Diss. Ph. D.--English--Uppsala university, 2000. / Bibliogr. p. 243-253. Index.

No description available.

Thesis (M. Phil.)--University of Hong Kong, 2007. / Title proper from title frame. Also available in printed format.

No description available.

Thesis (M.A.)--Université de Sherbrooke, 1999. / Includes bibliographical references.

Les silences d’une œuvre musico-littéraire telle que Coming Through Slaughter participent à l’esthétique jazzistique du roman tout en représentant un défi de taille pour les traducteurs vers le français. Cette thèse a pour objet l’étude du traitement, par les deux traducteurs du roman ondaatjien, d’une part des silences rythmiques qui fragmentent le texte pour lui conférer une mélodie et un rythme textuels et, d’autre part, des silences sémantiques au service de l’esthétique jazzistique qui, au moyen de la parataxe, de l’ellipse et du gérondif, figurent textuellement, non seulement le jazz, mais aussi un de ses pères, le célèbre cornettiste Charles « Buddy » Bolden. En usant d’un métalangage musical pour décrire les stratégies traductives des deux traducteurs francophones du premier roman ondaatjien, Robert Paquin, d’abord, au Québec, en 1987, puis Michel Lederer, en France, en 1999, cette analyse examinera le rapport entretenu par l’interprétation herméneutique des deux professionnels avec leur interprétation musicale du texte. Ce faisant, l’objectif sera de démontrer les propriétés performatives de l’acte traductif lorsque le texte traduit se rattache aux œuvres musico-littéraires en général et aux romans jazzistiques en particulier. / Silences of such a musico-literary work as Coming Through Slaughter contribute to the jazzistic aesthetics of the novel while representing quite a challenge for the French translators. This thesis aims at studying how the two translators of the Ondaatjian novel dealt on one hand with the rhythmical silences which fragment the text and create its melody and its rhythm and, on the other hand, with the semantic silences of the text, part of its jazzistic aesthetics which by use of parataxis, ellipsis and gerund, recreate on a textual level, not only jazz, but also one of his fathers, famous cornet player Charles “Buddy” Bolden. By using a musical metalanguage in order to describe the translation strategies that both Francophone translators of the first Ondaatjian novel, Robert Paquin, in Québec, in 1987, and then Michel Lederer, in France, in 1999, used, this analysis will look at the relationship between the two professionals’ hermeneutic interpretation and their musical interpretation (in a performative sense) of the text. In so doing, the objective will consist in proving the performative characteristics of the translation act when the translated text belongs to musico-literary works in general and to jazzistic novels in particular.

Techn. Univ., Diss.--Braunschweig, 2003.

No abstract available / English Studies / M.A. (English)

In this dissertation, I examine how the themes of memory, storytelling, and the construction of narrative identity develop in the works of Canadian authors Alistair MacLeod, Michael Ondaatje, and Jane Urquhart. As a means of delving more deeply into these themes, I focus on the specific narrative strategies that all three writers employ in the expression of the relationship between the individual and his/her community, as well as between physical and psychological realities. For the narrative voices in these authors’ works—given the different ways they envision and encode communal identity as constitutive of subjectivity—the past is inextricably embedded in the present. As they construct and record unfolding experience, a wider cultural history is written over with personal connections and significance. In the works of each of these authors, the act of telling stories (re)shapes people and events for the audience: speakers reform and reconstitute their experiences, allowing them both to rewrite the past and be haunted by it. Storytelling becomes an existential act in which personal landscapes are invested with structures of feeling that transcend local significance yet are manifested in everyday connections between ordinary people, and in daily (often unrecognized) struggles and acts of heroism. This includes a study of the means through which psychological evolution and trauma can be depicted. I also discuss how stylistic techniques such as fragmentation, repetition, self-reflexivity, and literary allusion function within these narratives. This aspect of my investigation provides the opportunity to engage more fully with the body of literary research that has already been produced on these authors.

<p>This essay uses the concept of performativity to illustrate how identity change and the possibility to shape one’s identity, agency, are treated in Michael Ondaatje’s The English Patient. Originally a theory introduced by queer theorist Judith Butler, performativity explains how a sense of identity stems not from innate qualities but from behaviour, or stylized acts, that is regulated by the norms of society. These acts are not the effect but the cause of a sense of identity. Butler argues that since identity is shaped through interplay between the individual and society, it can be actively re-shaped, and that there thus is a possibility for the individual to achieve agency. As other theorists have pointed out, there are great difficulties and dangers in trying to subvert one’s identity in undesired directions. Some writers even question the suggestion that active identity change is at all possible. These theoretical ideas are fruitfully illuminating when reading The English Patient, where identities are shaped and re-shaped through performative patterns. By looking at the main characters of the novel, it becomes clear that while identity change is possible, most characters are not in control of these changes. Only characters that try to re-shape uncontroversial aspects of identity manage to achieve agency. This paper shows that not only does the text point to the dangers of trying to subvert controversial aspects of one’s identity. It also points to the difficulties of disentangling oneself from the societal mechanisms that one tries to oppose, and hence to the multilayered difficulties of achieving agency. While identities in The English Patient are not fixed but change, identity change only rarely entails agency.</p>