This dissertation attempts to develop a counter—memory,
a cognitive strategy that provides an alternative to the
most prevalent mode of political action by members of
minority or subaltern groups: identity politics. It begins
with Teresa de Lauretis’ semiotics of subjectivity, which
posits the human subject as a shifting series of positions
or habits formed through semiotic and cognitive “mapping”
of, and being “mapped” by, its environment. De Lauretis
maintains that the subject can transform social reality
through an “inventive” mode of mapping. The first chapter
of this study is a semiotic analysis of the memory system at
work in Nicole Brossard’s Picture Theory. It argues that
Brossard’s use of holographic technology is an invention
that attempts to alter women’s maps of social reality.
Quantum physicist David Bohm has also employed the hologram
as a theoretical model. By merging Brossard’s holographic
memory with Bohm’s theory of a “holomovement,” this study
develops an epistemological strategy that alters not only
the map of reality, but also the dominant representational
mode of cognitive mapping.
This enquiry then moves on to other novels written in
Canada which have a strong political impetus based on
gender, nationality, ethnicity, race and/or class: Margaret
Atwood’s Surfacing, Marlene Nourbese Philip’s Looking for
Livingstone, Beatrice Culleton’s In Search of April Raintree
and Régine Robin’s La Ouébécoite. Through textual analysis,
it attempts to establish that although these novels make no
mention of holography, each of them employs a memory system
that inscribes itself holographically. That holographic
memory provides an alternative political strategy to the
“identity politics” at work in each of these texts. Each
text, in turn, like a fragment of a hologram, adds another
structural and political dimension to the hologram. The
processual structure of the holographic theory provides a
ground for alliances between different political agendas
while resisting closure. As an epistemological strategy, it
promises to alter both the method and the ground of
knowledge.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:LACETR/oai:collectionscanada.gc.ca:BVAU.2429/7031 |
| Date | 05 1900 |
| Creators | Thompson, Dawn |
| Source Sets | Library and Archives Canada ETDs Repository / Centre d'archives des thèses électroniques de Bibliothèque et Archives Canada |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Electronic Thesis or Dissertation |
| Relation | UBC Retrospective Theses Digitization Project [http://www.library.ubc.ca/archives/retro_theses/] |
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