Hierdie studie is In poging om uit die veelgeskakeerde digwerk van Sheila Cussons een draad te neem en dit deur te volg; in die hoop dat dit 'n Ariadne-draad mag word tot beter besef van die ryk gestruktureerdheid en diepte van haar verwysingsveld, en die betekenis daarvan vir ons tyd. Dis dan primer die beeld van die engel wat nagespeur word, as bonatuurlike wese wat nie tot die vlak van die fisiese inkorporeer nie. (From Ch. 1)

Thesis (M.A.)--University of Victoria, 2000. / Includes bibliographical references.

This thesis participates in a reconsideration of English-Canadian literary critical history through a reading of the critical construction of Sheila Watson's novel, The Double Hook. The thesis examines the rhetoric by which Watson's novel has been read as central to and representative of Canada's literary cultural maturity. That maturity has been measured by such modernist formal principles as the objective correlative and the mythical method, formalist standards and tastes valorized by New Criticism and by the synchronic mythographies of Freudian psychoanalysis, structuralist anthropology, and structuralist literary criticism (such as Frye's mythopoeics). The thesis argues that a structural mechanism of sacrifice is central to the literary critical narrative about this novel; that the myth-making by which violence becomes sacred and thereby marks the establishment, redemption, or survival of culture, is founded specifically on the sacrifice of women in The Double Hook.

This thesis examines the significant role of expressionist and minimalist visual aesthetics in the construction (imagery, structuring, language) and subsequent interpretation of Sheila Watson's The Double Hook. While Sherrill Grace's Regression & Apocalypse the groundwork for a literary expressionist reading of Watson's novel, this study elaborates the crucial links between literary and painterly expressionism in the novel and suggests Watson's critique of the expressionist aesthetic. A reading of the minimalist aesthetic, as both an extension of and an alternative to the expressionist reading of the text, emphasizes the relevance of noniconic painterly strategies to the novel and, by implication, of alternate forms of spectatorship that are demanded by the text. This study ultimately shows how Watson creatively synthesizes these extremes of modernist visual aesthetics and asks for the reader's imaginative and critical engagement with the modernist arts.

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This study examines heteroglossia and the dialogic nature of Sheila Heti’s novel Motherhood, published in 2018. The novel features a main character who muses on the question of whether or not to have children, the novel ending with her nearing the age of 40 and deciding not to try and become a mother. Through the use of M.M. Bakhtin’s theory of the novel as a dialogic medium, as well as Anne Herrmann’s theory on the female dialogic, the purpose of the study is to look at the way in which the main character comes to the conclusion not to have children. The novel is read through the lens of the languages and voices of different characters, determining whose language is allowed to be the dominant one, and the effect of these languages on the main character’s decision-making.

