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Michael Ondaatje's In the Skin of a Lion is rife with living bodies which are more than machines used as a means of productions or shells of an essential self, bodies which experience physical sensations and are abused by hard labour and the deliberate infliction of pain. Heroism and story-telling inform the representation of bodies in the text; both Caravaggio and Temelcoff fulfill superior masculine stereotypes through their bodies. Patrick's body reveals truths about himself and his situation; he eventually turns to female models of a relationship with one's body (as patterned by Alice and Clara). When he chooses to tell Alice's story to Harris, Patrick becomes the storyteller rather than the physically powerful hero, demonstrating that the body, though socially inscribed, can become a site of change.

EN:

In her prose fiction, Emily Carr rejects the modernist notion of a unified self and opts for a polyphonic self-portraiture. In Klee Wyck, The Book of Small, The House of all Sorts, and Growing Pains, the reader discovers a mature woman creating and re-creating earlier versions of herslef and subsequently interacting with them. Instead of isolating formative circumstances and interpolating a subject from causal sequences, Carr constructs a series of voices/personae whose historic specificity is uncertain. Carr's anecdotes present the unstable collage of self in autobiographies that resist (mis)interpretations; her voices can be likened to containers that protect their contents.

EN:

In "Antigone," Sheila Watson juxtaposes the desire for order and stability within families, institutions, and governments against the ominous threat of madness and anarchy. Through the appropriation and reshaping of classical myth, Watson explores many topics: Michel Foucault's concept of discipline as a covert form of power; the shadowy line between sites of danger and safety; the problems created by boundaries and borders; the ambivalence between the idea of nature as a walled paradise or an unruly wilderness; and the importance of ritual to society. Antigone transgresses the public peace in Creon's kingdom through her subversive burial ceremony of a sparrow on the hospital grounds. As in the other three Oedipal narratives, Watson uses madness to signal atrophy and to indicate the need for change; through Creon and Antigone, Watson explores through the collision that results when extreme rationalism confronts unrestrained passion. Closed and hierarchically structured institutions -- familial and communal -- become arenas of explosive confrontation.

EN:

Puisque la littérature acadienne est encore à ses débuts, la création d'une institution littéraire semblable à l'Académie Française devient difficile. Il faut d'abord s'entendre à ce qu'est exactement la littérature acadienne et comment les textes inclus la définissent. Souvent, il semble que plusieurs auteurs et plusieurs textes essayent d'établir leur propre définition du territoire acadien. Faut-il donc écrire l'Acadie dans ses textes afin qu'ils soient considérés valables? D'après Jacquot, plusieurs auteurs ont dû s'exiler afin de pouvoir écrire en toute liberté, des textes qui, à l'intérieur des bornes de l'Acadie, ne sont pas nécessairement considérés acadiens. Pour être accepté dans l'establishment littéraire acadien, il a fallu pendant de nombreuses années que la vision collective soit plus importante que celle individuelle. Bien que certains textes et certains auteurs marginaux sont aussi intéressants que ceux centraux, on les voit souvent exclus de l'institution littéraire en Acadie. En s'inspirant d'examples du Québec et de la France, Jacquot essaie de déterminer quelles oeuvres sont considérées valables, comment on les choisit, et qui les choisit.

EN:

Depuis de nombreuses, le théâtre acadien s'est établit en essayant de se démarquer de son voisin québécois et de son ancêtre français. C'est une production théâtrale se basant sur l'identité acadienne que l'on a vu naître. Au contraire des pièces québécoises et françaises, les pièces acadiennes sont rarement publiées; le théâtre acadien existe plutôt au niveau de la représentation. Depuis les années soixante et l'apparition des pièces d'Antonine Maillet, on développa une entreprise théâtrale bien particulière. Au début, les clichés de l'identité acadienne étaient souvent à la base des représentations. Les efforts des dramaturges contemporains tournent moins autour de l'identité acadienne, mais s'accentuent plutôt vers des situations universelles. L'histoire nostalgique du pays, élément dominant autrefois, est lentement disparu, et on utilise maintenant un language standard au lieu du vernaculaire. De cette façon, les dramaturges acadiens contemporains ouvrent au monde leurs représentations théâtrales.

