Cette thèse explore la relation entre les littératures autochtones et multiculturelles du Canada. Même si les critiques littéraires examinent les littératures dites mineures de plus en plus, ces dernières sont rarement étudiées sans la présence médiatrice de la littérature canadienne considérée comme étant dominante. Afin de produire une telle analyse, cette thèse mobilise le concept d’hybridité en tant que catégorie d’analyse de texte qui, en plus de son histoire raciale et coloniale, décrit convenablement les formes d’expérimentations stylistiques que les écrivains autochtones et multiculturels emploient afin de représenter et questionner leur marginalisation. Ne voulant pas reproduire les interprétations fétichistes qui réduisent les littératures autochtones et multiculturelles à leurs représentations de concepts d’altérité, j’examine ces textes dans leurs relations avec différents discours et débats ayant marqué les études littéraires canadiennes, notamment, le long poème canadien, l’écriture des prairies canadiennes, la littérature urbaine, le multiculturalisme, et les premières nations. Ma méthode d’analyse repose sur la façon dont chaque texte étudié alimente ces catégories d’analyse littéraire tout en les modifiant radicalement. De plus, je développe un cadre conceptuel et théorique permettant l’étude de la relation entre les textes autochtones et multiculturels sans toutefois confondre ou réduire les contextes d’où proviennent ces littératures. Ma thèse et ma méthode d’analyse se concrétise par l’interprétation des textes écrits par Armand Garnet Ruffo, Suzette Mayr, Rawi Hage, et Jeannette Armstrong. Le chapitre d’introduction détaille la façon dont la relation entre les textes autochtones et multiculturels a été appréhendée jusqu’à présent. J’y élabore mon cadre théorique qui joint et réinterprète de manière critique diverses théories, dont celle du postcolonialisme, de l’hybridité, et de la mondialisation, et la façon dont ces théories se rapportent aux études littéraires canadiennes. Dans mon deuxième chapitre, j’analyse le long poème d’Armand Garnet Ruffo, Grey Owl: The Mystery of Archie Belaney, en m’attardant particulièrement aux stratégies d’expérimentations stylistiques et génériques que Ruffo développe afin de rendre le genre du long poème canadien autochtone et de questionner l’identité de Grey Owl. Mon troisième chapitre examine Venous Hum, un roman de Suzette Mayr. Ce texte remet en question la tradition de « prairie writing », le multiculturalisme canadien, et le conservatisme albertain à travers son style expérimental, son usage des métaphores et du réalisme magique. Mon quatrième chapitre interprète le roman montréalais Cockroach, de Rawi Hage, en examinant la façon dont ses unités locales, nationales, et globales rencontrent le colonialisme et contestent les discours nationaux une fois que sa critique de la mondialisation se trouve réarticulée dans une approbation des discours d’interventions humanitaires de l’occident. Mon dernier chapitre explore le roman de Jeannette Armstrong, Whispering in Shadows, afin de démontrer les limites de ma méthode d’analyse. Puisque l’hybridité sous-entend inévitablement la notion d’assimilation, son application dans le contexte de l’œuvre d’Armstrong s’avèrerait réductrice. Pour cette raison, ce chapitre utilise des concepts autochtones définis par Armstrong afin de développer une méthode de lecture non-hégémonique. Ma thèse examine donc la façon dont chaque texte déploie le concept d’hybridité pour à la fois contester et enrichir les discours critiques qui tentent de contenir ces textes. Elle contribue aux études postcoloniales de la littérature canadienne en élargissant leur champ habituel pour inclure les complexités des théories de la mondialisation, et en examinant quelles stratégies littéraires les textes autochtones et multiculturels partagent, mais mobilisent à des fins différentes. / This dissertation explores the relationship between indigenous and multicultural writing in Canada. While critics have paid increasing attention to minoritized literatures, indigenous and multicultural literary strategies are seldom examined together without the mediating presence of settler or dominant Canadian literatures. In order to perform such an analysis, this dissertation deploys the concept of hybridity as a category of literary analysis that comes from a history of colonial violence, but which adequately describes the forms of stylistic experimentation which indigenous and multicultural writers use to dramatize and subvert their marginalization. In order to avoid fetishizing indigenous and multicultural texts as markers of reified “otherness,” I examine them in relation to specific discourses and debates in Canadian literary studies, such as the Canadian long poem, prairie writing, city writing, multiculturalism, and indigeneity. Methodologically, my dissertation examines how each text under discussion contributes, yet radically reconfigures and particularizes, each of these literary categories. In addition, I develop a conceptual framework through which the relationship between multicultural and indigenous texts can be approached without rehearsing the conflations that have marked Canadian literary criticism. To this end, I provide close-readings of