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.

In July 2010, the United Nations declared access to water and sanitation a human right. Certainly a success for water rights advocates worldwide, this resolution also poses a number of questions, such as how to find and distribute this water on a planet that is running out of fresh water (Barlow et al, Blue Gold xi). With this question in mind, this thesis looks at the treatment of water management projects in Michael Ondaatje’s In the Skin of a Lion (1987), Thomas King’s Green Grass, Running Water (1993), and Anne Michaels’ The Winter Vault (2009). More specifically, it examines the ways competing visions of the common good and of what development should (and should not) look like are imbricated therein. In so doing, my discussion focuses on the inextricability of social justice from water justice and it suggests that narrative can play a key role in connecting the two.

Approaching the idea of the library as a polyvocal, self-contradictory and even paradoxical dream, this thesis examines five select texts to examine how this dream emerges across vastly different representations in fiction. Discussed texts include Jorge Luis Borges’ “The Library of Babel” and “The Book of Sand,” Michael Ondaatje’s The English Patient, Ian McEwan’s Atonement, and Thomas Wharton’s Salamander. Special attention is given to the archetypal opposition between daytime’s clarity and night’s disorder, as well as to Alberto Manguel’s two hypothesized library foundational myths, the Tower of Babel and the Library of Alexandria. Although it attempts to remain conscious of social realities surrounding and producing historical libraries, this thesis is primarily concerned with the textual irruption of libraries in fictional narratives, and while its argument articulates the problematic dimension of libraries, it also endeavours to show how libraries are healthy, necessary, and even inevitable human creations. / A survey of library representations in select literary texts.

This thesis addresses four Canadian immigrant English-language prose writers in order to identify commonalities and differences in their literary representations of the immigrant experience over time. While origin and ethnicity factored in the selection of writers so as to ensure diversity, the primary selection criterion was to obtain a significant historical range, from the 1830s to the present. The writers selected are: Susanna Moodie, an immigrant from England in the mid-19th century; John Marlyn, an immigrant from Hungary in the early-20th century; Michael Ondaatje, an immigrant from Sri Lanka via England in the mid-20th century; and Rawi Hage, an immigrant from Lebanon via the US in the late-20th century. I conclude that there are significant similarities among the works of all four writers, generally attributable to their shared experience of being immigrants, and equally significant areas of divergence, generally attributable to the development of Canada, with Moodie and Marlyn on one side of an important watershed in the mid-1950s, and Ondaatje and Hage on the other. All four write extensively of the experience of the immigrant with a fundamental similarity in their depiction of isolation, non-belonging and dislocation. Over time, the representations of isolation have become more complex, mirroring the increasing diversity and complexity of Canadian society. The mid-1950s shift in Canadian immigration policy from preferred British, US, and Northern European immigration to multinational immigration has resulted in increased diversity of both the Canadian immigrant population and Canadian literature. While the environment of the immigrant to Canada changes, one constant has been and is likely to continue to be a sense of dislocation, non-belonging and isolation, of being an uninvited outsider, or survenant. Canadian literature has reflected this reality consistently for almost 200 years and will no doubt continue to do so.

Zugl.: Köln, Univ., Diss., 2004

Teilw. zugl.: Köln, Universiẗat, Diss., 2004.

Thèses (M.A.)--Université de Sherbrooke (Canada), 1999. / Titre de l'écran-titre (visionné le 20 juin 2006). Publié aussi en version papier.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Rutgers University, 2009. / "Graduate Program in Literatures in English." Includes bibliographical references (p. 169-181).

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Texas at Austin, 2005. / Vita. Includes bibliographical references.

Thesis (Ph.D.)--McMaster University, 2004. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 142-154). Also available via World Wide Web.