The starting point of this essay was the frustration I felt after having read the novel Nadja (1928) written by the French surrealist André Breton. The title promises the story of someone called Nadja but the promise stays unfulfilled. Recognition of this phenomenon, where a man writes a book about a woman, but the woman hardly is seen, made me want to examine it further. Using the theories of the French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan I analyze the relation between the male narrator and his female object. I also compare Nadja to a precursor: the novel Bruges-la-morte (1892) of the Belgian symbolist writer Georges Rodenbach. Their stories are, to a large degree, similar. The male main character meets a woman who becomes the center of his world for a short period of time, before he in Nadja rejects her, and in Bruges-la-morte kills her. What differentiates the two books mainly is, that whereas Breton uses Nadja as a tool to emancipate his unconscious in order to be able to create, Hugues tries to replace his dead wife with Jane in order to be able to desire a living object. The setting for both stories is the City, which seems to be analogous to the Woman. I examine the possible interpretations of the notion of the City as it appears in the two novels. The Lacanian notions of the Thing and objet petit a are essential for the understanding of the function of the Woman in these stories, I argue. Nadja is a femme-enfant, a muse, and the objet petit a for the male poet, i.e. the narrator of Nadja. Jane, the woman in Bruges-la-morte, is a femme fatale, and the Thing for the main character Hugues.

Texte remanié de: Thèse de doctorat--Histoire de l'art contemporain--Paris 10, 2006. / Bibliogr. p. 499-540.

Cette thèse entreprend d'étudier l'invention du surréalisme en regard de la découverte critique du baroque. L'art et la littérature baroques sont nés à la fin du XVIe siècle, mais seront occultés pendant près de deux cents ans. Ce n'est qu'à la fin du XIXe siècle qu'on les redécouvre et qu'on construit même une notion pour les désigner, le baroque. Au courant du XXe siècle, les travaux sur le baroque se multiplient dans toute l'Europe et tentent d'adapter les critères de cette notion issue de l'histoire de l'art à la littérature. Tandis que les chercheurs français commencent peu à peu à s'emparer de cet objet d'étude, le surréalisme se constitue en tant que mouvement et ne cesse de rechercher des prédécesseurs qui ne s'inscrivent pas dans l'histoire littéraire des manuels scolaires. Sans défendre une vision transhistorique du baroque, cette étude interroge d'une part, l'influence de cette notion moderne sur le surréalisme et, de l'autre, les affinités entre les artistes et auteurs nommés baroques et ceux surréalistes. À travers un historique de la réception du baroque, il s'agit dans un premier temps de montrer ce à quoi correspondait précisément la notion de baroque au moment où le surréalisme en était encore à ses débuts, soit jusqu'à la première moitié des années trente. De même, sa perception par les membres du mouvement y est également étudiée. Ce travail de recherche montre ensuite comment la pratique de l'automatisme qui caractérise les débuts du surréalisme est marquée par une théâtralité proprement baroque, telle que les premiers spécialistes l'ont définie. La vision du théâtre chez les baroques et chez les surréalistes se trouve par la suite analysée, afin de montrer cette fois la présence d'éléments communs aux auteurs baroques et à ceux surréalistes. Enfin, le merveilleux surréaliste se trouve mis en parallèle avec la meraviglia baroque, à travers la question des cabinets de curiosités, celle de l'image surréaliste et de la pointe baroque, ainsi que celle du procédé de l'anamorphose. ______________________________________________________________________________ MOTS-CLÉS DE L’AUTEUR : Surréalisme, Baroque, André Breton, Louis Aragon, Histoire littéraire, Théâtre, Merveilleux.

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With the fear of decline of the Cape Breton fiddling tradition after the airing of The Vanishing Cape Breton Fiddler by the CBC in 1971, both the Cape Breton community and ethnographers clamored to preserve and maintain the extant practices and discourse. While this allowed for performance contexts and practices to burgeon, it also solidified certain perspectives about the “diasporic preservation” and resultant “authenticity.” This work aims to trace the seeds and developments of the beliefs surrounding the Cape Breton fiddling tradition, from the idealizations of Enlightenment Scotland to the manipulation and commercialization of the folklore and Celticism of twentieth-century Nova Scotia. These contexts romanticized older practices as “authentic,” a construct that deeply impacted the narrative about the Cape Breton fiddling tradition. One of the most rooted and complex concepts in this narrative is that of “old style,” a term that came to represent the idealized performance practice in post-1971 Cape Breton fiddling. As models were sought for younger players to emulate, pre-1971 “master” fiddlers with innovative stylistic approaches began to be identified as “old style” players. The interstices of the tradition allowed more extreme stylistic experimentation to be accepted as “traditional,” while the symbiotic social practice of dancing necessitated relative conservatism. Analysis will show that “listening” tunes fell into the interstices of allowable innovation, while dance (particularly step-dance) tunes demanded certain “old style” techniques. A more holistic view of the complexities of the Cape Breton fiddling tradition follows from a perspective not only of the socio-musical elements that shaped the historical narrative, but also of the musical elements of this dance-oriented “old style.”