texts by Armand Garnet Ruffo, Suzette Mayr, Rawi Hage, and Jeannette Armstrong. My introductory chapter details the manner in which the relationship between indigenous and multicultural writing has been approached in Canadian literary studies so far, and elaborates my conceptual framework through critical re-interpretations of postcolonial, globalization, and hybridity theory as they relate to the field of Canadian literary studies. In my second chapter, I analyze Armand Garnet Ruffo’s long poem Grey Owl: The Mystery of Archie Belaney. I focus on the generic and stylistic strategies Ruffo develops in order to indigenize the genre of the Canadian long poem and question Grey Owl’s identity. My third chapter examines Suzette Mayr’s Venous Hum as a text which challenges prairie writing, Canadian multiculturalism, and Albertan conservatism through stylistic experimentation, metaphor usage, and use of magic realism. In my fourth chapter, I interpret Hage’s Montreal novel Cockroach as a text whose local, national, and global scales intersect with colonialism and contest national narratives as the novel ultimately replicates Western humanitarian intervention. My final chapter explores Jeannette Armstrong’s Whispering in Shadows in order to illustrate the conceptual limits of this dissertation. Since hybridity always assumes (partial) assimilation, its application in the context of Armstrong’s work would bear coercive results. For that reason, this chapter draws on Armstrong’s definition of indigenous concepts in order to develop a non-hegemonic method of analysis. My dissertation then examines the manner in which each text mobilizes hybridity in order to challenge and supplement the critical discourses that seek to contain them. It contributes to postcolonial Canadian literary studies by opening up the field to the complexities which competing definitions of the global generate, and by examining what literary strategies indigenous and multicultural texts share, yet deploy to different ends.

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Ce mémoire est une lecture hantologique du roman The Double Hook de Sheila Watson. Une telle lecture accorde une importance particulière aux fantômes et aux spectres qui se trouvent dans un texte ou qui le hantent. La hantologie étant un mouvement de pensée introduit par Jacques Derrida dans Spectres de Marx, cet ouvrage de Derrida se veut à la fois un point de départ et un site important de mon analyse auquel je retourne tout au long de ce mémoire. De plus, à travers les écrits de plusieurs spécialistes de la littérature canadienne-anglaise tels que Marlene Goldman, Margaret Turner et Cynthia Sugars, ce mémoire explore ce que le roman de Watson permet de découvrir à propos de ce qui hante l’imaginaire collectif canadien. Dans une première partie de ce mémoire, je concentre mon analyse sur les spectres textuels qui hantent les pages du roman de Watson. Les mythes autochtones, les récits chrétiens, les conventions du ‘Western’ et du roman régional, ainsi que les traces de plusieurs textes modernistes, semblent hanter la structure du roman et l’utilisation du langage qui crée l’histoire présentée par Watson. Dans le deuxième chapitre de ce mémoire, mon analyse se tourne vers les fantômes et les personnages fantomatiques qui existent dans le monde fictionnel créé par Watson. Les personnages tels que la mère de la famille Potter et Coyote sont fréquemment associés aux tropes du gothique et lus comme étant des spectres et ce sont de telles lectures qui ponctuent mon analyse de cet important roman. / This thesis consists of a study of haunting, both at the textual and fictional level, in Sheila Watson’s The Double Hook. In this hauntology of the novel, I explore the texts and cultural archetypes that haunt Watson’s novel as well as the ghosts, spectral figures, and haunting spaces and places represented in the novel. The theoretical movement of hauntology introduced by Jacques Derrida in Specters of Marx is a fundamental work in contemporary studies of the tropes of the Gothic and of a more generalized haunting that threatens notions of stability in our understanding of existence. Moreover, the haunting figures and texts in Watson’s novel subvert the heterogenous conception of a national discourse in Canada. The insights provided by scholars such as Marlene Goldman, Margaret Turner, and Cynthia Sugars, who are concerned with what Watson’s use of spectral figures in her narrative accomplishes in relation to writing the settler-colonizer nation of Canada, contribute to informing my argument about the place Watson’s novel occupies in the Canadian collective imaginary. In the first chapter of this thesis, I focus on the textual hauntings in the pages of Watson’s novel. Indigenous myths, Christian rituals, conventions of the western and regional novel, and modernist texts haunt the novel’s structure, content, and the language that constitutes it. In the second chapter of this thesis, I direct my attention towards the haunting and haunted figures that exist in the world created by Watson. In both chapters, my goal is to converse with the specters I see in the novel, to give a voice to what is not explicitly said and to find what lies between the fragments of Watson’s experimental prose.

