This study examines the ethnic minority experience and its effects on approaches to childhood in Shyam Selvadurai's Funny Boy, Joy Kogawa's Obasan, and Nino Ricci's Lives of the Saints. The novels' protagonists, Arjie, Naomi, and Vittorio, are marginalized not only geographically, but also in terms of age, language, race, and sexual orientation. In addition to having been written and narrated by members of ethnic minorities, the novels concentrate on characters belonging to the age of minority. Using these "child focalizers" in order to depict defamiliarized, displaced, and minor perspectives, the authors write in the genre I call minor literature, a term adapted from Deleuze and Guattari's concepts of such literature. In focalizing various linguistic deterritorializations and socio-political displacements through the eyes of minor children, the authors disturb and deconstruct social nor.ms and conventions. In the thesis I analyze the minor child focalizer's vulnerabilities to, and subversions of, major languages, social conventions, and codes of behaviour. I argue that the children's identities as ethnic minorities intensify and complicate their various displacements, and allow for the authors to comment on the radical experience of multiple deterritorialization. I establish three categories in my discussions of these novels as minor literatures and their protagonists as minor focalizers: the disturbance and manipulation of language, the minoradult's alignment with the child's subject position, and the transgressive nature of identity-performance. The children's manipulation of language, bodily expressions and performances of gender and language are all means of resistance to major adult impositions of expected identities and behaviours. I demonstrate how the processes by which these children "resist" impositions of identities expose the artificialities of those identities. / Thesis / Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

Abstract In a 1997 review, James Berger not only clearly points out the proliferation of trauma study in the 1990s but also professes that the representation of trauma would be more easily detected, analysized, and understood with immersion in literary texts. Therefore, in this thesis, I draw upon the ideas of historical trauma, psychological trauma, structural trauma and trauma responses in the five theoretical works¡XJudith Lewis Herman¡¦s Trauma and Recover (1992), Ronald Granofsky¡¦s The Trauma Novel: Contemporary Symbolic Depictions of Collective Disaster (1995), Tedeschi, Richard G. and Lawrence G. Calhoun¡¦s Trauma and Transformation: Growing in the Aftermath of Suffering (1995), Cathy Caruth¡¦s Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative, and History (1996) and Dominick LaCapra¡¦s Writing History, Writing Trauma (2001)¡Xto analysize the issue of trauma as revealed in John Okada¡¦s No-No Boy and Joy Kogawa¡¦s Obasan. The two texts differ in time and space but share the same historical trauma evoked by the aftereffect of the war and the violence of the governments¡¦ racially-oriented discrimination policy that results in the Nikkei¡¦s psychological trauma. Okada presents white American racial ascendancy in the 1950s, while Kogawa tackles Canadian governmental dominance in the 1980s. Both writers are concerned with the relationship between collective persecution and individual trauma during/after World War Two and both try to empower as well as give voice to those who have been traumatized by social and familial forces. Reading the two novels as an exploration of the Nikkei¡¦s postwar experience, this thesis first contends that underlying the Nikkei¡¦s trauma is the internment experience that leads to the occurrence of racial discrimination and identity crisis in the Nikkei community. Secondly, in the light of historical trauma and psychological trauma, this thesis analyzes the trauma responses which normally take shapes in the forms of conflict, avoidance, guilt, flashbacks, dreams, numbing or amnesia in the minds of traumatized people after long years of struggling. However, instead of regarding these responses to be obstacles, this thesis proposes that the trauma responses are great reinforcement for the survivors to cope with the trauma memory and to reconcile with the trauma history. Through discussion of trauma response, this thesis suggests that the Nikkei would work through the process of experiencing the symptoms of trauma and slowly reach the level of recovery and transformation. That is, a resolution of the Nikkei¡¦s rebirth would be possible when the Nikkei overcome the threat of trauma and develop a hope of reconciliation for their upcoming future.

<p> This dissertation examines explicit and implicit conceptualizations of time and history in four contemporary Canadian novels: Allan Donaldson's Maclean, Joy Kogawa's Obasan, Margaret Laurence's The Diviners, and Lee Maracle's Daughters are Forever. Performing close textual analysis from a posture of 'deliberate empathy,' the author identifies several key textual devices and concepts that signal the texts' alternate ideas about time and history. These include temporal simultaneity, historical multiplicity, and the presence of the past. Drawing on critical work from fields including literary theory, globalization and cultural studies, indigenous studies and anthropology, the author investigates the political significance of the texts' different historical and temporal models. She argues that the way individuals and cultures understand time and history bears significant influence on the ways in which they understand their ethical relationships with and responsibility toward the world around them. The dissertation closes with a call for further engagement with questions of temporality and for continued efforts to link pedagogical activity to struggles for human rights. </p> / Thesis / Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)