No description available.

Thesis (M.A.)--Université de Sherbrooke, 1999. / Includes bibliographical references.

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

In this dissertation, I examine how the themes of memory, storytelling, and the construction of narrative identity develop in the works of Canadian authors Alistair MacLeod, Michael Ondaatje, and Jane Urquhart. As a means of delving more deeply into these themes, I focus on the specific narrative strategies that all three writers employ in the expression of the relationship between the individual and his/her community, as well as between physical and psychological realities. For the narrative voices in these authors’ works—given the different ways they envision and encode communal identity as constitutive of subjectivity—the past is inextricably embedded in the present. As they construct and record unfolding experience, a wider cultural history is written over with personal connections and significance. In the works of each of these authors, the act of telling stories (re)shapes people and events for the audience: speakers reform and reconstitute their experiences, allowing them both to rewrite the past and be haunted by it. Storytelling becomes an existential act in which personal landscapes are invested with structures of feeling that transcend local significance yet are manifested in everyday connections between ordinary people, and in daily (often unrecognized) struggles and acts of heroism. This includes a study of the means through which psychological evolution and trauma can be depicted. I also discuss how stylistic techniques such as fragmentation, repetition, self-reflexivity, and literary allusion function within these narratives. This aspect of my investigation provides the opportunity to engage more fully with the body of literary research that has already been produced on these authors.

In July 2010, the United Nations declared access to water and sanitation a human right. Certainly a success for water rights advocates worldwide, this resolution also poses a number of questions, such as how to find and distribute this water on a planet that is running out of fresh water (Barlow et al, Blue Gold xi). With this question in mind, this thesis looks at the treatment of water management projects in Michael Ondaatje’s In the Skin of a Lion (1987), Thomas King’s Green Grass, Running Water (1993), and Anne Michaels’ The Winter Vault (2009). More specifically, it examines the ways competing visions of the common good and of what development should (and should not) look like are imbricated therein. In so doing, my discussion focuses on the inextricability of social justice from water justice and it suggests that narrative can play a key role in connecting the two.

Zugl.: Köln, Univ., Diss., 2004

Thèses (M.A.)--Université de Sherbrooke (Canada), 1999. / Titre de l'écran-titre (visionné le 20 juin 2006). Publié aussi en version papier.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Rutgers University, 2009. / "Graduate Program in Literatures in English." Includes bibliographical references (p. 169-181).

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Texas at Austin, 2005. / Vita. Includes bibliographical references.

Thesis (Ph.D.)--McMaster University, 2004. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 142-154). Also available via World Wide Web.