<p>Focusing on a diverse set of creative work from Europe, East and South Asia, the Americas, Middle East, and Africa, Minor Measures investigates modalities of world writing through modernist, postcolonial and contemporary transnational literatures in the intertwined moments of imperialism, developmentalism and globalism. It studies the category of world literature as a heterogeneous set of narrative-cognitive forms and comparative modes of gauging from a particular positionality the world-systemic pressures on individual and collective bodies. To this end, Minor Measures focuses on the dynamic and increasingly central role of geoliterary imagination in fashioning a secular hermeneutic that maps the relationships and overlaps between the local and the global, here and there, past and present, self and other. Moreover, it highlights the capacities of the literary aesthetics in configuring local subjectivities, affiliations and histories in relation to the abstract cartographic totality of global modernity. Shuttling back and forth between the two poles, literature as world writing refers to the unconscious framework of representing the contingencies of the lived experience of economically, racially, and geographically differentiated subjects from metropolitan, (post)colonial and diasporic positions.</p> / Dissertation

Keywords: Animalisierung, Einfühlung, Ethology, Expressionism, Painting, German Modernism In this study I deploy the perspective of ethology to examine Franz Marc's paintings of animals. To perceive animals ethologically means acknowledging that animals feel, think, experience, and imagine the world. Ethology has come to include interpretive pursuits as well as traditional field studies, and as I show, Marc's practice encompassed both aspects of this evolving discipline. To establish the presence of ethology in the humanities I give a "case study" of what I call "retroactive ethology" in the work of J.M. Coetzee. I present an account of Marc's deep knowledge about real live animals. I offer an assessment of the inspiration Marc drew from Post-Impressionism and Egyptian art and show how Marc modernizes animal painting by demolishing long-standing conventions of the genre. I offer some ideas to more fully explain two important terms Marc uses, Animalisierung and Einfühlung. Throughout my paper I keep conceptual and historical observations closely tied to Marc's own words and images. Thus by reading and looking closely, we are able to see Marc as a dedicated and innovative ethologist whose implicit environmental commitment offers great comment upon contemporary discussions of the representation of the animal.

The work grafted hymnologies, a piece for chamber orchestra, explores connections between twentieth century formalist compositional techniques and formalist techniques of pretonal music. This document, which accompanies the score for the piece, provides an analysis of the work that explains the various techniques and their application to the music. This piece is composed in five large sections. The work pairs compositional techniques associated with pre-tonal music from those of twentieth century modernist music. For example, the second section employs the Medieval idea of tropes-- each time the melody is repeated, new melodic material is added, in the style of the elaborations to the Gregorian repertory that were common as early as the tenth century. This is paired with a single pitch class drone that evolves by timbral modulation, a technique influenced in part by Schoenberg and carried out exactingly by Elliot Carter. Each section contains a similar pairings, which are explained in detail herein. That these kinds of pairings could co-exist in a single piece seems natural; certainly, the intricate formalism that appeared in some Western concert music before 1600 exhibits a certain degree of aesthetic concurrence with the formalist music of the early to mid- twentieth century. Artistically, reaching back to the past (both near and far) and creating something new is an interesting exploration of how history can inform the creative process. / text

This dissertation reveals a twentieth-century tradition of poetic formalism that positions race, gender, and sexuality as formal concerns, and further, as key factors in the development of contemporary formal poetics. My readings of three contemporary poets, Akilah Oliver, Sharon Bridgforth, and Alice Notley, combine formalist analysis with cultural approaches, including critical race theory and queer theory, to show how contemporary poets use form to confront racist, sexist, and homophobic representational traditions and to reshape identity discourse. This project intervenes in a critical tradition that divorces poetic form from political context and neglects formal aspects of poetries that engage with social identities, especially African American poetry. As Notley, Oliver, and Bridgforth portray racial, gender, and sexual diversity—including gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgendered bodies—they invent and remake forms, genres, and textual strategies, from the feminist epic to the performance novel. These new forms exceed the strategies of rupture, fracture, and fragmentation that marked many modern and postmodern experiments and, in fact, reveal the limitations of rupture as a means of political critique. Instead, they widen the field of formalism, incorporating performance genres (epic, storytelling, blues) and new textual strategies to call attention to the histories of bodies and their representations, assert interdependent identities, promote pluralism, and insist on the interrelationship of literature, orality, and bodily experience. / text

