14th Annual Comparative Literature Symposium

1

• Bienvenue!
• 14th Annual Comparative Literature Symposium
• Crossing Borders 21st Century Writers in the
  Americas
• Who is Roland Michel Tremblay?
• French-Canadian born in 1972 in Québec city now
  living in London UK since 1995
• In the past few years I have been leading two
  professional lives in parallel. The first one is
  in the world of Conferences in Telecoms and IT
  where I have been writing and managing major
  European events. My second life has been and
  still is the one of an author and technical
  adviser writing novels, essays, poetry,
  television scripts and now big American films.
• Masters Degree in French Literature from the
  University of London (Birkbeck College)
• I have also studied for one year at la Sorbonne
  in Paris and I have finished a BA Language and
  Philosophy at the University of Ottawa in Canada.
  I also have a college diploma in Sciences from
  the College of Jonquière in Québec.
• Author of many books, 4 are published in French
  in Paris by iDLivre publisher
• The books are Eclecticism (Philosophical Essay),
  Waiting for Paris (Novel), Denfert-Rochereau
  (Novel) and The Anarchist (Poetry). They are
  distributed in France, apparently they are the
  most popular of the publishing company and are
  also distributed in Belgium, Switzerland, Canada,
  Africa and Middle-East.
• Science Consultant/Technical Adviser/Writer for
  films and TV
• The television series Black Hole High that I
  worked on is now being broadcast on the NBC
  network all over America and on ITV all over the
  United Kingdom.
• What will this presentation cover?
• History of French-Canadian Literature
• Québecs main authors
• Roland Michel Tremblays books

2
In 1750 La Nouvelle-France (New France) was huge,
it went down to New Orleans in the South. As you
can see the Spanish controlled the Far West. Of
course most of these territories were uninhabited
in those days but you could find many French
colonies. Even today there are still many French
speaking persons in la Nouvelle-Orléans, mainly
due to the Acadians deportation by the British
between 1755 and 1762.
New France in 1750 New France, which included
Canada, was the French empire in North America.
By 1750 fur traders had expanded it in the
northwest, although wars with the British had
reduced it in the east. Isle Royale was the
remnant of French Acadia, most of which the
British ruled as Nova Scotia. The French still
maintained forts in the part west of the Bay of
Fundy (cross-hatched area). Actual French
settlement was largely limited to present-day
Nova Scotia, Québec province, Illinois, and
Louisiana French influence extended farther
through alliances with the indigenous nations for
trade and defense. French Canadians are descendant
s of the habitants, the French-speaking peasants
who stayed on in Québec after the French lost
their North American territories to the British
in the 1760s.
3
Québec Today
This is Québec today. Even though we lost a lot
of territories to the United States and that the
frontiers of the provinces were drawn to maximize
assimilation by leaving out at least 1 million
French speaking people in the provinces of
Ontario, New Brunswick and Nova Scotia, we can
still put four times France in the territory of
Québec. Todays French speaking population of the
whole Canada is about 8 million (one quarter of
Canada), almost the population of Belgium (10
million). And most of them dont speak English,
dont read in English and dont watch English
television. This is one of the main reasons why
we have so many publishers, television stations,
authors, books, arts in French, because even what
is French from France does not reach us as much
as what is American but translated into French.
4

