Dimension lapsisee : revised subjectivity in Quebecois women’s narratives

“Dimension lapsisée: Revised subjectivity in Québécois women’s narratives” argues that the long-standing binary divisions of Montréal that are rooted in the double colonisation of its territory have created a discursive space that is reminiscent of what Gloria Anzaldúa terms ‘borderlands’ in her 1987 publication Borderlands – La Frontera. In particular, this study is a critical discussion of the construction and modification of subjectivity emerging from the Montréal borderlands. It is based on the reading of selected first-person narratives in English and French that have been published since the beginning of the Quiet Revolution. These close readings of narratives – and fiction/theories – by Nicole Brossard, Gail Scott, Nathanaël, Heather O’Neill, and Zoe Whittall are at the core of my dissertation. The investigation of the ways in which the literary productions of these writers are critical of cultural norms is characteristic of many encounters that take place in contemporary Montréal. Because of their hyper-awareness of the structures of anglophone and francophone colonialism, these writings intervene to disrupt cultural preconceptions of imperialism, patriarchy, and heteronormativity. More generally, they challenge cultural as well as linguistic homogeneity and nationalisms. By and large, I take a historical approach to investigate the following question in this project: How has the crossing of cultural, linguistic, and ideological borders been addressed in narratives by bilingual, anglophone, and francophone Québécois women writers in Montréal for the past three decades?\nThis dissertation explores Montréal writing, analysing the urban topographies it maps, the social encounters it stages as well as the representations of both, and its many trans-lingual experiences and experiments. In particular, my readings of French Kiss (1974), Le désert mauve (1987), Main Brides (1993), My Paris (1999), Paper City (2003), The Sorrow and the Fast of It (2007), Lullabies for Little Criminals (2006), and Bottle Rocket Hearts (2007) focus on the notion of ‘subjectivity.’ On that account, first-person narrating subjects are at the centre of my study. Relying on theories of performativity, I outline the process of alteration of the subject as well as the deconstruction of its product.\nThe texts I have assembled here from a corpus of fiction as well as theory are written by individuals that identify – or at least temporarily identified – with the category of ‘woman.’ They live in Montréal or spent considerable time there (here) or shared (share) ideological principles, writing practices, and theories of subjectivity and translation.29 My choice of novels, long poems, and essays written in English, French, and translated from French into English and vice versa reaches from the 1970s to the beginning of the new millennium and reflects the changing character of the ‘subject’ and its location between cultures, languages, and genders. I use the concept of ‘dimension lapsisée’ to grapple with the multiple matrices of the writings and translations at hand. This concept is informed by fiction and theory taken from Montréal’s borderlands and is used as an interpretative device: As much as it describes the zones of cultural and linguistic encounters in the historically bisected city of Montréal, the ‘lapsised dimension,’ I claim, at the same time illustrates the oscillating state of an in- between generated by these encounters and that blurs the boundaries of nations, linguistic codes, genders and genres.

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