Sharon Pollock's plays have made a significant contribution to Canadian drama
over the last three decades; however, the majority of scholarly research on her work has
concentrated on one particular play-Blood Relations-and for the most part these studies
focus on feminism and metadrama. My thesis examines Pollock's use of the memory
play and how within this genre the playwright metaphorically places one (or more) of
her characters under investigation. The notion of memory is present in practically all of
her plays, but to focus my argument I select dramatic works where a rememberer
distinctly guides the audience from the play's present into the past. Because several of
her memory plays are based on historical events I use an historiographical approach to
illuminate her texts.
In the six Pollock works that I examine a crime or social wrongdoing has taken
place in the past, and one of the central characters needs to revisit the injustice from the
play's present. Through memory, the past is restaged and the character who experiences
the inquiry tries to understand, justify, and/or defend his or her position in the events.
Instead of determining if the characters are legally responsible for the crime or
wrongdoing, my investigation focuses on their level of moral responsibility in the social
injustice. I propose to examine the moral inquiries within Pollock's work in the context
of three types of memory plays, and these form the basis of my three main chapters:
third-person memory (Walsh, The Komagata Mam Incident), first-person memory (One
Tiger to a Hill, Moving Pictures), and multi-person memory (Doc, Fair Liberty's Calf).
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:LACETR/oai:collectionscanada.gc.ca:BVAU.2429/12963 |
| Date | 05 1900 |
| Creators | Belliveau, George Andre |
| 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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