The work of Jacques Ferron could well be defined by a paradox: to go forward one has to revisit one's past. Indeed, in his texts, Ferron, significantly, returns to his roots---literary and political---to understand, explain, and criticize his nation which at the time was preparing for the Quiet Revolution. Assuredly, Contes du pays incerain (1962) and Contes anglais (1964) are the two works in which are found the greatest number of references to great texts of the Western literary tradition. Ferron transposes classical and traditional Culture into his own and adapts many myths, biblical texts, and folk tales. Moreover, these two collections of tales, united in 1968 under the title Contes, but still independent of each other, allow one to understand, by their titles alone, that the author describes through them his vision of the nation, a bipolar Quebec where uncertainty is opposed to Englishness. From there it is only a short step to linking the present to the past: defining uncertainty and Englishness---signs of the collections' identity, signs, ultimately, of Ferron's vision of the nation---by looking into the processes of reactualization of Ferron's literary roots. Using an approach based on John J. White's method, this thesis proposes a mythocritical reading of Ferron's Contes. This approach allows one to retrace the path the author followed to understand his society. To understand Ferron's vision of the nation developed throughout his texts, one has to go back to the author's literary sources; to know to what extent uncertainty and Englishness are opposed, one has to analyse how each collection of tales transforms and gives new meaning to the myths and legends that are the foundation of the Western culture.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:LACETR/oai:collectionscanada.gc.ca:QMM.28251 |
| Date | January 1998 |
| Creators | Caumartin, Anne. |
| Contributors | Boucher, Jean-Pierre (advisor) |
| Publisher | McGill University |
| Source Sets | Library and Archives Canada ETDs Repository / Centre d'archives des thèses électroniques de Bibliothèque et Archives Canada |
| Language | French |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Electronic Thesis or Dissertation |
| Format | application/pdf |
| Coverage | Master of Arts (Département de langue et littérature françaises.) |
| Rights | All items in eScholarship@McGill are protected by copyright with all rights reserved unless otherwise indicated. |
| Relation | alephsysno: 001642380, proquestno: MQ43844, Theses scanned by UMI/ProQuest. |
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