EN:

Most critics misread Robert Kroetsch's theoretical statement "The Fear of Women in Prairie Fiction: An Erotics of Space" as being prescriptive of Kroetsch's conception of male-female relationships rather than descriptive of relationships in previous prairie fiction. Similarly, critical views of Gone Indian perpetuate the repressive binarism the characters in the novel seek to escape. Kroetsch's novel portrays the struggle to escape the definition of identity in the restrictive binary form (East-West, male-female, stasis-flux, reason-intuition); Kroetsch's protagonist finds a way to define identity without resorting to binarism, or evades defining it at all. The book remains an open field, a wealth of possibilities offering a series of metamorphoses, rather than a single switch from one pole to its opposite.

EN:

En partant des théories du plurilinguisme romanesque de Bakhtine, on voit comment elles sont importantes lorsqu'on examine l'usage du vernaculaire ou d'idiogèmes dans le roman québécois, spécialement dans Le Salut de l'Irlande de Jacques Ferron. Les régionalismes du texte rendent difficile sa traduction, surtout lorsqu'on cherche à préserver la nature plurilinguistique de l'original. Dans le roman de Ferron, on se heurte à l'usage fréquent du mot pantoute, canadianisme souvent utilisé en conversation, qui distingue les personnages qui l'utilisent selon leur milieu socio-historique d'origine. Bien qu'il est utilisé dans le cas de dialogues, pantoute semble établir une satire envers la classe dominante anglaise pour qui le mot est inconnu. Il devient aussi quelque peu satirique au niveau de la classe dominée. L'usage polyphonique de pantoute établit ainsi une relation ludique, voire ironique, entre l'auteur, les personnages et le lecteur du texte, et crée donc l'architectonie du roman.

EN:

Malcolm Lowry's Hear Us O Lord from Heaven Thy Dwelling Place enacts the conflict between narrative desire and linguistic representation. Gérard Genette's assumption that the reader is undefined but always implied in narrative discourse and M.M. Bakhtin's Speech Genres provide the basis for a model of addressivity responsive to the complexities of Lowry's fiction. The addressivity of the text -- the role of the receiver of a message -- signals Lowry's questioning of the relation between notions of self and other within narrative. And it forces us, as readers, to re-examine our assumptions about the stability of narrative and language as modes of self-reference. Lowry's narratives succeed because they collapse what were regarded as stable and fixed narrative posts and because they repeatedly question uniform notions of reality.

EN:

Les débuts de la littérature acadienne étaient fondés sur le silence lié à l'origine l'histoire de l'Acadie. En un cours laps de temps, on passa d'un silence à une multiplicité de voix littéraires. L'analyse du roman de Claude LeBouthillier, Le Feu du mauvais temps, et du recueil de poèmes de Gérald Leblanc, L'Extrème frontière, démontre que l'exil et l'errance sont deux thèmes marquants de la littérature acadienne. Le lieu de création acadienne, dont les limites flottantes ne cessent de vaciller, est déterminé par un sentiment d'appartenance et d'exclusion. Le roman de LeBouthillier demeure non seulement un ouvrage qui permet de retrouver ses racines, mais aussi de se retrouver soi-même. En même temps, le recueil de Leblanc évoque une Acadie ouverte au monde et ouverte à diverses expériences. Les deux oeuvres expriment donc la similitude et la dissemblance du projet de l'Acadie littéraire.

EN:

A close comparison of Michael Ondaatje's In the Skin of a Lion and Hugh MacLennan's Barometer Rising reveals that Ondaatje's novel both challenges and has significant affinities with Canadian tradition. Both novels present revisionist readings of history from marginalized points of view; both juxtapose twentieth-century historical events with ancient texts (Homer's Odyssey for MacLennan's novel and The Gilgamesh Epic for Ondaatje's). Whereas Barometer Rising asserts Canada's importance in the world because of its traumatic participation in the First World War, In the Skin of a Lion celebrates the importance of the marginalized persons and events that have shaped Canada. Ondaatje's choices of marginalized people and events and the relatively unfamiliar Babylonian epic as intertext validate the use of the term "ex-centric" to describe his novel; however, like MacLennan's more typically Canadian novel, Ondaatje's ex-centric novel upholds traditional Canadian values.

