By the late nineteenth century childbirth was firmly established in the domestic sphere. However, in the early years of the twentieth century different forms of maternity clinics were established where normal, as well as complicated, deliveries could take place. The aim of this dissertation is to analyse the institutionalisation of maternity care in a local urban context, the role of women in confinement in this process, and its impact on infant mortality. The geographical setting of the thesis is Sundsvall, a town in northern Sweden. The study concentrates on the period spanning from 1900 to 1930, when local communities, rather than federal agencies, were charged with creating and implementing community standards for maternity care. In order to lower the mortality rate of illegitimate infants, and to improve delivery conditions for unmarried women, a maternity home was opened in Sundsvall in 1913. Moreover, a maternity ward was established at the local hospital in 1920. In this study it is clear, that when institutional maternity care became available, the transition was rapid and unhesitating. When analysing the local practices it is possible to highlight the central role women played as part of this process. Initially indigent women and women bearing children out of wedlock accepted the institutional alternative, but shortly thereafter married women of means turned to the newly created wards. As a result of this early acceptance, these institutions were soon filled to capacity. During the period in question a significant reduction in infant mortality rates can be noticed in the Swedish towns. A reasonable assumption is that the institutionalisation of maternity care improved infants chances of survival. In the study it is suggested that the institutionalised maternity care made an impact on neonatal mortality, as well as on post-neonatal mortality. The study shows that local practices of care played a key role in infant survival. This dissertation reveals the value of examining local practices in order to understand the rapid changes of maternity care. Childbirth changed from being a private matter, taking place in one’s home, to be a public concern, taking place in the institutional setting. At the 1937 Parliament (Riksdag) the responsibility for institutionalised maternity care became a public and a State concern, and maternity care became a part of the Swedish welfare system.

La narrazione letteraria autobiografica si presenta come un genere di difficile definizione e quasi ai confini della letteratura, caratterizzato da un insieme inestricabile di testualità, referenzialità e costruzione. il narratore autodiegetico si pone il complesso obiettivo di riordinare la propria storia di vita, dando un senso ai ricordi, nel momento stesso in cui ne decide l'ordine e la composizione. Ci proponiamo qui di rintracciare le origini del genere autobiografico ed evidenziare la continuità della tradizione dei fondatori in alcuni casi rappresentativi della narrazione letteraria autobiografica del ventesimo secolo. / Autobiography is difficult to define as a literary genre and is almost at the boundaries of literature. It is marked by an inextricable mixture of textuality, referentiality and construction. The autodegetical narrative aims at giving an order to a life story, thus attributing a meaning to memories in the same time as it defines their order and composition. We intend to trace back the origin of the autobiographical genre and underline the continuity of tradition in some representative examples of literary autobiographical narrative of the twentieth century.

Twentieth-century American literature is filled with new images of motherhood. Long gone is the idealism of motherhood that flourished during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries in life and in writing. Long gone are the mother help books and guides on training mothers. The twentieth-century fiction writer ushers in new examples of motherhood described in novels that critique the bad mother and turn a critical eye towards the role of women and motherhood. This study examines the trauma surrounding twentieth-century motherhood and surrogacy; in particular, how abandonment, rape, incest, and negation often results in surrogacy; and how selected authors create characters who as mothers fail to protect their children, particularly their daughters. This study explores whether the failure is a result of social-economic or physiological circumstances that make mothering and motherlove impossible or a rejection of the ideal mother seldom realized by contemporary women, or whether the novelists have rewritten the notion of the mother’s help books by their fragmented representations of motherhood. Has motherhood become a rejection of self-potential? The study will critique mother-daughter relationships in four late twentieth-century American novels in their complex presentations of motherhood and surrogacy: Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye (1970), Kaye Gibbons’s Ellen Foster (1990), Dorothy Allison’s Bastard Out of Carolina (1992) and Sapphire’s Push (1997). Appropriated terminology from other disciplines illustrates the prevalence of surrogacy and protection in the subject novels. The use of surrogate will refer to those who come forward to provide the role of mothering and protection.

<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.