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"The Found Boat" by Alice Munro foregrounds the cultural inscription of its female subject by the phallocentric society in which she lives -- a twentieth-century Canadian small town with clearly delineated traditional gender roles. The female subject undergoes the repression and definition by lack necessary in the traditional psychoanalytic view for her entry into the symbolic order; however, Munro uses a strategy of paradox and its exposure of the split image of gender in the female subject to resist this episteme. Julia Kristeva's theory of the paradoxical desire to reify and subvert authoritarian structures of language and literature serves to illustrate the ironic positioning of Munro's work. Munro's text posits a "lie": mimicking realist literary convention and the psychoanalytic tradition, "The Found Box" implicates itself, like its opening image of the Flood, in paradox's subversion of authority.

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Entre la Seconde Guerre mondiale et le milieu des années soixante, le mouvement des femmes au Québec est en veilleuse. À l'instar du roman féminin de 1964 à 1970, on commence à percevoir un mouvement qui se tranformera graduellement en une deuxième grande vague du féminisme au Québec. Dans son analyse de neuf romans de cette période, Brown approche l'émancipation graduelle de la femme fictive qui, selon elle, conduira progressivement au féminisme des années soixante-dix. Les romans étudiés sont Le Coeur sauvage et La Fleur de peau d'Hélène Ouvrard, Aldébaran ou la fleur et Le Grand élixir de Claire de Lamirande, L'Île joyeuse de Louise Maheux-Forcier, L'Itinéraire de Simone Landry-Guillet, La Saison de l'inconfort de Paule Saint-Onge, Les Remparts de Québec d'Andrée Maillet et Dis-moi que je vis de Michèle Mailhot.

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The plight of the artist is central to Malcolm Lowry's fiction; Under the Volcano contains numerous references to artists and artistic figures. Lowry establishes the Consul's role as artist in several related ways: the Consul's identification with writers or literary characters; his simultaneous involvement with and isolation from the world (with its consequent fragmentation and dissolution of the self); and his meagre writings -- a poem, an unmailed letter, and the unwritten book. The unwritten book highlights Lowry's theme of the instability of language and its failure as a means of salvation. The association of writing with death and entrapment is also a recurrent theme: the Consul's solipsistic reading of the world dooms him to isolation. In Lowry's view, any art not founded on the capacity to love is doomed to failure: the Consul therefore fails as an artist.

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Au cours de l'histoire du roman québécois, on remarque un motif plutôt négatif du Patron. L'existence de ce personnage "méchant" serait due au sentiment d'aliénation canadienne-française face à l'exploitation capitaliste par l'anglophone. Jacques Poulin, dans son roman Les Grandes Marées (1978), essaie de déloger cette attitude négative négative envers le patron en essayant de lui donner un caractère plus positif. En examinant les différentes versions non-publiées du roman, Levasseur démontre comment la figure du patron dans le roman de Poulin passe d'un personnage significatif développé dans la première version du manuscrit à un personnage secondaire plat dans la version finale du roman.

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Most critics of Sinclair Ross's As For Me and My House give more critical attention to the narrated character, Philip, but the novel is Mrs. Bentley's journal; she is the maker of the story. Ross offers the reader an unusual experience: a male-authored text in which the reader is invited to identify with a feminine experience and perspective presented as the human one. Mrs. Bentley is both powerless -- oppressed in the spatial, temporal, physical, and marital spheres -- and a manipulator, whose attempts to bind her husband to her alienate some readers. In her diary, Mrs. Bentley struggles against her worst fear: her own unimportance. She articulates for readers the yearning that our lives mean something. Ross creates a tough-minded, ruthlessly frank, female narrator, one whose words name, and in the naming overcome, the conditions that threaten her.