Utilisant « The Clockmaker » de Thomas Chandler Haliburton, cette étude examine comment la littérature informe notre compréhension du passé et les idées du présent. Ceci est une analyse des façons que le conservatisme de certains « Impérialistes canadiens » du XIXe siècle (Stephen Leacock, G.M. Grant, Andrew Macphail), des idéologues imaginant un rôle plus important pour le Canada au sein de l'Empire britannique, était influencé par celui présenté dans «The Clockmaker». Ce travail propose que l’ouvrage, problématique aujourd’hui, est tout de même important à analyser pour sa popularité et son influence dans le passé, ainsi que pour avoir contribué à faire revivre – grâce à sa rhétorique satirique, ses caricatures, et un style politisé – un conservatisme mourant que les Impérialistes ont ensuite adoptés. Cela a permis aux Impérialistes de développer une vision du Canada conforme à leur époque tout en s'appuyant sur un élément conservateur avec un fondement établi. « The Clockmaker » présente plusieurs idées similaires à celles des Impérialistes: une forte association britannique, de l’anti-américanisme, une plus grande influence du Dominion, etc. Conséquemment, il n'est guère surprenant que Grant lui-même ait noté l'influence de Haliburton sur la conception canadienne de l’impérialisme de lui et ses confrères. Étudiant les valeurs de Haliburton, leur expression dans « The Clockmaker », et comment les Impérialistes reflètent les idées et la rhétorique du roman, cette étude crée une continuité entre « The Clockmaker » et ces nationalistes qui ont cherchés une légitimité dans le passé en imaginant les traditions d'un jeune pays. L’étude examine la manière dont la littérature, au-delà d'être modélisée par son présent, devient l'histoire hautement-interprétable qui l’informe. / Using Thomas Chandler Haliburton’s The Clockmaker, this work examines how literature informs understandings of the past and ideas of the present. This is an analysis of how the Toryism of certain late 19th-century Canadian Imperialists (Stephen Leacock, G.M. Grant, and Andrew Macphail) was influenced by The Clockmaker. These Imperialists were ideologues who imagined a greater role for Canada within the British Empire. The contention is that Haliburton’s work, although highly problematic today, is nonetheless important to analyze for the popularity and influence it had at other historical moments, and specifically for the ways it helped revive – through satirical rhetoric, caricatures, and politically-charged writing – a dying form of Toryism that the Imperialists adopted into their thought in multiple ways. This allowed the Canadian Imperialists to develop a vision of Canada in-line with the times while relying on an element of Tory culture that had a sound historical background. The Clockmaker expounds similar ideas to those of the Imperialists: strong British ties, anti-Americanism, an added socio-political weight to the Dominion, etc. It is hardly surprising, then, that Grant himself noted Haliburton’s influence on him and his fellow thinkers’ conceptual framing of imperialism in Canada. Studying Haliburton’s values, their expression in The Clockmaker, and the way the Imperialists’ works reflect the ideas and rhetorical tools of the novel, this study creates a continuity between The Clockmaker and those nationalists who sought legitimacy in the past when imagining the traditions of a fledgling country. This study examines how literature, beyond being modeled by its present, becomes the highly-interpretable history that informs said present.

