This study examines the function of oral narratives in Michael Ondaatje's representation of history. Ondaatje employs a variety of thematic, structural and stylistic oral narrative strategies in this inquiry. In the course of this work he faces the challenge of translating the open oral quality of the "tale" to the page. Ondaatje's longer prose works counter the printed text's tendency towards stasis through oral narrative and paralinguistic devices. Gradually, the aesthetics of public storytelling inform the process of historiographic revision. Within the oral model, ostensibly verifiable historical facts are no longer subjected to the laws of linear causality; therefore, any central single voice must relinquish its conventional claim to authority. Instead, several "speakers" tell of a shared history. Whereas conventional historiography often focuses on the effect of major historic forces, Ondaatje's oral model reveals how those on the periphery shape and define a given incident. Ultimately, the various participatory agents create the central event in the telling. The study concludes that Ondaatje employs oral narrative strategies to revise monolithic notions of history and to offer an open representation which draws attention to complexities ignored by conventional accounts.

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Criticism of Michael Ondaatje's prose emphasizes the author's deconstruction of familiar binary oppositions as he challenges history and authority. The criticism, however, neglects the opposition between men and women. This omission is surprising, considering the remarkable transition in the representation of women throughout Ondaatje's prose. Women in The Collected Works of Billy the Kid (1970) and Coming Through Slaughter (1976) are objectified: lacking the tools for self-representation, the women are framed as sites of sexuality, negativity, and darkness. In Running in the Family (1982), however, the narrator finds community with female family members, recognizing in himself the penchant for storytelling of his female relatives. Running bridges the earlier texts with the later In the Skin of a Lion (1987), where the narrator grants a more complex subjectivity to the women, empowering them with ability equal to that of men to take "responsibility for the story"(Skin 157).

Most inquiries into the nature of literary value have focused on how the academy shapes literary taste and determines the reputation of individual authors. This thesis examines how ideas of literary canon can impact a writer at the creative level. Michael Ondaatje's interest in the cultural significance of authorship makes him ideal for this topic of study. The first essay discusses how Ondaatje's repeated quotation of his own texts can be viewed as a metafictional commentary on the anxieties of literary innovation. It shows how the idea of literary influence and the author's relationship to the canon can be embodied as a formal and thematic characteristic of the literary text. The second essay shows how Ondaatje responds to traditional conceptions of the English-Canadian canon as an editor of a national anthology of short fiction. Early national anthologists beginning with E. H. Dewart in his Selections from Canadian Poets (1864) consolidated a set of evaluative criteria that reflected aspects of nineteenth-century English-Canadian nationalism. This essay examines two national anthologies that represent an alternative to this tradition. John Simpson's The Canadian Forget Me Not for MDCCCXXXVII (1837) is a representation of popular nineteenth-century bourgeois literary taste that predates this legitimating rhetoric. Michael Ondaatje's From Ink Lake (1990) renders an ironic commentary on this hundred-year-old legacy of canon formation.

Thesis (MA (English))--University of Stellenbosch, 2011. / ENGLISH ABSTRACT: In re-imagining the relationship between words and life, or alternately between self and world, the novelist is in a unique position not merely to reproduce these interlinked relationships through the practice of writing, but to use the unique possibilities extended by the form and content of the novel as literary genre to reveal this interpenetration of ontological and epistemological domains; to render visible what is normally regarded as separate. To disclose how the imaginative domain of fiction writing mirrors the novelistic character of material reality, this dissertation discusses three Michael Ondaatje works, The English Patient, Anil’s Ghost and Divisadero. Through a careful close reading it explores the manner in which Ondaatje‘s form of philosophical thought juxtaposes many genres and expressive forms into a highly complex, playful and self-referential metafictional whole. With a focus on close reading supplemented rather than determined by critical theory, this dissertation then sets out to demonstrate how the author‘s work advances the provocative central thesis that fictional texts not only reflect upon events, thoughts and emotions, but that philosophical works of literature and art are necessarily performative and interrogative, able to question aspects of the self, and ultimately able to present ethical ways of being and therapeutic escape to readers. / AFRIKAANSE OPSOMMING: Deur die voorstelling van die verhouding tussen woorde en die lewe, of alternatiewelik tussen self en wêreld, is die outeur uniek geposisioneer om nie net hierdie verwikkelde verhoudings deur die skryfproses weer te gee nie, maar ook om die unieke moontlikhede wat die roman as literêre genre bied, te ontgin. Eenvoudig gestel, die vorm en inhoud van die roman maak dit moontlik om hierdie wisselwerking van ontologiese en epistomologiese gebiede oop te vlek, om wat gewoonlik as afsonderlik beskou word, te beklemtoon en op die voorgrond te plaas. Om dan ten toon te stel hoe die verbeeldingryke gebied van fiksieskryfwerk die romankarakter van die materiële werklikheid weërspieel, fokus hierdie studie op ‘n bespreking van drie werke van Michael Ondaatje, naamlik The English Patient, Anil’s Ghost en Divisadero. Deur kritiese stiplees ondersoek hierdie verhandeling die wyse waarop Ondaatje se konkretisering van abstrakte en filosofiese idees teenoor verskeie ander genres en beeldende denkvorme geplaas word, en sodoende ‘n self-verwysende, uiters komplekse metafiktiewe geheel skep. Hierdie studie fokus op stiplees van die tekste, maar word ook aangevul deur literêre en filosofiese teorie. Uiteindelik poog hierdie studie om uit te beeld hoe die outeur se werk die uitdagende argument dat fiksie nie net gebeurtenisse, denke en emosies bepeins nie, maar dat filosofiese en literêre tekste en kunsvorme noodwendig dramatiserend en ondersoekend is. Tekste soos dié van Ondaatje beskik dan oor die vermoëns om eienskappe van die self te bevraagteken, en om eindelik etiese vorme van menswees en terapeutiese ontvlugting aan lesers te bied.

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