The prairie ecosystem of the American Midwest has long been depicted as a "lost landscape." Two-hundred years of Euro-American settlement has degraded the ecological prairie through systematic removal of native grasses and forbs, replacement with nonnative and invasive plant species, disruption of longstanding disturbance regimes (such as prairie fires), and the fragmentation of ecosystem connectivity. The prairie's depiction in art, literature, history, politics, and our national environmental discourse, collectively referred to in this study as the "cultural prairie," has not fared much better. Beginning in the early nineteenth-century, explorers and soldiers, writers and artists, settlers and promoters perpetuated an image of the "vanishing prairie" in travel narratives prolifically published for consumption by a burgeoning American readership. As the "vanishing prairie" emerged as the accepted image of the prairie, narratives depicting its disappearance from the landscape became self-fulfilling prophecies. Language, and narrative in particular, thus contributed to the degradation of the ecological prairie. Narratives of the "vanishing prairie" are characterized by what Anishinaabe writer Gerald Vizenor terms "absence, nihility, and victimry." One remedy to these fatalistic narratives is Vizenor's notion of "survivance," which he defines as "an active sense of presence over absence, deracination, and oblivion; survivance is the continuance of stories" ("Aesthetics of Survivance," in Survivance: Narratives of Native Presence, ed. Gerald Vizenor [Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 2008], 1). Though Vizenor uses the term survivance principally to recover the stories, traditions, and identities of Native American cultures from Euro-American "simulations of dominance," his critical inquiries are more broadly applicable to the exploitation of the environment by many of the same policies, agents, strategies, and technologies that were put to use to propagate and promote state-sponsored ideologies of uniformity, homogeneity, and monoculturalism throughout the American Midwest. "Prairie survivance" is thus an attempt to make the prairie a presence, not an absence, in mainstream environmental discourse and debate, including the study of American literature and the fields of environmental criticism (or ecocriticism), place studies, and cultural geography. My argument begins with a critique of Euro-American travel narratives popularized throughout the nineteenth-century by the likes of Washington Irving, George Catlin, "Buffalo Bill" Cody, and others. These travel narratives perpetuated the trope of the "vanishing prairie" by employing stock images and narrative techniques, none more pervasive than the bison hunt. Specifically, the dramatic hunt sequences of these travel narratives reinforced the eradication of the bison from the ecological prairie. However, the consequences of these narratives are not limited to the time of their writing; instead, the "lost landscape" image of the prairie remains persistent to this day as a direct result of its misrepresentation in the travel literature of the nineteenth century. The second half of my argument entails a reading of counternarratives that envision a much different past, present, and future for the prairie. The bison's recovery in narratives by Luther Standing Bear, James Welch, N. Scott Momaday, and Mary Oliver is one example in which the fate of the prairie is not limited to its inevitable demise. Moreover, I have coined the term "aesthetics of restoration" to describe the prairie's presence in the work of Aldo Leopold, Paul Gruchow, Annie Proulx, and Linda Hogan (among others), each of whom overturns nihilistic images of the prairie as a "lost landscape" by writing about its restoration and permanent return to the landscapes of the American Midwest. Narrative's potential for healing is realized in these examples, a cornerstone of narrative ethics.