In Bonheur d'occasion (1945), Hey Waitress and Other Stories (1989), Les enfants Beaudet (2001) and Lullabies for Little Criminals (2006), the characters struggle with exclusion, confinement and lack of social recognition in precarious environments. Moving in and out of home, they resist power structures that define and delineate their living spaces and they use strategies of transgression that allow them to make sense of their existence in relation to other people who share similar struggles. One aspect of the transgressive function of the texts is to represent alternative spaces in the lives of women and children that result from their experiences of struggle. The texts dramatize a desire for alternatives to dealing with spatial distress, economic crisis and sex-gendered boundaries. This desire is represented by the female and child characters' survival strategies, which show their capacity to surmount the socio-spatial difficulties. As Barbara Godard remarked, one of the aims of recent feminist research"coincides with the efforts of women writers to open new dimensions of space, to allow women freedom of movement, without hesitancy, or fear, or obstacle, through geographic and political spaces, but, more fundamentally, through cultural, conceptual and imaginary spaces" (Godard 2). Looking closely at how authors Gabrielle Roy, Helen Potrebenko, Isabel Vaillancourt and Heather O'Neill dramatize female and child characters' movement through and experience of daily living spaces, I suggest that, indeed, the texts open and question the geographical, material, sex-gendered, and imaginary spaces in which fictionalized subjects struggle to exist. By exploring the characters' experience of spatial, economic and psychosocial distress, I argue that the fictionalized subjects are able to build localized spaces of comfort both in the public and in the private sphere and thus to find a certain"freedom of movement" (Godard 2). Their survival strategies used for coping with social, spatial, economic, and physical boundaries show that they are agents of change and capable of finding and preserving minimum comfort in living spaces. For instance, the characters show ambivalence towards their sense of home, and, accordingly, they seek to rebuild and/or negotiate this living space through alternative sites such as embodied, fantasized or shared spatiality. I will read the texts according to the experiences of struggle of the characters, the represented survival strategies, and textual elements such as narrative point of view and discourses on space, gender and poverty. Bonheur d'occasion concentrates on the ways of using and creating space to get out of poverty and represents women's active, but subjugated, roles. The collection of short stories Hey Waitress and Other Stories gathers fictional voices of working-class, elderly, and poor subjects who experience sex-gendered, spatial, and economic struggle. These struggles create a space for alternatives and for resistance in living spaces that are open to change. Les enfants Beaudet fictionalizes the lives of children who, as a closed group, try to appropriate private and public spaces and use violence and revenge to cope with feelings of abandonment and injustice. Finally, Lullabies for Little Criminals , a first-person narrative, dramatizes the daily struggles of a pre-teenager who goes from one place to another, searching for recognition and a sense of home in Montreal. Each text represents particular living spaces and lived spatiality that situate and inscribe the agency of the female and child protagonists. Despite spatial crises, these stories dramatize how oppressed subjects are able to take action. Drawing on theories of space (Henri Lefebvre, Elizabeth Grosz, Kristinne Miranne and Alma H. Young), home (Catherine Wiley, Thomas Foster, Janet Zandy) and the fictional representation of poverty (Roxanne Rimstead), this thesis analyses home, the workplace, the body, and the shared space of solidarity as fragile, limited and conflicting sites. The four books dramatize the socio-spatial distress of characters that arise when precarious living conditions limit their opportunities for survival and subjecthood. I suggest, more particularly, that the negotiation of space is an important part of the process of identity formation through which the characters find a sense of home between the material and the psychological, the public and the private, and individuality and solidarity.

