Jody Danard

“Perdre le Nord”: Literary Subject Constructions in the Narrative Imagined Space of the North in French Canadian Contemporary Literatures from Québec, Acadie and Autochthonous Territories

The North as a contradictory figure between man and nature, space and history, fact and construction has always exerted a certain fascination on people in Europe and has increasingly been used as a spatial narrative frame in literature from Québec – but also of Acadian or autochthonous provenance. The fictional(ised) North has since come under the scrutiny of researchers as a cultural-geographical space of identitary negotiation, but especially as a literary-aesthetic space of identity construction. My PhD project focuses on the following research questions: In what ways have subject constructions with reference to the North been constructed literarily, aesthetically and narratively in exemplary French Canadian narrative texts since the 2000s? Which long-lived topoi and narratives play a role in the different corpora? What new narratives are emerging?