No description available.

No description available.

Over seventy years after the fallout of the Nazi genocide, depicting the Shoah continues to serve as a subject of widespread debate. Balancing the aesthetics of representation with historical accountability poses unique challenges to both readers and writers of Holocaust literature. In its extensive considerations of time and place, in its troubling of the conventional limitations of the Canadian novel, and in its suggestive possibilities both inside and outside of the ethnic mainstream, the genre is one of ample opportunity — a prospect that entails enormous responsibility. The difficulty of finding the appropriate language to represent the horrors of the Shoah is the central subject of this thesis, which focuses on interpretive responsibility in Mavis Gallant’s “The Pegnitz Junction” (1973). It situates the novella in both a theoretical and Canadian literary context, examines Gallant’s understanding of the ethics of aestheticizing the event, provides a full-length study of the story, and attempts to fill some of the gaps in critical scholarship by drawing attention to the multidimensionality of the text’s portrayal of a post-Auschwitz world. I look closely at how Gallant’s work prompts a suspension of logic and normalcy, and in turn reconceptualizes the novella insofar as its indirection causes her readership to contemplate whether Holocaust responsibility is, in the words of D.G. Myers, “to be shared by [readers], despite the fact that they are not to blame” (270). I suggest that the novella is a medium in which refusal to provide logical explanations for the Holocaust through aesthetic representation not only allows audiences to ponder the implications of humanity’s capacity to preserve and erase historical memory, but also causes them to consider how human beings ought to respond responsibly to the ramifications of historical trauma. / Thesis / Master of Arts (MA)

No description available.

No description available.

This thesis discusses the influence of consumption on masculinity beginning in the early modern period of the English Restoration through the twenty-first century. Specifically, this thesis investigates the male figures known as the gallant, the fop and the metrosexual, which are found in the Renaissance, Restoration and twenty-first century respectively. Each figure embodied his society's fears about the effect of consumerism on masculinity by openly wearing sumptuous clothing and practicing "effeminate" behavior. A product of the developing early consumer society, the gallant of the Renaissance was widely and harshly chastised for his dress and behavior. Because mass consumerism was so new in the early modern period, the gallant was able to utilize consumption to express social dissidence and to defy class and gender. Writers such as Thomas Dekker, Philip Stubbes and Barnabe Riche rejected the gallant, but their rejection only served to fuel his subversive behavior. The fop built upon the foundation laid by the gallant and found wider acceptance in the Restoration despite the fact he was still mocked by Restoration society. The fop embodied the specific changes in consumption in the Restoration such as a greater influx of international trade through an excessive adoption of French dress and behavior. I first define the fop through George Etherege's Man of Mode. Then, by comparing William Wycherley's The Country Wife to William Shakespeare's All's Well that End's Well, I distinguish the fop's reception in the Restoration from the gallant's in the Renaissance. The metrosexual was the culmination of the impact of five hundred years of consumerism upon masculinity, and as such did not face rejection by society. Instead, metrosexuality embodies the pervasiveness of consumer-mediated masculinity in the twenty-first century. While some members of contemporary society still struggle to recognize the performative nature of gender identity, instead choosing to cling to the notion that masculinity is in "crisis," the metrosexual openly embraces gender performativity by consuming different products in order to maintain his male gender identity. As a result of metrosexuality masculinity is subsumed under consumerism and all forms of male identity become products to be purchased at will. Chuck Palahniuk tries to envision a world wherein consumerism no longer has any influence over masculinity in Fight Club, but he is ultimately unable to break masculinity away from consumerism because of the powerful bond that had been formed over a half a millennia. Ultimately masculinity is found to be dependent upon consumption, and the days when the male identity could exist apart from consumerism have long since departed. The gallant, the fop and the metrosexual each faced individual challenges, but in the end demonstrate the unbreakable and subversive bond between consumerism and masculinity.