EN:

W.H. New claims that Duncan Campbell Scott's In the Village of Viger is the first in a rich tradition of Canadian short story cycles. It is also an expression in fiction of turn-of-the-century North American anti-modernism. The primary thematic concern of the collection is the threat posed by the advance of metropolitan modernity upon the traditional conception of the family and the ideal of community itself. The culminating story, "Paul Farlotte," explores the dominant theme of the fractured family, in concert with other themes from the preceding stories: madness, romance, industrialization, and "progress". In the stories, Scott envisions the possibility of a new order emerging, in which the concepts of "family" and "community" would be redefined without losing their traditional functions of conserving and transmitting values.

EN:

Roch Carrier's La Guerre, Yes Sir! is essentially a novel of decolonization, in which Carrier exposes the dangerously protective values of commitment to the land and the Church and the fallacies of tradition by which French-Canadians have been subordinated and dominated. The novel's attempt to reject the debilitating view of a peaceful, idyllic, rural life -- as portrayed in Louis Hémon's Maria Chapdelaine -- successfully brings to light the violence, both linguistic and behavioural, that characterizes a colonial revolt. Carrier's characters feel unable to overcome the social, religious, sexual, and economic realities that frustrate them; their struggle unites them as a culturally homologous community, but also ties them to their oppressors, the Anglais.

EN:

Robert Wallace, in his analysis of critical responses to translated French-Canadian theatre in Toronto, argues that efforts to bridge the cultural gap have sometimes been sabotaged because of a failure to acknowledge, accept, and account for cultural differences. Jane Koustas examines critical responses to translated Quebec theatre in Toronto from 1951 to 1982 and considers general trends through the divergent reviews in the daily press. Particular attention is paid to the critical response to the question of place, as well as the importance attributed to the translation and translator. Michel Tremblay emerges as the most popular Quebec playwright in Toronto, despite the problems of translating his trademark "joual" and the failure of critics to recognize the political and social connotations of his work. As Wallace observes, Toronto institutions either appropriate or dismiss work that is culturally different; in the case of Tremblay, the critical response dismisses the political, Quebec message while appropriating the universal elements.

EN:

Theodore Dreiser's An American Tragedy and Frederick Philip Grove's A Search for America are similar in their focus on the metaphor of America. Juxtaposing the two works gives insight into significant differences in Canadian and American conceptions of personal and national identity and valuations of the margins. Both protagonists, Dreiser's Clyde Griffiths and Grove's Phil Branden, suffer from their position as social outsiders and develop strategies to deal with their marginalization. The Canadian traveller distinguishes himself from his American counterpart through his self-conscious linguistic flexibility. Branden survives, not because he creates a name or well-defined identity for himself, but because he eludes the notion of a fixed identity in his journey towards self-creation. Griffiths's yearning to merge with the society that excludes him means that the only self he has is the one he will become; his language is emptied of meaning until he vanishes like a "nobody." In both novels, metaphors of self-creation are interwoven with metaphors of national identity. Dreiser's ironic tragedy dramatizes the ultimate expulsion of the scapegoat; Grove's ironic comedy-romance ends with the protagonist's overt reconciliation with North American society.

EN:

Bien qu'il considère sa poésie comme un geste égoïste, Gérald Leblanc affirme que l'acte social de la publication devient aussi un acte politique. Il a commencé à écrire afin de donner un sens au language. Cette fascination se traduit pour Leblanc par l'écriture d'une Acadie différente de cette "Acadie-de-la-mer" traditionnelle. Dyane Léger, influencée par les écrits de Nelligan, dit qu'elle s'est tournée vers l'écriture parce que celle-ci facilite le voyage dans l'imaginaire. Pour elle, l'écriture est, plus que les autres médiums de l'art, sans frontières. Son choix d'écrire en français dans un milieu majoritaire anglophone transforme aussi son écriture en un acte politique.