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Bien que l'oeuvre entière d'André Langevin est marquée par la solitude, Une chaîne dans le parc devient le roman par excellence de l'incommunicabilité, de la rupture, du désespoir et de la mort. Le roman est parsemé d'états-limites ou de paroxysmes d'amour et de mort qui sont accompagnés par la violence. Dans l'ordre croissant d'excès et de violence, Oore étudie l'acte sexuel, le suicide et le meurtre qui semblent être causés par la solitude et la non-communication humaine. Pour dire les choses de façon véritable, la communication linéaire adulte doit être boulversée. Cette nouvelle forme de communication, après la solitude, la violence et la mort, rend possible la création et assure donc la continuité dans le roman de Langevin.

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The narrators in Alistair MacLeod's "The Road to Rankin's Point" and Neil Gunn's Highland River return to the moments of disjunction caused by the nineteenth-century highland clearances in order to recover parts of themselves and their culture through a reconstruction -- through remnants of oral narrative, music, and the ruins which mark the landscape -- of the lost people in their ancestral pasts. For both MacLeod and Gunn, the dislocation and cultural erasure caused by the clearances have deep resonances in the present-day communities they write of and recurring ramifications in the continuing disintegration of highland culture due to migration. Scottish and Canadian writers such as Gunn, MacLeod, Margaret Laurence, and Iain Chrichton Smith textualize the culturally disruptive moments of the highland clearances in moments when past and present intersect in order to establish personal identity in the present and make visible, through the subjectivity of personal narrative, what received history has rendered invisible.

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Liées à la mort et à l'amour, les représentations de "la plongée dans la mer" sont un aspect thématique important qui fournissent plusieurs lectures à portée symbolique dans L'Étoile pourpre d'Alain Grandbois. Bolduc explique comment la plongée devient un geste de révolte et de découverte symbolisant un renouveau de l'existence humaine. Elle devient aussi élément regénérateur du retour à l'état originel d'avant la "Faute". La mer, élément naturel, fait face à l'histoire humaine, élément culturel. Par ce fait, la plongée devient symbole de transcendance du temps dans Grandbois. La mer est donc un élément de continuité entre le mythe et l'histoire.

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Robert Thompson offers one reading of Gerry Gilbert's Moby Jane through "Picture Windshield." For Gilbert, life is diachronic, moving, made of things and things happening, "incidents" which are "incidental" to one another, and to the poem. Engaging the space in Gilbert's writing frees the reader from the "fixed." Gilbert's writing is representative of "a life tracking itself." Add the reader's tracks to Gilbert's and the readings/ relationships in Moby Jane become multiple. Layout, syntax, word-play -- all contribute to the open play of signification. Gilbert's perception and writing are grounded in the local, but it isn't always possible to make sense of Gilbert's work, for he is frequently simply playing -- with words, images, concepts, and people, including the reader.

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Considéré pendant de nombreuses années comme le théâtre en marge de celui professionel, le théâtre amateur, pendant et après la révolution tranquille, devient un médium de questionnement idéologique qui a non seulement contribué au développement du théâtre québécois, mais aussi à l'histoire culturelle récente du Québec. En 1958, la création de l'ACTA (Association Canadienne du Théâtre Amateur) qui deviendra plus tard l'AQJT (Association Québécoise du Jeune Théâtre) assura la promotion du théâtre de création et de recherche québécois. S'opposant aux institutions sociales, économiques et politiques dominantes, l'ACTA-AQJT facilite la présentation de pièces "à risque" et promouvoit les jeunes dramaturges. Bélanger analyse l'historique du théâtre amateur québécois et de l'ACTA-AQJT jusqu'à son démantèlement en 1985.

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Roo Borson talks about the importance of memory to her work. In Whole Night Coming Home (1984), "memory turns the past into fiction . . . writing about it takes it one step further." Her work becomes, in Quinn's words, "word paintings of memories." She claims that she is "North American" in that she has an affinity with the landscape of North America. Her poetry is very "flesh and blood"; she shares with Daphne Marlatt and Erin Mouré a "sensuousness in the world that is made manifest in the writing." Although she claims that she doesn't write for a particular audience, "The motive for writing poetry is somehow to sing or to speak. To sing or speak requires a listener." What matters to her is not her critical reception but that the individual reader finds something meaningful in her work.