This dissertation examines urban walking in Canada as it deviates from a largely male peripatetic tradition associated with the flâneur. This new incarnation of the walker—differentiated by gender, race, class, and/or sexual orientation—reshapes the urban imaginary and shifts the act of walking from what is generally theorized as an individualistic or simply transgressive act to a relational and transformative practice. While the walkers in this study are diverse, the majority of them are women: writers Dionne Brand, Daphne Marlatt, Régine Robin, Gail Scott, and Lisa Robertson and performance artists Kinga Araya, Stephanie Marshall, and Camille Turner all challenge the dualism inscribed by the dominant (masculine) gaze under the project of modernity that abstracts and objectifies the other. Yet, although sexual difference is often the first step toward rethinking identities and relationships to others and the city, it is not the last. I argue that poet Bud Osborn, the play The Postman, the projects Ogimaa Mikana, [murmur] and Walking With Our Sisters, and community initiatives such as Jane’s Walk, also invite all readers and pedestrians to question the equality, official history and inhabitability of Canadian cities. As these peripatetic works emphasize, how, where and why we choose to walk is a significant commentary on the nature of public space and democracy in contemporary urban Canada. This interdisciplinary study focuses on Vancouver, Toronto and Montreal, cities where there has been not only some of the greatest social and economic change in Canada under neoliberalism but also the greatest concentration of affective, peripatetic practices that react to these changes. The nineteenth-century flâneur’s pursuit of knowledge is no longer adequate to approach the everyday reality of the local and contingent effects of global capitalism. As these walkers reject an oversimplified and romanticized notion of belonging to a city or nation based on normative identity categories, they recognize the vulnerability of others and demand that cities be more than locations of precarity and economic growth. This dissertation critically engages diverse Canadian peripatetic perspectives notably absent in theories of urban walking and extends them in new directions. Although the topic of walking suggests an anthropocentrism that contradicts the turn to posthumanism in literary and cultural studies, the walkers in this study open the peripatetic up to non-anthropocentric notions as the autonomous subject of liberal individualism often associated with the male urban walking tradition is displaced by a new focus on the interdependent, affective relation of self and city and on attending to others, to the care of and responsibility for others and the city.

Thesis Abstract This thesis analyses the fiction of the twentieth-century Irish-American author Maeve Brennan through the lens of shame. All of Brennan's published writing has been included: her short stories and magazine contributions collected in The Long Winded Lady, The Springs of Affection, and The Rose Garden, as well as her novella The Visitor. Shame has recently been embraced in academia as a subject of research, as well as an interpretative key for literary analysis. The thesis examines shame in order to map out social and psychological experience of belonging, and the lack thereof, in Brennan's fiction, as both the threat and the reality of isolation, stemming from social rejection, occur as its prominent themes. These elements are also shown as connected to the issues of self-determination and identity, as Brennan's characters partly embrace and partly oppose social normativity. As some of their individual needs, especially those of women, are add odds with social expectations, they are effectively choosing between social inclusion on the one hand, and embracing their personal difference. As transgressions of social norms come with varying degrees of shame, the emotion is omnipresent in the highly regulated, and surveilled, environments that Brennan depicts. As the affect itself causes further...

The contemporary flâneur is confronted with a radically different world in comparison to the Parisian arcades of the nineteenth century during which the idea of the flâneur was conceptualised. The current urban milieu of the flâneur is dominated by consumerism, computer systems and surveillance, and the research posed here explores the flâneur within this environment. The flâneur was originally visualised on the streets and arcades of the city; however, cities do not only exist as buildings and streets and have become global entities that are constituted from the physical and the virtual. Throughout this study reference is primarily made to the work of Francis Alÿs to elucidate theoretical concepts. This study proposes that there is an absence of the teleological goal in the journey of the flâneur and as such, the flâneur wanders the streets without aim; however, in the process creates narratives and leaves traces of his journey. The ubiquity of surveillance in the contemporary metropolis complicates the flâneur's relationship with the latter. Consequently the impact of surveillance on the flâneur and the flâneur's daily wanderings are examined to ascertain its influence on the flâneur in a hyperreal society. In contemporary thinking, the traditional idea of the male flâneur requires reassessment and this research investigates the possibility of the female flâneur and women's presence in the public spaces of the city and the virtual realm of cyberspace. Furthermore, women are intricately linked to consumerism and their experience and position in the city are influenced by being seen as objects of the gaze. / Dissertation (MA)--University of Pretoria, 2011. / Visual Arts / unrestricted

La présente recherche interroge la presse de la monarchie de Juillet comme un espace de composition et d'expérimentation de la posture d'écrivaine-journaliste. Elle entreprend également d'analyser les tactiques d'acceptabilité et les stratégies d'écriture visant à la reconnaissance littéraire des femmes. / The present research questions the press pf the July Monarchy as a space of composition and experimentation of the position of woman writer-journalist. It undertakes to analyse the tactics of acceptability and the strategies of writing aimed at the literary recognition of women.