• History of Québecs Literature
• The distinctive complexion of French Canadian
  literature is due in large part to the national
  spirit of the French-speaking, predominantly
  Roman Catholic habitants and to tensions inherent
  in their social, political, and geographic
  situation. This situation is characterized by
  isolation and a feeling of being threatened by
  the larger, primarily Protestant and
  English-speaking culture in North America.
• French Canadian literature, properly speaking,
  began with the introduction of a printing press
  and the founding of a weekly bilingual newspaper,
  the Québec Gazette, in 1764. However, the sense
  of a specific literature different from that of
  France did not take hold until the 1840s. From
  then on, for well over a century, literature was
  an important tool in French Canadas ongoing
  struggle for cultural survival, and its themes of
  language, culture, religion, and politics
  reflected the evolving nature of that struggle.
  By the end of the 20th century, literature in
  Québec had become multiethnic, cosmopolitan, and
  confident of its identity.
• On a historical level, Québecs literature was
  born from the "reports of the Jesuits" sent in
  Nouvelle-France by the French. Then this
  literature of ethnologists (which described the
  places, people, manners, the climate in very
  Christian terms) little by little left the place
  to tales (transcription of oral stories) and to
  the account of combat (against English and the
  "savages"). As of this time, Québecs literature
  was a literature of assertion and resistance,
  which it remained until the Seventies. The quiet
  revolution changed this as from the seventies
  Quebeckers had the impression to have won. They
  were not threatened any more and their literature
  lost its claiming aspects to become more ludic,
  light, even commercial. It also lost much of its
  rigor because of the revalorization of the
  popular language (joual). For the past twenty
  years the great challenge of Québecs literature
  has been to account for the great stakes of our
  time (political, immigration, society, etc.)
  which has not happened yet.

5

• Catholic, censorship, Quiet Revolution
  (Révolution Tranquille)
• The Catholic religion has played a big role in
  literature in Québec and before 1960 Québec was
  one of the most censored place in the world
  because directly under the powers of the clergy.
  No wonder the quiet revolution happened and that
  suddenly Québecs literature became one of the
  most liberated in the world, celebrating the gay
  culture, transvestites and other subjects that
  were never mentioned before.
• Politics
• Politics played a major role in Quebecs
  literature. It was not the best literature that
  was inspired from the social and political
  situation, but it is the literature that survived
  through the years because it was telling the
  history. One of the worst books I read from a
  French-Canadian author was Le Libraire from
  Gérard Bessette and it only survived time because
  it was describing the socio-political situation
  in Canada and the censorship exerted by the
  priests. The lesson here is that if you wish to
  be remembered as an author, you should talk about
  the history of your country, politics, and the
  social life of the time. It is now very hard in
  Québec to find a book that does not deal with
  this search for a distinctive identity different
  from the rest of the planet and the political
  situation about an eventual separation of Québec
  from the rest of Canada.
• An Identity
• It is much more desirable for a French-Canadian
  author to be published in France, it is like
  consecration, like a British writer would love to
  be published in America. It is also very
  difficult if not impossible. This said Québec has
  nothing to envy to France. There are many
  publishers in Québec publishing in French and so
  many authors even though there are not many
  readers, that there is no question about it
  there is a French-Canadian culture and la
  Littérature Québécoise exists. Sometimes France
  can even be ignored, what is important is to say
  to the English Canadians We are here, we have a
  culture!. So much so that English Canadians
  started in recent years to wonder if they had an
  identity to differentiate themselves from
  Americans.

6

• Québec and France
• It is more common today to have French-Canadians
  published in France but it is still a slow and
  uneasy process. Only the best authors succeed.
  Since France and Quebec undertook real cultural
  exchanges in the Forties and after the 2nd World
  War, almost all of the principal Québecs authors
  were published in France Gabrielle Roy, Claire
  Martin, Bertrand Vac, Jacques Godbout, Anne
  Hébert, etc. Then little by little Quebec began
  to build its own publishing structures
  (non-existent before the 2nd World War) and from
  that point it was no longer necessary to go and
  get published in Paris. This practice thus
  disappeared with time and Quebecs authors and
  Frenchs publishers lost sight of each other.
  Today if an author makes it big they simply get
  published in France by a publisher that has an
  agreement with a Québecs publisher. These
  authors are often translated in many languages,
  often up to 26.
• Verbal communication - French-Canadian compared
  with French from France
• The difference between the French that we talk in
  Québec with the French talked in France today is
  as big as the difference between the American
  English and the British English. The only
  difference is that in Québec we have kept the
  Napoleonian French while in France the standards
  have changed progressively over the years.
  Québecs French, including many expressions and
  folks songs, is very similar to the French we
  can find in Belgium, Catalan (Spain), Switzerland
  and other previous French colonies. Sometimes in
  Spain you hear people speaking Catalan and
  sometimes even Spanish, and you could think they
  speak French-Canadian, until the background noise
  cease and then you know they are speaking Catalan
  or Spanish.
• Written texts and literature - French-Canadian
  compared with French from France
• The written French in Québec is very similar to
  the written French in France, exactly like the
  written English in the US is comparable to the
  written English in Britain. Only some expressions
  are different and sometimes some words are
  written differently. Instead of growing apart,
  the level of French in Québec is getting better
  and closer to the French of France. There is a
  desire to bridge the differences and to get the
  standards up.