EN:

Après la parution de son premier roman, 37 1/2 AA, Louise Leblanc s'est vue insérée instantanément dans l'institution littéraire québécoise. Le roman a obtenu le prix Robert-Cliche, ce qui causa la surprise chez les critiques. Ceux-ci ont critiqué l'aspect para-littéraire des oeuvres gagnantes de ce prix dans les dernières années. L'auteure, qui présente son oeuvre comme un pastiche des Harlequins, dit qu'elle était consciente de ses efforts de déstabiliser les conventions de ce genre littéraire marginal. Le roman s'affiche comme une caricature établissant une binarité confrontant le roman Harlequin à son pendant "littéraire". D'après les critiques, le roman ne réussit pas sa mission satirique; sa fin est conventionellement "Harlequin".

EN:

An examination of Duncan Campbell Scott's writing reveals a consistency between his 'outer' position as a civil servant and his 'inner' position as a writer who depicted Native people in his poetry and short fiction; his creative work provided imaginative expression of a colonialist ideology. Scott's treatment of the mixed-blood characters in his writings reveals a view of culture as an inherited quality, defined by one's blood, which can be altered in future generations through intermarriage and enforced through education in the ways of civilization. Through his depiction of mixed-blood characters who are both defined and limited by contrasting sets of characteristics 'inherent' in their blood, Scott reveals the belief that Native people possessed a 'savage' nature, which was determined by their blood. Scott's poetry and short fiction provide insight into the ideological context in which these works were created.

EN:

Dans Pélagie-la-Charette, Antonine Maillet, tout en étant consciente de la tradition réaliste et omnisciente du roman historique acadien, essaie de ce détacher de celle-ci en rendant hommage à la tradition orale. L'objectivité de la voix narrative, par l'expression de la multiplicité diégétique, perd son prestige et semble être impossible. Sans avoir recours à une objectivité personnelle, Maillet propose trois niveaux diégétiques, voire la diégèse apparente, la diégèse mise en abîme et la diégèse en puissance ou la situation d'énonciation. Même si ces trois voix sont séparées par le temps et l'espace, leurs mélanges de tons et de vocabulaires, attraits du plurilinguisme bakhtinien, n'empêchent pas la communication interdiégétique de s'établir. Donc, les personnages d'un espace-temps peuvent communiquer avec les personnages d'un autre espace-temps. C'est avec l'aide de ces éléments que Maillet peut subvertir les conventions du roman historique.

EN:

Don McKay uses the image of a dead raven, strung up with baler twine, as an opening into a meditation on appropriation of matériel, the nature of wilderness, the paradox of home-making, and the art of being a nature poet. The poet appropriates matériel from its autonomous existence, but matériel is never completely captured; wilderness, in McKay's definition, is not just a set of endangered spaces but the capacity of all things to elude the mind's appropriations. Home-making is another appropriation -- the settling of the self into the world -- but paradoxically, home both claims place and acts to become a place among others. Poetic attention is a form of knowing that counters the primordial grasp in home-making and celebrates the wilderness of the other. McKay's acknowledges his debt to Romanticism's conceptualization of nature, but claims that poetic attention is based on a recognition and a valuing of the other's wilderness; it leads to a work which is not just a vestige of the other, but a translation of it.

EN:

Floyd Flavel disputes the significance of cultural appropriation (which he calls a "non-issue") but says it is important to maintain one's culture by living through it: its strength, foresight, commitment, discipline and joy. He claims that aboriginal self-government would require a cultural and artistic mandate. The important issues for a playwright are "real" issues (wounds, obsessions, the past); these become the core of a play. The change in Native representation on the stage has come about because Native people are the ones putting Native characters on the stage, and he claims that the Native Earth Performing Arts is "the only place that is a nurturing ground for Native theatre."