The linking short narratives explored in this study-- Anna Jameson's Winter Studies and Summer Rambles in Canada, Sara Jeannette Duncan's The Pool In the Desert and Mavis Gallant's Home Truths— employ first-person narrators to both comply with and subvert dominant ideas of the gendered female subject. In addition, these representative linking narrative texts demonstrate that choices to do with form, as well as subject and theme, may both support and subvert the discourses of the time and place in which they are written. My exploration of these three representative texts draws from W.H. New's fragmentation theory of short narratives, Gérard Genette's narrative theory of voice and mood, Paul de Man's problematization of generic distinctions between autobiography and fiction, and Julia Kristeva's theory of the speaking subject as text in process and vice versa. Jameson's Romantic "I" uses the miscellany's flexible form of linking short narratives autobiographically to both reify and recuse nineteenth-century genre conventions of travel narrative and the gendered position of women in Europe and Canada. As the Recusant "I," first person narration in Duncan's quartet of stories figures splits not only between female desire and gender codes, but also between creative imagination and conditions of exile. With a psychopoetics of the unsaid, the Remembering "I" of Gallant's linking narratives figures female subjectivity as a process of both psychology and history. These women-authored linking narratives challenge assumptions that first-person narration is univocal, and therefore problematize distinctions between autobiography and fiction. In their uses of the linking narrative form, they also challenge aesthetic criteria that privilege wholeness and unity— of the novel, for example— in concepts of mimesis dominating representations of reality in their respective periods. These first-person linking narratives use the voice of the "I" subversively, telling the doubled position of the female subject in the discourses of genre and gender. / Graduate

Doctorat en philosophie et lettres / info:eu-repo/semantics/nonPublished

As the Enlightenment took hold in Europe, all aspects of eighteenth-century society felt its effects. Musical tastes, caught in this ideological shift, began to move from the more codified complexity of counterpoint toward the more simplified aesthetic known as galant. Johann Sebastian Bach, now in the most mature phase of a musical career rooted in the contrapuntal style, came under growing public criticism from proponents of galant who were increasingly dismissive of counterpoint as an out-dated compositional method. In 1741, during this time of growing censure, Bach created the wedding cantata BWV 210, O holder Tag erwünschte Zeit, based on an earlier cantata but with significant changes that are unique within this oeuvre. Rather than the typical celebratory libretto characteristic of his other wedding cantatas, Bach mounted a strong rhetorical argument in defense of music, deftly combining irony, humour, and pointed barbs to make his point. The rationale for this has not received significant scholarly attention. This dissertation explores the idea that Bach used BWV 210 as a specific personal response to his critics who favoured the changing musical aesthetic of the era, and as a defense of a contrapuntal style cherished by him but no longer valued by many advocates of the galant. This claim is supported through an aggregation of extant research linking the cantata to the circumstances in which it was created. Particular attention is given to the ideological conflict represented in the aesthetic shift of the eighteenth century, and Bach’s reactions evident in written documents, his compositions and in his unique synthesis of compositional styles intersecting the aesthetics of his era. The circumstances under which the cantata was written provide context for the significant libretto revisions undertaken to adapt the cantata from its closest known counterpart, BWV 210a. Finally, Johann Scheibe’s published criticism against Bach is explored as an important flashpoint for Bach’s use of BWV 210 as a musical rebuttal. Not only is a better understanding of a lesser-known cantata achieved, but a glimpse into the mindset of Bach is also realized through the unusually personal response included in BWV 210.

As the Enlightenment took hold in Europe, all aspects of eighteenth-century society felt its effects. Musical tastes, caught in this ideological shift, began to move from the more codified complexity of counterpoint toward the more simplified aesthetic known as galant. Johann Sebastian Bach, now in the most mature phase of a musical career rooted in the contrapuntal style, came under growing public criticism from proponents of galant who were increasingly dismissive of counterpoint as an out-dated compositional method. In 1741, during this time of growing censure, Bach created the wedding cantata BWV 210, O holder Tag erwünschte Zeit, based on an earlier cantata but with significant changes that are unique within this oeuvre. Rather than the typical celebratory libretto characteristic of his other wedding cantatas, Bach mounted a strong rhetorical argument in defense of music, deftly combining irony, humour, and pointed barbs to make his point. The rationale for this has not received significant scholarly attention. This dissertation explores the idea that Bach used BWV 210 as a specific personal response to his critics who favoured the changing musical aesthetic of the era, and as a defense of a contrapuntal style cherished by him but no longer valued by many advocates of the galant. This claim is supported through an aggregation of extant research linking the cantata to the circumstances in which it was created. Particular attention is given to the ideological conflict represented in the aesthetic shift of the eighteenth century, and Bach’s reactions evident in written documents, his compositions and in his unique synthesis of compositional styles intersecting the aesthetics of his era. The circumstances under which the cantata was written provide context for the significant libretto revisions undertaken to adapt the cantata from its closest known counterpart, BWV 210a. Finally, Johann Scheibe’s published criticism against Bach is explored as an important flashpoint for Bach’s use of BWV 210 as a musical rebuttal. Not only is a better understanding of a lesser-known cantata achieved, but a glimpse into the mindset of Bach is also realized through the unusually personal response included in BWV 210.