7

• Québecs Literature
• Links on the Internet in French
• LÎle www.litterature.org www.litterature.org/a
  uteur.asp
• Littérature québécoise http//felix.cyberscol.qc.
  ca/LQ/
• La Bibliothèque électronique du Québec, free
  e-books of authors from Québec and France now in
  the public domain http//jydupuis.apinc.org
• Links on the Internet in English
• National Library of Canada www.nlc-bnc.ca
• US Internet Movie Database http//us.imdb.com
• Online bookstores www.amazon.com
  www.archambault.ca
• A good book in French
• La Littérature Québécoise by Laurent Mailhot,
  Typo Publisher (Montréal), Essais
• A good resource in English
• Encarta Encyclopedia 2003 on CD-ROM or DVD

8

• Anne Hébert (Poetry and Novels)
• (Sainte-Catherine-de-Fossambault, Québec,
  1916-2000)
• French-Canadian poet and novelist, much of whose
  work describes the conflict between the outer,
  modern world and the inner life of the creative
  artist. Born in Saint-Catherine-de-Fossambault,
  Québec, Hébert grew up in the city of Québec. She
  moved to Paris in the mid-1950s. In her books
  Hébert explores the sense of alienation and
  isolation felt by artists, but she also stresses
  the need to work in the everyday world as a way
  to spiritual redemption. She is known for her
  precise descriptions of the physical world.
• Many of Hébert's works explore the theme of
  awareness after revolt against violent
  oppression. Her first novel, Les chambres de bois
  (1958 The Silent Rooms,1974), is the story of a
  young woman who returns to a more natural and
  simple life after being imprisoned by her
  husband. Hébert's later novelssuch as Kamouraska
  (1970 translated 1973) Les enfants du sabbat
  (1975 Children of the Black Sabbath,1977) and
  Les fous de Bassan (1982 In the Shadow of the
  Wind,1983)are stories of demonic possession and
  murder. Hébert's other works include the novels
  Le premier jardin (1988) and L'enfant chargé de
  songes (The child full of dreams, 1992) the
  poetry volumes Les songes en équilibre (Dreams in
  Equilibrium, 1942) and Le jour n'a dégal que la
  nuit (Day Has No Equal but Night, 1994) and the
  short-story collection Le torrent (1950).
• The violent eroticism of Héberts early work gave
  way to an increasing serenity and even nostalgia
  for the society from which she had voluntarily
  exiled herself in the 1950s. Anne Hébert shows
  that after more than three decades she can still
  evoke the mysteries of human existence.
• Anne Hébert's highly regarded Les Fous de Bassan
  is a symbolic and mysterious story set in the
  village of Griffin Creek in 1936.
• In Le premier jardin, Anne Hébert tells the story
  of actress Flora Fontanges, who returns from
  France to her hometown of Quebec City in the
  1970s to perform in a play. The invitation to
  return comes at a time of personal anguish, for
  her daughter has just died. Like Atwood's Elaine
  Risley, Flora Fontanges explores her hometown,
  recapturing with stunning accuracy the passionate
  history of the city and her own personal history.
• As a result of Quebec's Catholic heritage, its
  writers often see human conflicts in terms of
  damnation and salvation. Anne Hébert's important
  novel, Les enfants du sabbat, set in a Quebec
  convent in the mid-1940's, is a visionary tale of
  a young girl's damnation.
• Anne Hébert's Héloise is the story of a married
  man in Paris, whose encounter with a woman leads
  him into a life of fantasy.
• Anne Hébert Center (French) www.usherbrooke.ca/fl
  sh/centannheb/index.html

