Documents found
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368.More information
AbstractThat all epistolary exchange is based on a pragmatic form of giving, on a gesture which, because there is no guarantee of any return, creates a permanent debt between the partners of the exchange — this is what is suggested by Saint-Denys Garneau in the letter written at Sainte-Catherine-de-Portneuf on December 30, 1932. The letter writer undertakes an intense accounting activity which confers a priceless quality on his offering. This article attempts to locate this practice of epistolary giving in the discursive context of Québec in the thirties, at a time when the gift system appeared to major doxographists as an alternative to the utilitarian morality and market economy that had pushed Québec into the Depression. Deeply engaged with the ideology of his time, Saint-Denys Garneau also appears as an epistolary usurer, speculating on the corporatist logic of the gift in order to launch his own writing career.
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369.More information
AbstractMoments of biographical rupture, in particular certain strong moments in life's cycle, are apparently favorable to the appearance of diaries and other personal writings about one's self among those, both men and women, with the adequate scriptural skills and a certain maintained level of familiarity with the written word. Writings about oneself can then be catalogues of experiences, written about, re-read and re-written, or fictitious situations in preparation for real actions. Potentially these documents are a place for self-reflexivity, on one's past and one's future. Either during the actual crisis or afterwards, the written word permits working on the schemes of one's experience. While the existence of personal writings is a good indicator of the writer's reflexivity (on-going, retrospective or prospective) on his or her life, the study of texts produced within the framework of such an activity should permit a detailing the nature and functions of this introspection.
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370.More information
Like many of his contemporaries, Victor-Lévy Beaulieu has produced work that radically challenges the Québécois relation to history, particularly through his dream of a work that would finally enable Québec to accede to history. This Book—La Grande Tribu, which Beaulieu has been promising for over thirty years but has never finished—is the embodiment of the arrested time that is a specific feature of Québec's historicity. Analysis focuses on traces of the Book in some of the author's most determining novels, and on the consequences of its suspended writing. To the figures of historicism leading the work to the worst contradictions are opposed, here, the logic of messianism as principle of legibility – a Jewish messianism, to be distinguished from the “French Canadian messianism” that is treated ironically in novels Don Quichotte de la démanche and Satan Belhumeur.