Currently, in the fields of multi-ethnic literary and cultural studies in American, many critics and theoreticians concentrate on exposing forces of social and economic oppression against ethnic minorities and practices of cultural hegemony by the dominant culture. In the process, they often read characters in multi-ethnic American literatures as agents of resistance and counter-discourse. While it is valuable to recognize the subversive potential in these writings, it is equally important to expose their distinct, individual attributes. Accordingly, this dissertation explores the neglected double nature and "bi-cultural" presence of the subject in a branch of contemporary American literature that I designate as "emergent." Through its "re-accentuation" (Bakhtin) of sign systems, writers of emergent fiction strive not to simply reintonate already established cultural paradigms from either recent or ancient homelands but, instead, to engage an active and ongoing cultural exchange in the context of America as (new) homeland. Presenting the individual and social subject as hybrid, emergent writers examine its dynamic involvement in both private and public spheres. My close readings of this literature focus on the representation of self-other interrelationships. / I introduce and situate my analysis with a theoretical overview of the subject in cross-cultural or "liminal" zones (Bhabha). I also consider the significance of "dialogism" (Bakhtin) in the multi-ethnic, often female, subject's experience of "estrangement" (Felski). My choice of both established and lesser-known of new writers, born (or raised) in the United States but of diverse ethnic backgrounds, includes Cristina Garcia (Hispanic), Louise Erdrich (Native), Julia Shigekuni (Japanese), Sandra Cisneros (Chicana), Askold Melnyczuk (Ukrainian), Charlotte Sherman (African), and Amy Tan (Chinese). Situating the individual and social subject at various crossroads---both physical and psychological---emergent writers examine the changing nature of self identity and social expression. Through their "border pedagogy" (Giroux), they traverse axiologic discourses and socio-cultural boundaries and attend to ensuing dialectical tensions between inner and outer worlds, and among peoples, cultures, and social hierarchies.

In spite of the growing interest of Russian and Western scholars in Sergei Dovlatov and his art, his place in Russian literature has not yet been clearly defined. His position as a writer in Russia in the 1960s and early 70s was ambiguous due to his opposition to the traditional Soviet canon and rejection by the current literary establishment. However, he later gained recognition and popularity as an emigre writer in the United States. The concept of 'marginality' colours his biography and art, for his life itself was a succession of marginal experiences and marginality is the key topic of his writings. / Marginality unifies Dovlatov's art. This is evident in his marginal status as a writer in and outside the Soviet Union, and in his writing which uses the underappreciated short form of narration (the novella and short story), develops a non-traditional conversational style, pursues the themes of non-conventional behaviour and introduces eccentric characters. / However, it is not possible to discuss Dovlatov's status as a marginal writer without contextualizing his life and art in the ambience of the entire generation of Leningrad writers of the sixties. Writers and poets such as Brodskii, Goliavkin, Gubin, Vakhtin and Ufliand do not only represent the culture of Leningrad's artistic non-conformists, they are also Dovlatov's prototypes and protagonists. Apart from their marginal status, all these writers shared the determination to make independent choices in life and in art. They refused to be viewed as marginal authors by the dominant canon, which disregarded their works as insignificant. Here as well marginality emerges as a literary concept and a behavioural model, shaped by societal norms (the positive type of citizen or official Soviet writer) and traditional canons (the Russian didactic tradition or Soviet ideological writing). This literary concept includes an orientation towards American literature, the creation of marginal characters and themes as well as an exploration of different styles. / The works of writers of the Leningrad circle laid the foundation for the emergence of a literary phenomenon such as Dovlatov. It is in delineating this context that this dissertation demonstrates Dovlatov's original approach to marginality, as well as the way he turned his life experience into literature and became a spokesman for neglected fellow writers and citizens.