9

• Michel Tremblay (Theater and Novels)
  (Montréal, 1942 - )
• The novels and plays of Michel Tremblay, set in
  Montréals working-class neighborhoods and
  dealing with such themes as the politics of
  language, homosexuality, transvestites,
  prostitution, drug dealers and incest, explored
  the transformation of Québec society in the 60s
  and 70s. His plays were innovative in language
  and subject matter. They also experimented with
  staging and characters, often splitting the stage
  into different times or places or creating more
  than one version of a character.
• Tremblay, who by the 1980s had published some 50
  volumes, also produced several new plays,
  including Albertine en cinq temps (1984
  Albertine in Five Times, 1986), using a cast of
  characters familiar from his earlier works. His
  most important works of the 1980s and 1990s were
  novels, including two additions to the
  multivolume Chroniques du plateau Mont-Royal Des
  nouvelles dEdouard (News of Edward, 1984) and Le
  premier quartier de la lune (1989 The First
  Quarter of the Moon, 1994). Tremblays Le coeur
  découvert (1986 The Heart Laid Bare, 1989) is a
  moving account of homosexual love. The explicitly
  autobiographical Un ange cornu avec des ailes de
  tôle (A Horned Angel with Tin Wings, 1994) traces
  Tremblays evolution from childhood to young
  adulthood through the books that were important
  to him.
• The nostalgic trilogy evoking his childhood in
  working-class east-end Montréal in the 1940s
  consists of La grosse femme d'à côté est enceinte
  (1978 The Fat Woman Next Door Is Pregnant,
  1981), Thérèse et Pierrette à l'école des
  saints-Anges (1980 Therese and Pierrette and the
  Little Hanging Angels, 1984), and La duchesse et
  le roturier (The Duchess and the Commoner, 1982).
  
• Another expression of French Canadian
  self-confidence was an ongoing debate over
  whether writers should work in traditional French
  or in French as it was spoken in Canada. This
  issue took on epic proportions in a controversy
  over a play by Michel Tremblay, Les belles-soeurs
  (1968 translated 1974), which many critics found
  shocking in its use of colloquial language that
  was considered both ugly and crude. The play
  shows 15 working-class women from three
  generations laughing and quarreling after one of
  them wins a million trading stamps and asks the
  group to help her paste them into booklets.
  Tremblay brought the nature of the language
  controversy into sharp focus and delighted
  audiences by recreating the anglicized,
  impoverished, yet forceful language of the
  Montréal working class. In so doing, he helped
  bring French Canadian drama to the attention of
  the world.
• Tremblay's Le Vrai Monde?, for Le Theatre
  Français, looked at how a writer uses his life in
  his work. In Douze coups de théâtre (Twelve
  theater pieces) Quebec's foremost playwright,
  Michel Tremblay, offers souvenirs of his
  discovery of the theater and the text of his
  first prizewinning play. Michel Tremblay presents
  in C't'à ton tour Laura Cadieux a gathering of
  women, playing cards in the waiting room of a
  gynecologist. And from Québec came Michel
  Tremblay's Hosanna, about a homosexual
  relationship between a motorcyclist and a
  hairdresser. Michel Tremblay's Bonjour la
  Bonjour, is about an incestuous family.
• Focused more narrowly on Montreal, indeed
  centered on the now mythic Rue Fabre, is Michel
  Tremblay's Le premier quartier de la lune, the
  fifth and final volume of his Chroniques de
  MontRoyal. The action takes place on June 20,
  1952 it is the last day of school, the moment
  when summer seems to offer hope in the difficult
  world of nine-year-old Marcel and young people
  like him. Alienated from the world around him by
  worsening epilepsy, Marcel creates a dream world
  in his solitary life with his cat, Duplessis.
• Main website http//membres.lycos.fr/karmina/inde
  x.html