What are the intercultural and spiritual implications of death in literature? How do communities portrayed in two specific novels, Brian Moore's Black Robe and Lee Maracle's Ravensong, handle the conflict that comes with death seen from within and from without? The communities represented within these narratives do not share the same spiritual or cultural background, yet all must face the reality of death on a daily basis. Is there some form of mediation to help these conflicting views on death come together within the stories? By looking into specific examples from the novels, derived from observations on the afterlife, rituals enacted by the community, power struggles between community leaders and the alienation and isolation that come with death, it is possible to determine what the differences are between the belief systems. Building from psychological and sociological theories on death as much as on notions of contact and identity, we can determine how the views on death come into play between spiritualities and cultures in the novels. When mediation fails, we see that it is mostly because of a lack of understanding of the Other, either through resistance to or dismissal of the Other's perceived spirituality. When mediation does occur, we can surmise that the people are accepting the Other's point-of-view either to supplement their own or to try to understand the strangeness of the Other. In both instances, shared beliefs or experiences become the key element that allows the dialogue to either occur or be denied. Only when context is shared does there seem to be a possibility of bridging the gap between culture and spirituality, and death, as a shared experience, offers this.

This interdisciplinary study examines the contribution that a book-review magazine makes to the cultural identity of its readers. It is the result of reflections on the cultural work of Books in Canada , on whether or not this periodical was a cultural worksite and if that is the case how it performed that cultural work. In addition, it interrogates factors that may have contributed to the magazine's demise. The study affirms that Books in Canada, a cultural enterprise from 1971 to 2008, mirrored and helped to shape book and literary culture in Canada through its circulation, through the personalities of its editors, through its front covers and through its reviewers and their reviews. Furthermore, it proposes that the demise of the enterprise was due to a combination of factors. The study begins with an introduction to book reviewing and special-interest magazines. Chapter I examines the interplay between selected visual and textual contents published in Books in Canada in its founding years. These components reflected and helped to fuel the cultural nationalism that was sweeping Canada subsequent to the 1967 World's Fair in Montreal. There were also persistent rumours and comments about the magazine that caused certain"cracks in the foundation" to appear. Chapter II compares the aims and editorial challenges of Val Clery, founder of Books in Canada , with those of Adrien Thério, founder of Lettres québécoises, and of the editors of the magazines' twentieth-anniversary issues, Paul Stuewe in the case of the former and André Vanasse in the case of the latter. Evidence in the content of the magazine, editorial and otherwise, indicated that the"contracts" that the editors made with their readers over the years were similar, to reflect and shape a cultural identity, but the result of their"projects," that is, the nature of those identities, was distinctly different. Evidently then, personal aims, preferences and political leanings of editors can have a major impact on the content of a book-review magazine and thus on the cultural work that it does. Therefore, in Chapter III, I focus on selected contents published during the tenures of two of Books in Canada 's key editors, Paul Stuewe and Olga Stein, in order to understand ways that their choices constituted a form of cultural work. The second part of this chapter moves from an analysis of the cultural work of editors to an examination of the cultural work of reviewers. Here, through a close-reading of a selection of reviews published in Books in Canada, and in other periodicals, I argue that reviewers do cultural work in the way that they negotiate their presence in a review, and in how they signal that presence through lexical choices and through the degree of intellectual interaction that they invite. Intellectual interaction is at the core of Chapter IV.This chapter consists of close readings of some of the"billboards" of the enterprise, that is, the front covers of Books in Canada , in order to show how these important components do cultural work by requiring readers to make an intellectual leap from image to text. Chapter V suggests that book reviews, the company's"bills of goods," do cultural work in much the same way as the paratexts of a book. One of my own reviews is offered as a case-study along with a number of other reviews of how central components of a book-review magazine do cultural work through the illocutionary force of their sentences. The first part of Chapter VI, the final chapter, measures the legacy of the magazine, in particular, the annual Books in Canada First Novel Award. Created in 1976, this prize is awarded to the author of the novel judged by a Books in Canada prize committee to be the best first novel in English of the year. The second part of Chapter VI sheds light on factors that may have contributed to the closure of the enterprise, including the copyright uproar that accompanied the agreement that Adrian Stein, publisher of Books in Canada and Olga Stein's husband, made in 2001 with the online book merchant, Amazon.com. Furthermore, this penultimate section of the study suggests that one of the most important factors in the magazine's demise was the decision by the Steins to exploit their position as owners, publisher, and editor of a book-review periodical, a government-subsidized one at that, to publish their own lengthy pre-trial defense of Conrad Black. The chapter then zooms back from the particular to the general with a broader consideration of the impact of technology and globalization on the book industry and on the ability of Books in Canada to survive in any form, print or digital.