Cette thèse porte sur les transgressions discursives, esthétiques et sociales de la frontière entre la vie privée et la vie publique effectuées par les créatrices françaises contemporaines Sophie Calle et Annie Ernaux. Dans une perspective féministe qui s’appuie sur les théories du quotidien, la thèse pose les questions suivantes : quelles libertés peut se permettre la femme-artiste ou l’écrivaine aujourd’hui ? Où, comment, et par qui se dessinent les limites éthiques de la création ? À la lumière des représentations souvent stéréotypées de la femme criminelle, le premier chapitre dégage de la réception des œuvres de Calle et d’Ernaux les « crimes » – entre autres, d’obscénité, d’impudeur et d’indécence – dont elles ont été accusées par la critique. Les trois chapitres suivants ciblent les diverses manières subversives et innovatrices dont Calle et Ernaux déjouent les perceptions acceptées de la féminité pour s’assurer la liberté totale en création : elles se construisent en flâneuses maniant la photographie ou l’écriture photographique comme une arme, en amoureuses blessées qui se vengent de leurs amants, et en théoriciennes manipulant les modalités de leur propre inscription dans les canons littéraires et artistiques. Cette thèse analyse au fil des chapitres les échos des œuvres de Calle et d’Ernaux au plan social, insistant sur le rapport fécond qui existe entre l’œuvre d’art et son cadre, interrogeant l’ethos de l’artiste et celui de l’art. Sophie Calle et Annie Ernaux répondent avec force à la nécessité de se positionner autrement face à l’art en tant que femme, notamment, en proposant l’art et l’écriture comme hors la loi. La conclusion étudie dans cette optique le phénomène récent de la « judiciarisation » de l’art. En examinant certains procès intentés depuis 2010 à des artistes, des écrivaines, des commissaires d’exposition et des maisons d’édition françaises, cette thèse questionne finalement les risques et les violences de la représentation tels qu’ils sont désignés par la loi. / This dissertation analyzes how contemporary French artist Sophie Calle and contemporary French writer Annie Ernaux transgress the discursive, aesthetic, and social boundaries between public and private life. Taking a feminist perspective and drawing on theories of everyday life, this dissertation asks: what liberties are the female artist and writer permitted today? Where, how and by whom are the ethical limits of creative practice established? In light of often stereotypical literary and artistic representations of the female criminal, the first chapter examines the accusations of obscenity, shamelessness and indecency levelled against Calle and Ernaux by their critics. The following three chapters identify the diverse, innovative and subversive ways in which Calle and Ernaux question accepted perceptions of femininity in order to seize creative freedom: they assume the distinct and tactical positions of flâneuses, heart-broken women avenging their ex-lovers, and theorists manipulating the reception of their own works. Together, these four chapters trace the artwork’s resonance in the public sphere, insist on the fruitful relationship that exists between a work of art and its frame, and consider the ethos of the artist as well as that of art. Sophie Calle’s and Annie Ernaux’s practices suggest that in order to achieve creative autonomy, art and writing must function outside of the constraints of moral, ethical, social and even civil laws. By examining instances in which artists, writers, curators and publishing houses have been subject to lawsuits in France since 2010, the conclusion of this dissertation studies a recent increase in the litigation of art and outlines some of the limits of representation as defined by the law.

Cette thèse porte sur les transgressions discursives, esthétiques et sociales de la frontière entre la vie privée et la vie publique effectuées par les créatrices françaises contemporaines Sophie Calle et Annie Ernaux. Dans une perspective féministe qui s’appuie sur les théories du quotidien, la thèse pose les questions suivantes : quelles libertés peut se permettre la femme-artiste ou l’écrivaine aujourd’hui ? Où, comment, et par qui se dessinent les limites éthiques de la création ? À la lumière des représentations souvent stéréotypées de la femme criminelle, le premier chapitre dégage de la réception des œuvres de Calle et d’Ernaux les « crimes » – entre autres, d’obscénité, d’impudeur et d’indécence – dont elles ont été accusées par la critique. Les trois chapitres suivants ciblent les diverses manières subversives et innovatrices dont Calle et Ernaux déjouent les perceptions acceptées de la féminité pour s’assurer la liberté totale en création : elles se construisent en flâneuses maniant la photographie ou l’écriture photographique comme une arme, en amoureuses blessées qui se vengent de leurs amants, et en théoriciennes manipulant les modalités de leur propre inscription dans les canons littéraires et artistiques. Cette thèse analyse au fil des chapitres les échos des œuvres de Calle et d’Ernaux au plan social, insistant sur le rapport fécond qui existe entre l’œuvre d’art et son cadre, interrogeant l’ethos de l’artiste et celui de l’art. Sophie Calle et Annie Ernaux répondent avec force à la nécessité de se positionner autrement face à l’art en tant que femme, notamment, en proposant l’art et l’écriture comme hors la loi. La conclusion étudie dans cette optique le phénomène récent de la « judiciarisation » de l’art. En examinant certains procès intentés depuis 2010 à des artistes, des écrivaines, des commissaires d’exposition et des maisons d’édition françaises, cette thèse questionne finalement les risques et les violences de la représentation tels qu’ils sont désignés par la loi. / This dissertation analyzes how contemporary French artist Sophie Calle and contemporary French writer Annie Ernaux transgress the discursive, aesthetic, and social boundaries between public and private life. Taking a feminist perspective and drawing on theories of everyday life, this dissertation asks: what liberties are the female artist and writer permitted today? Where, how and by whom are the ethical limits of creative practice established? In light of often stereotypical literary and artistic representations of the female criminal, the first chapter examines the accusations of obscenity, shamelessness and indecency levelled against Calle and Ernaux by their critics. The following three chapters identify the diverse, innovative and subversive ways in which Calle and Ernaux question accepted perceptions of femininity in order to seize creative freedom: they assume the distinct and tactical positions of flâneuses, heart-broken women avenging their ex-lovers, and theorists manipulating the reception of their own works. Together, these four chapters trace the artwork’s resonance in the public sphere, insist on the fruitful relationship that exists between a work of art and its frame, and consider the ethos of the artist as well as that of art. Sophie Calle’s and Annie Ernaux’s practices suggest that in order to achieve creative autonomy, art and writing must function outside of the constraints of moral, ethical, social and even civil laws. By examining instances in which artists, writers, curators and publishing houses have been subject to lawsuits in France since 2010, the conclusion of this dissertation studies a recent increase in the litigation of art and outlines some of the limits of representation as defined by the law.