Cette recherche a pour but premier de mieux comprendre la participation des danseurs à la mise en oeuvre chorégraphique comme un facteur de construction des corps dansants. Pour rendre compte de cela, j'ai proposé une étude de l'oeuvre de deux chorégraphes contemporaines brésiliennes, Lia Rodrigues et Sheila Ribeiro. Cette recherche a également pour but d'identifier des manifestations de brésilités présentes dans les deux oeuvres chorégraphiques analysées, Aquilo de que somos feitos, de Lia Rodrigues et Marché aux puces: nous sommes usagés et pas chers, de Sheila Ribeiro et ce, tout en se demandant si ces manifestations de brésilités imprègnent aussi les corps dansants. Cette étude s'inscrit dans un paradigme postpositiviste et adopte une approche ethnographique comme méthodologie de recherche utilisant l'observation et l'entrevue comme instruments de cueillette de données. Le travail sur le terrain a pris la forme de deux études indépendantes, afin de favoriser l'immersion dans le travail de chaque compagnie. L'analyse et l'interprétation des données ont été réalisées à travers l'identification d'unités d'analyse et leur rassemblement dans des catégories d'analyse, en gardant un contact permanent avec les données brutes et le cadre théorique développé lors de la revue de littérature. La participation active des danseurs aux processus de mise en oeuvre chorégraphique est l'un des principaux aspects de la construction de corps dansants dans le contexte de Aquilo de que somos feitos et de Marché aux puces: nous sommes usagés et pas chers. Celle-ci demande aux danseurs de se détacher de leurs habitudes techniques, interprétatives et créatives pour pouvoir répondre aux sollicitations des chorégraphes, de même que pour proposer du matériau et des procédés pour la création et la recréation chorégraphique. Ainsi, la collaboration à la mise en oeuvre chorégraphique permet-elle aux danseurs de réinventer leurs corps en vue d'un projet chorégraphique, mais aussi en vue d'un projet de vie. Au-delà de certains éléments de la culture brésilienne qui peuvent être plus clairement discernés dans la mise en oeuvre de chaque pièce, je considère que ces deux chorégraphies présentent des aspects faisant référence à des représentations de brésilités liées à l'anthropophagie. L'anthropophagie, mouvement artistique développé au Brésil à partir des années 1920, se réactualise ponctuellement dans la démarche de certains artistes contemporains brésiliens. Ainsi, la métaphore anthropophagique condense-t-elle des manifestations de brésilités présentes dans Aquilo de que somos feitos et Marché aux puces: nous sommes usagés et pas chers. De même, le corps anthropophage devient une figure féconde pour comprendre la construction de corps dansants dans les démarches de Lia Rodrigues et de Sheila Ribeiro, tout en considérant que dans leurs créations se manifestent certains traits des brésilités. ______________________________________________________________________________ MOTS-CLÉS DE L’AUTEUR : Mise en œuvre chorégraphique, Construction du corps dansant, Danseurs contemporains, Danse contemporaine, Chorégraphes brésiliens, Brésilités.

This dissertation argues that a number of works of Canadian fiction usually designated as modernist fit more properly into the category of “late modernism”: a category that has only recently begun to emerge as a bridge between post-war modernism and emergent postmodernism. These works are aligned by their use of abstract, absurdist, or surrealist narrative structures and consequently by their refusal to adhere to conventional strictures of social realism. Because of this refusal, literary critics have identified the late-modernist emphasis on narrative form as necessarily ahistorical or apolitical. Conversely, I argue, these works are socially and politically engaged with the historical contexts and material conditions of their inception, composition, and consequent reception. I argue herein that the works of Sheila Watson, Elizabeth Smart, Malcolm Lowry, and John Glassco tend towards non-representational narrative forms, and in doing so, they engage in modes of cultural critique. These critiques are focused by a negotiation of what has been multiply identified as a “contradiction” in modernist art: while on the one hand the texts break with traditional forms of social-realist narrative out of a need to find new forms of expression in an effort to rebel against conservative, bourgeois sensibilities, on the other hand they are always produced from within the self-same socio-political economy that they critique. Whether this position is identified as a “modernist double bind” (following Willmott) or a “central paradox” of modernism (following Eysteinsson), I have argued that each author negotiates these internal contradictions through the integration of autobiographical material into their writing. In reading these works as part of a unified late-modernist narrative tradition, this dissertation aims to destabilize critical and popular understandings of mid-century Canadian prose and argue for an alternate reading of artistic interpretation of the twentieth-century Canadian condition. Such a reading challenges current canon formation because it destabilizes traditional critical accounts of these texts as instances of eccentric expression or singular moments of genius. Instead, we are asked to consider seriously the tendency for play with subjectivity and autobiographical material as an interpretive strategy to express the mid-century, post-war condition.

The first part of the thesis has the character of an exploratory probe, which is looking for the form and situation of textile art at present. It is based mainly interviews of experts in the field of textile art and experiences of the visited exhibitions. Part of this thesis is also personal creation, based on textile experiments. From these findings there was created a pivotal part in the form of a didactic project, inspired in particular by the creation of Sheila Hicks. Results and benefits of the work is to outline the current situation of textile art in our country and verified in a practical set of teaching practices focused mainly on the development of sensory sensitivity. The didactic methods are supplemented by reflections and extending or innovate variant sof lesson plans in Art Education.