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The "encyclopedic imagination" describes an artist's conviction that a work of art must be expansive and inclusive to a point of total embodiment. The artist (or dramatized artist figure) implies that the work of art must give a total account not only of the subjective life of the artist but of the reality to which the representing self responds. The focus of this study is not on any work's encyclopedic achievement (for the artist's inclusive ideal always remains well outside the actual capacity of the work), but on the relationship of the ideal of aesthetic all-inclusiveness to a problematic ideal of encompassing selfhood for the representing personality. / Following an introduction that establishes modern and postmodern conceptions of the notion of aesthetic totality, this dissertation describes, in six Canadian works, the (untenable) radicalization of the self through the "encyclopedic" ideal. Chapter one considers Ernest Buckler's The Mountain and the Valley (1952) and notes that the protagonist's drive towards total representation is costly to his sense of authentic temporality. Chapter two identifies "total embodiment" as the governing poetic principle of P. K. Page's The Hidden Room (poems c.1942-1997), and suggests the relation of this ideal to Page's apparent creative crisis. Chapter three examines the ethics of all-inclusive representation in Leonard Cohen's Beautiful Losers (1966) and argues that the novel's vision of the world incorporated into a single body is a reflection of both the totalitarian politic of One Man and of apocalyptic-beatific "total identity." Chapter four looks at Margaret Atwood's Cat's Eye (1988) in terms of the trope of the "perverse museum" in Atwood's oeuvre. The novel's treatment of representation as exhibition figures identity as a matter of insatiable demonstration. Chapter five considers the "life-long" poems of Louis Dudek (Continuation c.1971-2001) and bpNichol (The Martyrology 1967-1988) as particularly marked cases of works that must continue until they have enfolded a coherent world-view into an all-encompassing subjectivity. / Each chapter stresses the counterintuitive quality of the "encyclopedic" ideal and demonstrates that a total yet coherent representation of the world seems inversely proportional to a coherent yet total representation of the self.

This dissertation develops and demonstrates a new mode of regional literary analysis. I begin by assessing the work of five Canadian literary regionalists from perspectives provided by human geographers and spatial theorists. Although discourses of Canadian literary regionalism vary, I argue that this field has tended to rely upon a reified understanding of regional analysis, a mystified conception of regional identity, and a passive construction of regional space. I offer a means of disrupting these tendencies by re-imagining the process of regional literary analysis. As I define it, literary regionalism is the process of demonstrating patterns in the way that literary texts deploy representations of sociomaterial space to enable performances of identity. This approach foregrounds literature's capacity to elucidate space's social efficacy. It also directs literary regionalism towards a more contemporary understanding of space and identity. In part two I begin to apply my mode of analysis to eight twentieth-century Canadian realist novels by introducing the concept of place. Because place-studies focus on the organization of social relations within a single text, I argue that they offer a useful means of initiating cross-textual, regional analyses. I demonstrate this point by analyzing the relationship between place and gender identity in Charles Bruce's The Channel Shore, and then looking for parallels in the way other novels articulate this relationship. In part three I construct a "region of denial and purgation" by interrogating how and why authors deploy representations of nature to deny the social origins of identity formation. I relate the power such representations have to articulate seemingly epiphanic shifts in identity to the sublime's enduring legacy. Because sublime experience enables characters to reconstitute themselves as new, it facilitates their desires to purge those aspects of their personal histories that have caused them guilt or shame. I conclude that this dissertation makes two contributions to Canadian literary studies. First, it advances a productive dialogue between human geography and Canadian literary studies. Second, by re-imagining the practice of Canadian literary regionalism through alternate disciplinary lenses, this dissertation helpfully foregrounds the heterodox character—and'unexplored potential—of a regional mode of literary analysis.

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Cette etude propose une analyse de "Tel Quel" en tant que mouvement de neo-avant-garde situe a la frontiere de la modernite et de la postmodernite. Nous y considerons tous les textes de creation (roman et poesie) publies dans la collection "Tel Quel" entre 1960 et 1982, sans negliger l'etude de leur rapport avec la reflexion theorique exposee dans les essais et les articles de la revue. Cette these represente en meme temps un effort de synthese des principales typologies ou tentatives de definition proposees par la critique occidentale pour caracteriser les mouvements litteraires issus des societes post-industrielles: modernite, postmodernite, modernisme, postmodernisme, avant-garde, post avant-garde et neo-avant-garde.

