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642.More information
AbstractThe hybrid form espoused by Jean Echenoz' Un an represents a major trend in contemporary French fiction. Its narrative offers a twofold discourse : both a plot-driven story seeking a realistic representation of the world and an ethnological inquiry fueled by social commentary. The novel, initially inspired by the 1996 anti-mendicity laws, gradually shifts the emphasis from the depiction of events to the presentation of the characters' thoughts and narrator's comments. The narrator operates from a « negative » perspective, which demystifies the illusion of reality while expanding the space around the fictional world ultimately transforming it into a « novelistic essay ».
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643.More information
In Le roman à l'imparfait (1976), Gilles Marcotte sums up his analysis of Une saison dans la vie d'Emmanuel by Marie-Claire Blais with these words, “We can laugh, it's okay.” But what does this laughter mean? Why is it so rare that it must be coaxed out, as if not directly perceptible to the reader? This paper raises this question based on Marie-Claire Blais's novel, as well as Gérard Bessette's Le libraire and Jacques Ferron's Le ciel de Québec. It postulates that the laughter underpinning the Québec novels of the Quiet Revolution is unlike the “carnavalesque” laughter proposed by Mikhaïl Bakhtin and echoed by André Belleau and several other Québec critics. Rather, like Pierre Popovic who questions whether the notion of “carnavalesque” reversal applies to contemporary literature, the above novels are analyzed to see if their ironic distancing is incompatible with the tumultuous notion of the carnavalesque. Their humour is more a “head laugh” than a “fun laugh,” based more on individual than collective sentiment, and hard to fit into the nationalist ideology. Herein a measure of the liberty enjoyed by the Québec novel with watchwords of the Quiet Revolution.
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644.More information
In the present era of the visual, the image that was once a synthesis is today more and more synthetic. In moving from the smoothness and purity of synthesis to the coarseness and texturedness of the synthetic, technology has reached a new level of transparency. Driven by the Hollywood star system, it occupies an ever-increasing share of Quebec screen space. Despite the cultural danger of American control over its film indusry, Quebecois identity sometimes finds novel solutions for self-affirmation. Studying the film Screamers by Christian Duguay (1996) shows how Quebec cinema can play Hollywood's transparency game, yet still oppose the values that underlie it.
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