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(De)Formed Melancholic Depictions of Identity: Digitizing Aesthetics, Memory, and Culture
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- Author / Creator
- Cormier, Matthew S.
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This thesis takes up France Daigle’s postmodernist Pour sûr (2011), a Governor General’s Award-winning novel that depicts the day-to-day lives of a group of Acadians in Moncton, New Brunswick, over the course of 1728 fragments that belong to various aspects of Acadian culture, as a case study for a new methodology that aims to offer innovative means of studying minor literatures in Canada. First, it does so by distant reading the novel’s quantifiable aesthetics—fragments, intertextuality, self-reflexivity—using digital tools, with data visualizations that show hidden patterns and clusters indicative of an unconscious cultural memory; second, it close reads these patterns and clusters alongside the author’s melancholic, self-reflexive interjections as sites of conflict, sites that affectively construct her depiction of Acadian identity.
Chapter 1 introduces readers to the novel of study, the significance of cultural memory for a minor literature such as Acadie’s, and to the project’s objectives, while Chapter 2 conceptualizes the methodological framework of “sieve reading” that this thesis employs, and which combines distant and close reading. Next, Chapter 3 contextualizes Daigle and Pour sûr within the history of Acadian fiction and the tradition of literary postmodernism. In Chapter 4, I present data visualizations of the text that represent its fragmentation, self-reflection, and language before analyzing these findings alongside close readings of the novel in Chapter 5. Lastly, Chapter 6 discusses other possible applications for “sieve reading,” namely with respect to other minor literatures.
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- Graduation date
- Spring 2020
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- Type of Item
- Thesis
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- Degree
- Doctor of Philosophy
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- License
- Permission is hereby granted to the University of Alberta Libraries to reproduce single copies of this thesis and to lend or sell such copies for private, scholarly or scientific research purposes only. Where the thesis is converted to, or otherwise made available in digital form, the University of Alberta will advise potential users of the thesis of these terms. The author reserves all other publication and other rights in association with the copyright in the thesis and, except as herein before provided, neither the thesis nor any substantial portion thereof may be printed or otherwise reproduced in any material form whatsoever without the author's prior written permission.