This thesis develops an argument that psychogeography can provide alternative, yet familiar, approaches to social work research and pedagogy. Psychogeography refers to studies of how our psychological experiences, such as our thoughts and feelings, are connected to our being in places. The present study was designed to be a novel application of a psychogeographic exercise in a social work learning context. For this research project, I met with five undergraduate students and interviewed them as we walked through the neighbourhoods surrounding their field practicum placement settings. My interviews with these students focused on the thoughts, feelings, memories, and experiences that they associated with these places. This exercise inspired critical reflection of diverse themes; including the impacts that places of placement environments had on the participants' development of their existential identity and critical consciousness. I argue that psychogeography evokes such reflection because its conception is rooted in efforts to develop creative and participatory engagement in place-based reflection for inspiring social justice activism. As such, the philosophical work of phenomenology and the action-seeking work of critical theorists can orient psychogeographic place studies to be congruent with social work research that aims to develop holistic and critical social justice-oriented education and practice. / Thesis / Master of Social Work (MSW)

L’été au Parc Belmont est un recueil de fragments qui allie prose narrative, photographies d’archives familiales, écriture manuscrite et dessins. Le récit relate l’enquête d’une narratrice sur l’identité de son père et la difficile mise au tombeau de celui-ci. Dans ce projet d’exhumation du passé paternel, la parole phagocytante de la narratrice rassemble toutes les informations qu’elle peut trouver et demeure l’unique énonciatrice du récit. C’est dans une temporalité ressassante, mélancolique et non linéaire que se déroule l’intrigue; entre l’enfance du père le long de la rivière des Prairies, son adolescence à Cartierville et sa vie adulte dans une ville de banlieue, le présent de l’enquête vient faire irruption. Le recours à des archives familiales sous forme de photographies et de vidéos pour l’élaboration de ce recueil problématise le rapport entre le texte et l’image. Ainsi, les photographies sont utilisées de diverses manières : photos qui apparaissent dans le texte sans qu’on les convoque directement, photos dont est donnée une ekphrasis elliptique ou falsifiée, photos accompagnées de légendes détournées, etc. Cartographies du père propose une réflexion sur les liens qu’entretiennent le topographique et le biographique dans les textes littéraires contemporains. Dans le cadre de cet essai, je m’intéresse à un corpus doublement mixte : québécois et américain, mais également narratif et graphique. L’étude porte plus exactement sur trois autrices et auteurs, soit Alison Bechdel (Fun Home : A Family Tragicomic, 2006), Hervé Bouchard (Harvey ou Comment je suis devenu invisible, 2009) et Catherine Mavrikakis (La ballade d’Ali Baba, 2014). Au-delà des rapports entre transmission et lieu, les textes de mon corpus sont liés par la mort du père, perte indépassable, événement toujours à investiguer pour les narratrices et narrateurs. Il s’agit non seulement d’analyser la manière dont ces textes thématisent l’absence paternelle ainsi que les difficultés et les apories de la transmission qui en découlent, mais aussi de quelles façons ils représentent le lieu, jouent avec l’espace de la page, mobilisent les outils de la cartographie et décrivent les trajets. Pour ces héritières et héritiers, la reconstruction d’un événement ou d’un passé familial passe nécessairement par une reconstitution du lieu, qu’il soit la campagne de la Pennsylvanie, la maison familiale des Bouillon ou le chemin entre Montréal et Key West. L’analyse de cette reconstitution du lieu informe le lecteur du rapport que l’héritier entretient avec la figure paternelle. Cartographies du père offre également une réflexion sur l’acte de raconter l’autre et sur les recours fictionnels inévitables que cette entreprise oblige. / L’été au Parc Belmont is a collection of fragments that combines narrative prose, family archive photographs, handwriting and drawings. In this story, the narrator is investigating her father’s identity. The narrator gathers all the information she can find and remains the sole enunciator of the story in her attempt to exhume the paternal past. The plot unfolds in an overwhelming, melancholy and non-linear temporality; between the father’s childhood along the Rivière des Prairies, his adolescence in Cartierville and his adulthood in a suburban town, the narrator’s investigation periodically bursts in. The use of family archives in the form of photographs and videos problematizes the relationship between text and image. Thus, photographs are used in various ways : photos which appear in the text without being directly referred to, photos which are given an elliptical or falsified ekphrasis, photos accompanied by diverted legends, etc. Cartographies du père offers a reflection on the links between topography and biography in contemporary literary texts. In this essay, I am studying a corpus that is both Québécois and American, as well as narrative and graphic. The study focuses on three authors : Alison Bechdel (Fun Home : A Family Tragicomic, 2006), Hervé Bouchard (Harvey ou Comment je suis devenu invisible, 2009) and Catherine Mavrikakis (La ballade d’Ali Baba, 2014). Beyond the relationships between transmission and locales, the texts of my corpus are linked by the father’s death, an unsurpassable loss, an event that is yet to be investigated by the narrators. While this essay focuses on the way in which these texts thematize paternal absence –namely through the difficulties and shortcomings of the transmission resulting from this loss – it is also questioning the ways in which the authors represent various locales, play with the space of the page, mobilize mapping tools and describe routes. For these heirs, the reconstruction of a family event or history necessarily involves a reconstruction of the setting, whether it be the Pennsylvania countryside, the Bouillon family home or the road between Montreal and Key West. The analysis of the reconstruction of the locale informs the reader of the relationship that the heir maintains with the father figure. Cartographies du père also offers a reflection on the act of remembering and talking about another person and on the inevitable fictional shifts that this action provoke.