10

• Réjean Ducharme (Novels)
• (Saint-Félix-de-Valois, Québec, 1941 - )
• Novelist and playwright Réjean Ducharme spent
  seven months in the Canadian Air Force in 1962,
  then worked as a salesman, office clerk and cab
  driver before travelling across Canada, the
  United States and Mexico for three years.
• Ten of his works have been published by Gallimard
  which is an accomplishment, given the prestige of
  this French publishing company. His first novel,
  LAvalée des avalées (1966), won the Governor
  Generals Literary Award in 1967. His second
  novel, Le Nez qui voque (1967), was awarded the
  Prix littéraire de la province de Québec. These
  two, plus a third novel, LOcéantume (1968), were
  published during the years of the Quiet
  Revolution in Quebec and made a significant
  impact. Ducharme wrote the plays, Le Cid maghané
  and Ines Pérée et Inat Tendu in 1968, and Ha ha!
  which won the Governor Generals Literary Award
  in 1982. He received the Prix Belgique-Canada in
  1973 for LHiver de force and the Prix
  France-Canada in 1976 for Les Enfantômes. In
  addition, he wrote the lyrics of several songs
  for Robert Charlebois (1976). Ducharme also wrote
  the screenplay for two very successful films Les
  Bons Débarras (1979) and Les Beaux Souvenirs
  (1981) produced by Francis Mankiewicz. After a
  14-year silence, Ducharme surprised the world
  with two novels, Dévadé (1990) and Va savoir
  (1994). Réjean Ducharme is considered one of the
  most significant and original voices in Quebec
  literary history. He has also exhibited his
  sculptures and paintings created with found
  objects, under the pseudonym Roch Plante.
• Even those writers who avoided political themes
  expressed the tensions inherent in the Québecois
  situation. Réjean Ducharmes novel L'avalée des
  avalés (1966 The Swallower Swallowed, 1968)
  portrays the anger of an adolescent girl who is
  half Jewish and half Catholic. The girl feels
  dominated by her mother and torn between her
  contradictory cultural and linguistic heritages.
• In L'Océantume, Réjean Ducharme returned to his
  fantasy world of children and explored their
  bizarre relationships.
• In French Canada the most intriguing poetry event
  was novelist Rejean Ducharme's poetry-novel La
  fille de Christophe Colomb, a surreal attempt in
  more than 1,000 quatrains of sophomoric doggerel
  to follow the heroine in her search for true
  friendship.

11

• Robert Lepage (Theater, Movies, Actor)
  (Québec, 1957 - )
• Robert Lepage was born in Quebec City on December
  12, 1957 and was admitted to the Conservatoire
  d'art dramatique de Québec in 1975. After
  graduating in 1978, he went on to Paris to
  complete his training at Alain Knapp's theatre
  school. He later returned to his hometown where
  he contributed to several creations as an actor,
  author, and director. Then in 1980, he joined the
  Théâtre Repère, a Quebec City theatre company
  where, within a few years, he was to make his
  name as one of the major creative forces of his
  country.
• Circulations, which was created in 1984 and
  presented throughout Canada, won the Best
  Canadian Production Award at the Quinzaine
  internationale de théâtre de Québec. It was in
  1985, however, with The Dragons Trilogy, that
  his work was to be internationally recognized.
• In 1986, he created Vinci, his first solo
  performance, which notably won the Prix Coup de
  Pouce at the Festival Off dAvignon, the Best
  Creation Award at the Festival de Nyon, and the
  Best Staging Award by the Association québécoise
  des critiques de théâtre. The following year, The
  Polygraph won the Time Out/01 Production Award in
  London, and the Chalmers Award in Toronto.
  Finally, in 1988, The Tectonic Plates confirmed
  his reputation on many stages throughout North
  America and Europe.
• Canadian cinema received a transfusion of fresh
  blood in 1995 with a large crop of films from
  writer-directors making their first features. The
  most keenly anticipated debut was by Quebec
  superstar stage director Robert Lepage, whose Le
  confessionnal (The confessional) opened the
  Directors' Fortnight program at the Cannes Film
  Festival. Ingenious, complex, and ambitious, Le
  confessionnal is psychological drama set against
  the backdrop of Alfred Hitchcock shooting his
  1953 film noir I Confess in Quebec City. Lothaire
  Bluteau stars as an artist who helps his adopted
  brother unravel the mystery of his birth.
  Jockeying between two time frames, Lepage
  displays the visual sleight of hand that
  distinguishes his stage work. His controlled
  direction leaves a cold impression, but the
  brilliance of the film, which received 12 Genie
  nominations, is undeniable. He made many more
  movies since and won many awards.
• Internationally, Quebec director Robert Lepage,
  known for his dreamlike, highly visual collective
  theater, attained international renown this year
  with his production of a A Midsummer Night's
  Dream at the National Theatre in London. The
  entire play took place in a pit filled with mud
  and was instantly in demand in Japan and
  throughout Europe.
• Quebec's Robert Lepage continued to create some
  of the most innovative visual theater in the
  world, presenting Needles and Opium, a one-man
  show he wrote, directed, and performed, at the
  National Arts Centre in Ottawa. Among festivals,
  World Stage, a biennial Toronto event, scored
  record attendance with a program that included
  Needles and Opium, a one-man show about Jean
  Cocteau and Miles Davis written and performed by
  Quebec director Robert Lepage.
• In 1993, he once again expressed his interest for
  music when he staged Peter Gabriel's Secret World
  Tour, which was presented around the world. That
  same year, he was very much in demand by various
  theaters around the world. For example, he staged
  Macbeth and The Tempest in Japanese versions at
  the Tokyo Globe. The following year, Stockholm
  welcomed him for the set designing and staging of
  August Strindberg's A Dreamplay.