À partir du projet d’écriture d’une chronique que Céline met en avant lorsqu’il parle de son œuvre dans l’après-guerre, ce mémoire examine l’hypothèse selon laquelle le genre des chroniques médiévales fait, dans Nord, l’objet d’une réécriture permanente et déterminante pour la version de la Seconde Guerre mondiale de Céline. La notion d’horizon d’attente de Jauss permet d’abord de démontrer comment Nord reconstruit le discours testimonial et l’éthos de la vérité qui fondent la légitimité de chroniqueurs comme Villehardouin ou Clari afin d’accréditer une version illégitime des événements de 39-45. Au récit magnifié de la « Libération », Céline oppose en effet une chronique de l’épuration et un témoignage sur la vie quotidienne dans l’Allemagne de 1944. Idéologiquement nationalistes, les chroniques médiévales forment une lignée de la francité à partir de laquelle Céline crée une fiction politique passéiste qui projette sur les événements de 39-45 la géopolitique d’une Europe médiévale afin de cautionner les partis pris d’extrême droite de l’auteur. Par ailleurs, Nord accentue la propension autobiographique de certaines chroniques et la confond avec une lignée de mémorialistes disgraciés. Ceux-ci lui fournissent le plaidoyer pro domo qui orchestre toute la rhétorique d’autojustification de l’écrivain dans l’après-guerre : s’autoproclamer victime de l’histoire afin de justifier a posteriori les pamphlets antisémites et ainsi s’exonérer de tout aveu de culpabilité. Enfin, Céline qualifie Nord de « roman » par référence à la part d’affabulation des chroniqueurs. Pour représenter l’histoire en une Apocalypse advenue sans justice divine et sans héros, Nord procède en effet à une réactivation des genres fictionnels comme la légende, l’épique et le chevaleresque qui s’entremêlaient à l’histoire dans les Chroniques de Froissart. Cette réécriture entre fabula et historia est donc d’abord une création de romancier qui, dans le contexte de crise de la fiction de l’après-guerre, procède à un épuisement du roman par l’histoire. / Rooted in the chronicle writing exercise that Céline upholds when speaking about his post-war work, this memoire examines the hypothesis that the genre of medieval chronicles establish, in Nord, a permanent and definitive rewriting of Céline’s version of the Second World War. Jauss’ reception theory permits a demonstration of how Nord reconstructs the testimonial discourse and the ethos of truth, which are the foundation of the chroniclers Villehardouin or Clari, in order to give credence to an illegitimate version of the events of 1939-1945. In the magnified narrative of “Liberation”, Celine in fact opposes a chronicle of the épuration and an eyewitness account of daily life in Germany, 1944. Nationalist in ideology, medieval chronicles trace a French tradition from which Celine creates a pacifist political fiction and projects the geopolitics of medieval Europe upon the events of 1939-1945 in order to legitimize the author’s extreme right political leanings. Nord accentuates the autobiographical propensities of certain chronicles and merges them with a tradition of disgraced memorialists. This provides the pro domo plea instrumental in orchestrating the rhetoric of self-justification in the writer’s post-war works : to proclaim himself a victim of history in order to justify a posteriori the anti-semite pamphlets and therefore to self-exonerate of all admission of guilt. Finally, Céline qualifies North as a novel as a reference towards the fabrication of the chroniclers. To represent history as the coming Apocalypse without divine justice and without heroes, North proceeds to reactivate fictional genres such as legend, epic, and chivalry which become entangled with history in the Chroniques of Froissart. This rewriting between fabula and historia is therefore a creation of a novelist who, within the context of the post-war fiction crisis, proceeds to deconstruct the novel through history.

Mémoire numérisé par la Division de la gestion de documents et des archives de l'Université de Montréal

Mémoire numérisé par la Division de la gestion de documents et des archives de l'Université de Montréal / Pour respecter les droits d'auteur, la version électronique de cette thèse ou ce mémoire a été dépouillée, le cas échéant, de ses documents visuels et audio-visuels. La version intégrale de la thèse ou du mémoire a été déposée au Service de la gestion des documents et des archives de l'Université de Montréal.

