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Claiming space : exile and homecoming in Roughing it in the bush and Obasan

The narrators of Roughing It in the Bush and Obasan struggle with the notion of home and how to reinvent it in situations of exile. Moodie is estranged when she emmigrates from Britain to Canada to find her role compromised by the rigors of the pioneering experience. Naomi, a Japanese Canadian is estranged when she and her family are expelled from their home, relocated in internment camps, and dispersed across the country during the Second World War. I argue that reinventing home requires both questioning and claiming material and discursive spaces. / Moodie reinvents home by negotiating Old and New World spaces of gender, class and culture. Naomi reinvents home by questioning official, exclusionary discourse and testifying to the Japanese Canadian history of internment and dispersal. Both narrators negotiate borders between private experience and public discourse and in the process, explore the question: "What is the meaning of home?"

Identiferoai:union.ndltd.org:LACETR/oai:collectionscanada.gc.ca:QMM.21199
Date January 1998
CreatorsCaylor, Jennifer.
PublisherMcGill University
Source SetsLibrary and Archives Canada ETDs Repository / Centre d'archives des thèses électroniques de Bibliothèque et Archives Canada
LanguageEnglish
Detected LanguageEnglish
TypeElectronic Thesis or Dissertation
Formatapplication/pdf
CoverageMaster of Arts (Department of English.)
RightsAll items in eScholarship@McGill are protected by copyright with all rights reserved unless otherwise indicated.
Relationalephsysno: 001658982, proquestno: MQ50502, Theses scanned by UMI/ProQuest.

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