12

• Jacques Godbout (Novels, Films) (Montréal, 1933 -
  )
• After completing an MA in French literature at
  the University of Montreal, Jacques Godbout
  taught for several years at Addis Ababa
  University in Ethiopia. On returning to Canada in
  1957, he worked in advertising before joining the
  National Film Board as a writer in the French
  department. In 1961, he directed his first
  documentary short and he has been an NFB
  filmmaker ever since. In all, he has directed
  some 30 films, including four dramatic features.
• Godbout is an equally prolific author, having
  published numerous essays, novels and poetry
  collections, written radio dramas for
  Radio-Canada and France's national network, and
  contributed to a number of periodicals, including
  Parti pris, Les Lettres françaises, Maclean's,
  Les Nouvelles littéraires and L'Actualité, and
  newspapers such as Le Jour and Le Devoir.
• Godbouts witty and urbane novels Une histoire
  américaine (1986 An American Story, 1988) and Le
  temps des Galarneau (1994 The Golden Galarneaus,
  1995) document the shift in attitudes and trends
  regarding language, politics, and consumer
  society.
• Novelist Jacques Godbout was convinced that
  French Canadians were first of all a North
  American species, subject to all the pressures of
  American society. He concocted a lively and
  amusing version of Québecois French to explain
  the dilemmas created by these pressures in Salut
  Galarneau! (1967 Hail Galarneau!, 1970).
• In Jacques Godbout's Une histoire américaine, the
  protagonist, a communications expert named
  Gregory Francoeur, accepts an invitation to
  deliver a series of talks at Berkeley on the
  subject of Quebec within Canada. An incurable
  dreamer, Francoeur presents a journal within the
  novel, and his California is far from paradise.
• One of the most arresting of the late 1981 novels
  was Jacques Godbout's allegory of Quebec
  political life, Les Têtes à Papineau. It tells of
  a man with two heads, one speaking English and
  the other French, and of the operation to
  separate them.
• Godbout was awarded the Prix Duvernay by the St
  Jean Baptiste Sociey for the body of his literary
  work in 1972, the Prix Belgique-Canada in 1978
  and the Prix du Québec (Athanase-David) in 1985.
  He also received an honorary EUROFIPA award at
  the 7th International Audiovisual Program
  Festival in Cannes in 1994.

