays, I build upon the hypothesis that his profound knowledge of poetry reading and writing modes influences him to change his literary approach to this genre. (Abstract shortened by UMI.)