This thesis intends to describe the contemporary self as drawn by literary theory and writing practice. This objective implies defining the human being considering its history as well as studying its representation in narratives. / In order to circumscribe today's self, we undoubtedly have to study its historical evolution. Exploring the diametrically opposed conceptions suggested by modernity and postmodernity will lead us to a better understanding of the hybrid composition of the contemporary self, which is characterized by a search for coherence and meaning to a multidimensional and constantly evolving individual. / This definition, so far theoretical, will have to be confronted with the representations of the self found in autobiographies. The study of such self-narratives will provide the opportunity to observe in concrete terms the conception of the human being today. / The essential role of narratives will be identified beforehand. Narrative form certainly allows the representation of the self, but moreover it enters in the constitution and definition of the being itself. Self-narrative permits to establish the coherence of the self, hence it clearly appears at the basis of the identity. Overall, the narrative constitutes the foundation of the contemporary self amidst modernity and postmodernity.

This study investigates the expression and repression of desire in four 20th-century German-language lesbian prose texts. I examine in chronological order three novels and one novella: Der Skorpion (1919) by Anna Elisabet Weirauch; Lyrische Novelle (1933) by the Swiss author Annemarie Schwarzenbach; Der Schlachter empfiehlt noch immer Herz (1976) by Margot Schroeder; and, finally, Bilder von ihr (1996) by Karen-Susan Fessel. While not concentrating on any single literary work, the excursus on texts from the period between the Third Reich and the Second Feminist Movement in Germany provides a brief analysis of the (lack of) lesbian literary developments during this time. / Drawing on diverse lesbian-feminist and queer strains of criticism, this study provides a close examination of the narrative elements, strategies, and styles used to inscribe lesbian desire into the literary works selected for analysis. The investigation explores how these texts utilize narrative conceptualizations of lesbian desire, critiques of heterophallocentric language and representation, and strategies to create lesbian narrative spaces that challenge the heterosexual presumptions and trajectories which traditionally underlie conventional Western romance narratives. The constructions of "lesbian" identity presented in the texts are fundamentally connected to the creation and operation of these narrative spaces. Thus, in order to contextualize my interpretations and literary analyses, I situate the texts in the respective socio-historical and political contexts in which they were written and received. / The unresolved problems, prevailing tensions, and their individual differences notwithstanding, the narratives examined here collectively contribute to a lesbian counterdiscourse to the 20th-century German literary establishment. By exploring the strategies invoked in these texts to represent a desiring textual lesbian subjectivity, this study hopes to make visible a tradition of Germanlanguage lesbian literature---a fragmented and often marginalized literature---over the last century and to offer German literary studies insights from the periphery of the dominant heterosexual culture. However, this investigation simultaneously and paradoxically also contests the very positioning of German lesbian literature and criticism at the margins by proposing their strategic integration into the German literary canon.

The following Master's thesis is proposing the analysis of five novels, written between 1988 and 1993, by five young Quebec writers. The object of this research is to study the representation of "generation X" in these five texts. The introduction of the thesis establishes the parameters of the "generation X", which comprises people born between 1959 and 1974. This definition constitutes the basis of our comparison between the concept of "generation X" and the main characters of the novels, who are "fictive" members of this generation. / The rest of the thesis includes three chapters, devoted to the following themes: the politic perception of young characters, their economic situation and their attitude toward society. Necessarily, our analysis also considers the difference of perception between "baby-boomers" (people born between 1944 and 1959) and "generation X". This comparison is essential because "generation X" defines itself in opposition with adults values and institutions: reject of political power and authority, reject of work, instruction and money, refusal to integrate society. / The main purpose of this analysis is to see how the present Quebec novel integrates, assimilates and thinks the socio-historic context where it takes place, and how it could possibly renew the forms and the style of Quebec novel in general.