The purpose of this qualitative research study was to understand the facilitators and/or barriers to safer drug use and sexual practices among a sample of young female injection drug users (IDUs) who live in small towns/rural communities in Cape Breton, Nova Scotia. This study examined how economic status, relationships, social roles, small town/rural living, and stigma function as facilitators and/or barriers to safer practices. Eight female IDUs aged 20-31, living in small towns/rural communities in Cape Breton, engaged in face-to-face, semi-structured interviews. The women described what day-to-day life is like for female IDUs living in small towns/rural communities. They spoke about managing drug addiction, their understanding of safer and unsafe injection drug use and risky and safer sexual practices, as well as their experiences with services/supports. The information obtained from this study will help to inform harm reduction policy and program initiatives.

Human-coyote conflict has intensified in Nova Scotia, following a fatal attack in Cape Breton Highlands National Park of Canada (CBHNPC) in October, 2009. This conflict has impacted people and coyotes across the province, and raised numerous questions about how humans and coyotes relate to one another and what steps we might take to avert future conflict. From 2011-2012, I used scat, remote camera, and snow tracking surveys to assess the degree of spatial overlap between human and coyote activity in CBHNPC. I found a negative correlation between hiker/biker and coyote activity in the summer and fall [r=-.830, n=14, p<.01]. In the winter, I found no correlation between human and coyote activity [r=.006, n=10], and a negative correlation between coyote and domestic dog activity [r=-.612, n=10, p<.05]. I discuss the implications of these research findings and the application of noninvasive survey methods in this, and potentially other, human-wildlife conflicts.

With the fear of decline of the Cape Breton fiddling tradition after the airing of The Vanishing Cape Breton Fiddler by the CBC in 1971, both the Cape Breton community and ethnographers clamored to preserve and maintain the extant practices and discourse. While this allowed for performance contexts and practices to burgeon, it also solidified certain perspectives about the “diasporic preservation” and resultant “authenticity.” This work aims to trace the seeds and developments of the beliefs surrounding the Cape Breton fiddling tradition, from the idealizations of Enlightenment Scotland to the manipulation and commercialization of the folklore and Celticism of twentieth-century Nova Scotia. These contexts romanticized older practices as “authentic,” a construct that deeply impacted the narrative about the Cape Breton fiddling tradition. One of the most rooted and complex concepts in this narrative is that of “old style,” a term that came to represent the idealized performance practice in post-1971 Cape Breton fiddling. As models were sought for younger players to emulate, pre-1971 “master” fiddlers with innovative stylistic approaches began to be identified as “old style” players. The interstices of the tradition allowed more extreme stylistic experimentation to be accepted as “traditional,” while the symbiotic social practice of dancing necessitated relative conservatism. Analysis will show that “listening” tunes fell into the interstices of allowable innovation, while dance (particularly step-dance) tunes demanded certain “old style” techniques. A more holistic view of the complexities of the Cape Breton fiddling tradition follows from a perspective not only of the socio-musical elements that shaped the historical narrative, but also of the musical elements of this dance-oriented “old style.”

Thesis (doctoral)--Humboldt-Universität, Berlin, 2004. / Bibliography: p. [507]-525.

With the fear of decline of the Cape Breton fiddling tradition after the airing of The Vanishing Cape Breton Fiddler by the CBC in 1971, both the Cape Breton community and ethnographers clamored to preserve and maintain the extant practices and discourse. While this allowed for performance contexts and practices to burgeon, it also solidified certain perspectives about the “diasporic preservation” and resultant “authenticity.” This work aims to trace the seeds and developments of the beliefs surrounding the Cape Breton fiddling tradition, from the idealizations of Enlightenment Scotland to the manipulation and commercialization of the folklore and Celticism of twentieth-century Nova Scotia. These contexts romanticized older practices as “authentic,” a construct that deeply impacted the narrative about the Cape Breton fiddling tradition. One of the most rooted and complex concepts in this narrative is that of “old style,” a term that came to represent the idealized performance practice in post-1971 Cape Breton fiddling. As models were sought for younger players to emulate, pre-1971 “master” fiddlers with innovative stylistic approaches began to be identified as “old style” players. The interstices of the tradition allowed more extreme stylistic experimentation to be accepted as “traditional,” while the symbiotic social practice of dancing necessitated relative conservatism. Analysis will show that “listening” tunes fell into the interstices of allowable innovation, while dance (particularly step-dance) tunes demanded certain “old style” techniques. A more holistic view of the complexities of the Cape Breton fiddling tradition follows from a perspective not only of the socio-musical elements that shaped the historical narrative, but also of the musical elements of this dance-oriented “old style.” / Arts, Faculty of / Music, School of / Graduate