To interpret a poem is to comprehend a complete act of written communication. And to comprehend such an act, the reader must break the codes in which the communication is framed. Thus, poetic interpretation becomes the study of codes--or semiotics. Poetic codes exist at pragmatic, semantic, syntactic, and phonic levels. The decoding requires the reader's linguistic skills, literary competence, and personal experience. It involves an initial reading and a retroactive reading. At the first step, the reader attempts to supply elements missing in the text. Yet trying to interpret the text literally, he encounters problems in pragmatics, semantics, syntactics, or phonics, and is unable to grasp a coherent sense of the poem. Those problems give rise to a retroactive reading. At this step, the reader looks for a higher level of understanding where a unity of meaning can be identified. And by explaining the clues in the text according to his linguistic and literary competence, and revising his understanding on the basis of his new findings, he finally discovers a kernel concept, on which the whole text can be seen as a single unit, and every element, which first appeared to be puzzling, has a significative purpose. This semiotic model of interpretation has proven to be very fruitful in the explication of Tu Mu's poetry. It also enables the reader to appreciate the poetic discourse more thoroughly. Some of the ideas advocated by the model may also serve as principles for the translation of poetry. For example, in reading a poem, the model requires a search for unified pragmatic, semantic, syntactic, and phonic patterns, which convey the kernel concept. Thus, in translating a poem, the translator should also try to re-produce in the target language such unified patterns so that the reader may grasp the same kernel concept as contained in the original discourse. The model stresses implicities of poetry. Hence the rendition of a poem should preserve the implicities of the original text in order to invoke from the reader a response similar to what would be induced by the original poem.

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published_or_final_version / Chinese / Master / Master of Philosophy

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This thesis addresses the teleological relationship between national identity and national consciousness in the specific definition of Canada as a northern nation by giving a descriptive account of representative texts in which the north figures as a central theme, including: ethnography, travel writing, autobiography, adventure stories, poetry, and novels. It argues that the collective Canadian identity idealized in the representation of the north is not organic but constructed in terms of such characteristics as self-sufficiency, independence, and endurance; that these characteristics are inflected by ideas of gender and race; and that they are evoked to give the 'deeper justification' of nationhood to the Canadian state. In this description of the mutually dependent definitions of gender, racial, and national identities, the thesis disputes the idea that northern consciousness is the source of a distinct collective identity for Canadians.

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This thesis, L'Echec de la litterature quebecoise au XIXe siecle, is focused on the idea that literature was impossible as such in the 19th Century French Quebec. Les Anciens Canadiens serves as a revealer for this issue. The thesis first describes the socio-historical, ideological and literary backgrounds around this novel written by a seignorial class member. So we will see this seignorial class has solidly constituted itself only after the New France transfer to Great Britain. The thesis explains the ideological readjustment after 1837-38 in the French Canadian Society and has an interest in the antagonistic characters of the 19th Century Quebec literary contents: historial and rural novels; patriotic and personal poetry. Next the thesis examines how the Anciens Canadiens text is working, insisting on the logic and the contradictions of this working. Then the thesis explains how it arrived that Les Anciens Canadiens, commanded by a seigniorial ideology, was well received by petit-bourgeois readers. A light is thrown on the possibilities of realism of this novel and the reasons why they have not materialized. Finally, we try to show the contradictions in the petite-bourgeoisie socio-historical situation that have prevented the birth of true literature.

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