Postcolonialism in North America : Imaginative Colonization in Henry Thoreau's "A Yankee in Canada" and Jacques Poulin's "Volkswagen Blues"

Postcolonialism in North America : Imaginative Colonization in Henry Thoreau's "A Yankee in Canada" and Jacques Poulin's "Volkswagen Blues"

Also featured, in abridged form, in the Massachusetts Review (see 'Journal Articles'). From the author: "This thesis introduces the concept of imaginative colonization in postcolonial literary and cultural studies, which has a particular relevance to the literatures of North America. It argues that the postcolonial experiences of the former colonies of England and France in the Americas, particularly the United States and French Canada, have been primarily conditioned by their relations to each other and not by their relations to the former colonizing power. Imaginative colonization occurs when one former colony, using the means of the cross-border narrative and/or the postmodern recuperation of history, reimagines another not as an autonomous cultural entity, but as a feature of its own history, language, ideology, and even cartography. Focusing especially on Henry Thoreau's travelogue, 'A Yankee in Canada' (1866) and Jacques Poulin's postmodern novel, 'Volkswagen Blues' (1984), but taking into account the entire history of French Canadian-American relations, this thesis establishes that the practice of imaginative colonization in North American literatures is parallel but nonsynchronous: both American and French Canadian literature go through the same developmental stages of decolonization and postcolonial imaginative colonization, even though they do so in different centuries. The examples presented also indicate that imaginative colonization blurs the established dividing lines between works of fact and fiction and that it occurs in both French and English."

Weisman, Adam

1995

en

Thesis/Dissertation

1750-1995; Canada; United States

No

263

Cambridge, Massachusetts

Ph. D., English and American Literature and Language

Harvard University

Postcolonialism in North America... @ Google Books