Studies of outdoor recreation and the social construction of wilderness have shown how urban consumption of wilderness areas dispossessed rural residents from traditional land uses. Though essential for understanding power struggles over land use, these studies pay little attention to rural involvement in creating recreational areas. In contrast, this dissertation focuses on how rural non-indigenous people used, enjoyed and constructed their own recreational hinterland. Set in twentieth-century British Columbia, where wilderness adventure is popular and where mountains, oceans and lakes lend themselves to romantic and sublime aesthetics, the case studies here examine rural recreation by considering the forms that “rural” has taken in British Columbia, the relationship of civil society to government, conceptions of Crown and private land as a commons, the production and consumption of recreational spaces, and ethics such as woodcraft, “leave-no-trace,” the “good life” and postmaterialism. The sources include interviews with participants in these activities and archival sources such as diaries, newspapers, government records on parks, forestry and transportation, and letters that citizens wrote to government. This material is set within the context of historical studies of outdoor recreation, the social construction of wilderness, automobiles and parks, the informal economy, and the contested commons. The first two case studies involve the imaginative transformation of mountain landscapes into parks and playgrounds to attract tourists at Mt. Revelstoke and on Vancouver Island’s Forbidden Plateau. During the Second World War, the province was reluctant to create parks for local recreation, but at Darke Lake in the Okanagan, the Fish and Game Club lobbied successfully for a small park, challenging the supremacy of logging as an essential war industry. After the war, the state’s view of parks shifted. The provincial government promoted recreational democracy, and offered parks as part of the “good life” to working families from booming single-industry towns, sometimes responding to local demands as in the case of the Champion Lakes. Inspired by the American Wilderness Act of 1964, some British Columbians sought to preserve large tracts of roadless, forested land. The Purcell Wilderness Conservancy (1974) in the Kootenay region resulted from a local trail-building effort and a letter-writing campaign. Beginning in the late 1980s, retirees in Powell River started building trails on the edges of town. This group is still active in ensuring that their forested hinterland remains an accessible commons for recreational use. The rural British Columbians discussed in these case studies consistently engaged with the backcountry as their recreational commons where they could combine work and leisure, harvest non-timber forest products, and promote tourism. Rural residents who were willing to volunteer and enjoyed some leisure time forged networks among tourism promoters and applied for government funding to create access to recreational space, and protect it from uses inconsistent with recreation, such as logging. British Columbians have claimed the right to access Crown land as a commons for recreation in a variety of ways over the twentieth century and these case studies show how rural agency has played a significant role in creating recreational space.

Australia in the early 50s followed a decade or so of frenzy activities in the visual arts. This resurgence of Australian art which led to its recognition in the UK and the United States also brought about a renewed recognition in the quality of domestic architecture. New boundaries in the design of the Australian home were being redefined, both in theory as well as in practice. Although the decades between the two Great Wars saw the importation of such influences as the Californian Bungalow and Art Deco styles (shades of Dudok, Mendelsohn etc.), it was during the post-war years that the term organic architecture that was much discussed by a wide range of practitioners of the time. This research aims to trace the journey of organic architecture from its origin to Australia and provide some insight into the workings of those who claimed to have practiced it.

This thesis examines Spanish representations of Muslim and Jewish cultures in Morocco during the colonial campaigns in the Rif (1909-1927) in relation to constructions of Spanish identity during this period. It focuses on visual and textual narratives in the press (colonial photojournalism) and on three literary texts: Carmen de Burgos' En la guerra (1909), Ernesto Giménez Caballero's Notas marruecas de un soldado (1923) and Arturo Barea's La ruta (1943). The analysis undertaken centres on the use of the motifs of the body and the city and references to the medieval Castilian ballad tradition, the Romancero, by writers and photographers to explore the cultural relationship between Spain and North Africa. The chapters explore the delineation of boundaries between Spanish and Moroccan cultures by contemporary commentators and the power structures that underpin those boundaries, considering the different hierarchies that are established in Spain's relationship with Moroccan Muslims and Jews. Chapter 1 concerns the socio-historical context of the colonial campaigns and highlights the significance of the question of Spain's identity in relation to Morocco during this period. Chapter 2 compares representations of cultural and ethnic affinity between Spain and Morocco, arguing that beyond merely serving as a tool of colonial domination, they are harnessed in some cases to support the colonial venture, in others to challenge it, and yet in others to explore the pre-modern origins of the Spanish nation. In many of the examples examined, a process of self-Orientalisation is observed, where the 'Orientalist' and colonialist gaze is turned back on Spain as well as on Morocco. Chapter 3 examines representations of Muslim and Jewish alterity, arguing that these assertions of difference reveal Spanish anxieties about non-difference from North Africa, cultural regression, national fragmentation, and Spain's ability to dominate the protectorate. I conclude that these anxieties provide the fundamental underpinning to Spanish constructions of Morocco during the Rif War, and that this self-awareness about non-difference and failures of domination unsettles the predominant paradigm of discourse analysis within colonial studies.