FRE 312: French Language Practice II

The question "What is Quebecois literature?" may seem innocent and answerable, yet Rosemary Chapman's compelling study shows that to answer it is to chart the cultural history of French Canada, to put francophone writing in Canada in postcolonial context and to ask whether literary history,with its focus on the nation, is in fact obsolete.This remarkable book will be compulsory reading for scholars well-versed in francophone postcolonial studies and will also act as an ideal introduction for Anglophone scholars of Canadian literature.

In this volume, Florian Freitag provides the first history of the genre in North America from its beginnings in the middle of the nineteenth century to its apogee in French Canada around the middle of the twentieth. Analyses of a large number of farm novels written in French and English, Freitag examines how North American farm novels draw on the history of farming in nineteenth-century North America as well as on the national self-conceptions of the United States, English Canada, and French Canada, portraying farmers as national icons and the farm as a symbolic space of the American, English Canadian, and French Canadian nations.

Notions of place and space offer a framework for a variety of readings of the novels of Quebec. Works from the mid-nineteenth to the late twentieth century are used to offer the reader a series of detailed textual analyses, but also to illuminate aspects of the geography and history of Quebec.

French-Canadian fiction History and criticism.
Regionalism in literature.
Farm life in literature.
Country life in literature.
Roman québécois Histoire et critique.

In Narratology and Text, Paul Perron examines the role that literature plays in the formation of French Canadian identity. Perron presents a narratological and semiotic analysis of canonical non-fictional and fictional texts from New France and Quebec, and illustrates how citizens of French Catholic origins living in Canada have constructed their identity by defining the self as part of a closed community founded in race, language, and religion, and as radically opposed to the other, constituted as an omnipresent heterogeneous threat to the homogenous group.

Éd. originale: Québec : Librairie Garneau, 1937?

Andre Bourassa, in this important work, underlines the role played by artists and poets during the 1940s and the relationships among various groups. But his emphasis is on the literature of Quebec, from the first novel in 1837 (also the year of Quebec's first revolution), through the Quiet Revolution of the 1950s and 1960s, to the present. In manifestos, poems, articles, and theatre pieces he examines the nature of Quebec surrealism and its international context.

Translated from the 1990 French edition that won the Gabrielle Roy Prize for literary criticism. Paterson (French, U. of Toronto) investigates whether there is such a creature as a postmodern Quebec novel, what its forms are, and what are its sites of interrogation. Considers a representative sampli

The Outlander (French: Le Survenant) is a Canadian drama film from Quebec, directed by Érik Canuel and released in 2005. An adaptation of Germaine Guèvremont's novel Le Survenant, the film stars Jean-Nicolas Verreault as the title character, a mysterious stranger whose arrival in the small town of Chénal-du-Moine significantly shakes up the community.

A re-evaluation of regionalism in Canadian and American writing, A Sense of Place provides a comparative approach to the issue within a continental framework. The contributors to this collection-including Frank Davey, Marjorie Pryse, and Jonathan Hart-look at a broad range of writers. They explore regionalism on both sides of the border in light of the central political, cultural, literary, and theoretical debates of our times.

The texts they propose focus on the relationship between regionalism and modernism in Quebec, others on the links between French-language and English-language regionalisms, and others on regionalism as a social phenomenon. This work has made it possible to recognize the phenomenon of regionalism, particularly that of French Canada, a historical and ideological complexity that contrasts with the simplistic and often caricatural vision that some supporters of modernism sometimes oppose.

French-Canadian literature Québec (Province) 20th century History and criticism.
Regionalism in literature.
Littérature régionale Québec (Province) Histoire et critique.
French-Canadian literature.
Québec (Province) Vie intellectuelle 20e siècle.