13

• Gabrielle Roy (Novels)
• (Saint-Boniface, Manitoba, 1909-1983)
• Gabrielle Roy was a Canadian novelist, a
  short-story writer and a journalist. Her first
  novel, Bonheur doccasion (1945 The Tin Flute,
  1947), broke new ground in its depiction of urban
  life in French-speaking Canada. Roy was renowned
  for her poetic style as well as her compassion
  for her characters, who range from the humble
  urban working class to the Ukrainian immigrants
  who settled the prairies of western Canada.
• Roys first novel, Bonheur doccasion, is
  considered a masterpiece of social realism.
  Unlike most preceding Québec novels, which
  depicted rural settings and simple country folk,
  Bonheur doccasion innovatively portrayed the
  urban environment of Montréal and its
  working-class neighborhood, Saint-Henri, during
  World War II (1939-1945). The novel features
  concerns that preoccupied Roy throughout her
  career, such as the misery of the homeless, the
  poverty of the working class, and the inequity of
  womens social position. As her other works do,
  the novel conceives of life as a voyage of
  discovery and self-realization. Bonheur
  doccasion became the first Canadian novel to win
  the Prix Fémina, a major French literary award.
  Roys other major urban novel is Alexandre
  Chenevert (1954 The Cashier, 1955). It features
  a common mans struggle with life in modern
  society, alienated in a large city and surrounded
  by seemingly constant news reports of disaster
  and plight.
• Most of Roys other major works are based on her
  experiences growing up and working as a teacher
  on the Manitoba prairies. These books include the
  story collections La petite poule deau (1950
  Where Nests the Water Hen, 1951), Rue
  Deschambault (1955 Street of Riches, 1957), La
  route dAltamont (1966 The Road past Altamont,
  1966), and Ces enfants de ma vie (1977 Children
  of My Heart, 1979). Two other works, the novel La
  montagne secrete (1961 The Hidden Mountain,
  1962) and the story collection La rivière sans
  repos (1970 Windflower, 1970), are set in the
  Canadian Arctic. Her autobiography, La détresse
  et lenchantement (1984 Enchantment and Sorrow,
  1987), was published after her death. Roy
  received three Governor Generals Literary
  Awards, for the English translations of Bonheur
  doccasion and Rue Deschambault and for Ces
  enfants de ma vie.
• Gabrielle Roy undertakes psychological drama of a
  different kind in Un jardin au bout du monde,
  which explores the consciousness of a Quebec
  woman as well as of generations of immigrants to
  Quebec. La route d'Altamont (The Road Past
  Altamont) displayed a nostalgic sadness in four
  loosely connected sketches dealing with growing
  up and growing old. Street of Riches, a quietly
  moving study, partly autobiographical, of the
  awakening sensibilities of a French-Canadian girl
  growing up in the suburbs of Winnipeg.
• Significantly, all the novels written in French
  during the year 1955 deal with the problems of
  guilt or sin faced by the French-Canadian who
  strives for individual freedom. Gabrielle Roy's
  Alexandre Chenevert is a tender and sensitive
  analysis of the attempts of a fear-ridden little
  clerk to escape from the meaningless repetitions
  of urban drudgery and from the inhumanities of a
  narrow religion. This is accomplished through
  humility, a tender pity for the sufferings of
  humanity, and a love for the beauties of nature.
  Roy heralded a new phase in French Canadian life
  and its reflection in literature. Henceforth,
  with the rapidly expanding city of Montréal as
  the nucleus for a new literary culture, French
  Canadian writers would be preoccupied with the
  problems of urbanization.

14

• Marie-Claire Blais (Novels)
• (Québec, October 1939 - )
• Marie-Claire Blais published her first novel, La
  Belle Bête, at the age of 20. It is not as much
  about her native Québec Province as about a
  family inhabiting a somber landscape shut off
  from other people and from love. After winning a
  bursary from the Gugenheim Foundation in the
  United States, Marie-Claire Blais wrote Une
  Saison dans la vie d'Emmanuel in 1965, which was
  widely circulated at an astonishing speed. Like
  her other works, it is a bleak story of people
  locked in their own degraded, poverty-stricken
  worlds. An author of plays and poetry, Blais used
  dramatic and poetic techniques in the novella Le
  jour est noir (1962 The Day Is Dark,1967). A
  more specifically French-Canadian setting,
  however, forms the background of St. Lawrence
  Blues (1973 trans. 1974).
• More than 20 novels, five plays, and collections
  of poetry which appeared at that time in France
  and in Quebec have been translated into English.
  Just to name a few at random, there are Tête
  blanche (1980) L'Insoumise (1966) David Sterne
  (1967) Vivre! Vivre! (1969) Pierre (1986)
  L'Ange de la solitude (1989) and Un Jardin dans
  la tempête (1990). Her most recent novel, Soifs,
  appeared in 1995.
• Marie-Claire Blais was the recipient of many
  awards, such as the Prix de la langue française
  for La Belle Bête (1961), the Prix France-Québec
  and the Governor General's Award for Les
  Manuscrits de Pauline Archange (1969) and Le
  Sourd dans la ville (1979), the Prix
  Belgique-Canada in 1976, and the Prix
  Athanase-David in 1982 for all her works, and the
  Prix de l'Académie française for Visions d'Anna
  (1983). In 1993, she was elected member of the
  Académie royale de langue et de littérature
  françaises de Belgique.
• In Quebec fiction, Marie-Claire Blais published
  the third volume in her sequence about the
  childhood and adolescence of Pauline Archange.
  Les apparences is marked by the same sensitivity
  that is evident in the earlier volumes, and there
  is a refreshing absence of Mlle Blais' customary
  Gothic horror.
• Marie-Claire Blais' David Sterne was a
  Dostoevskian examination of three young men who
  commit suicide.
• Marie-Claire Blais, in works such as Une saison
  dans la vie d'Emmanuel (1965 A Season in the
  Life of Emmanuel, 1966), showed the emptiness and
  hypocrisy of the traditional values that had
  previously allowed French Canadians to maintain
  their separateness she particularly portrays the
  way these values often victimized women and
  children.

15

• Antonine Maillet (Novels)
• (Bouctouche, New-Brunswick, 1929 - )
• Novelist and playwright Antonine Maillet attended
  school in Bouctouche, Memramcook, Moncton,
  Montreal and Quebec City. Since her first novel
  in 1958, Maillet has had 30 or so works
  published. In the course of her career, she has
  won many literary awards, including the Prix
  Champlain for Pointe-aux-Coques (1958), the
  Governor General's award for Don l'Orignal
  (1972), le Grand Prix de la Ville de Montréal for
  Mariaagélas (1973), and the much coveted Prix
  Goncourt for Pélagie-la-Charrette (1979).
• From the start of her career, Antonine Maillet
  has drawn on Acadian history, language, folklore,
  traditions and geographical features -- in short,
  the uniqueness of her native region provides
  material and inspiration for her writing. Several
  of her works are peopled by vividly portrayed
  characters who share the same surroundings an
  imaginary place reminiscent of Bouctouche, where
  she was born. Her fervent attachment to Acadia
  and its people has contributed greatly to the
  development of a thriving culture in the last few
  decades. However, as she pointed out recently at
  the Acadian World Congress, her people still have
  a long way to go "Acadia needs to say what it
  is that it is part of Canada, that it is part of
  America, that it is part of the international
  fraternity of Francophone nations, and that it
  therefore has its own place in the world -- a
  place that is unique, just as each of the world's
  peoples is unique."
• "...the French folks is the folks fr'm France,
  les Français de France. 'n fer that matter, we're
  even less Français de France than we're
  Americans. We're more like French Canadians, they
  told us. Well, that ain't true either. French
  Canadians are those that live in Québec. They
  call'em Canayens or Québécois. But how can we be
  Québécois if we ain't livin in Québec? Fer the
  love of Christ, where do we live? ...In Acadie,
  we was told, 'n we're supposed to be Acadjens.
  So, that's the way we decided to answer the
  question 'bout nationality Acadjens we says to
  them. Now then, we can be sure of one thing,
  we're the only ones to have that name."
• Antonine Maillet's Mariaagelas recalls smuggling
  in the region of Acadia during Prohibition.
• Evangeline deusse (1975 Evangeline the Second,
  1987) explore Acadian folklore and history.
• Maillet is best known for her dramatic monologue
  La sagouine (1971 translated 1979) and a series
  of novels and plays based on Acadian life and
  history, including Pélagie-la-Charrette (1979
  Pélagie The Return to a Homeland, 1982).
  Pélagie-la-Charrette was the first work written
  outside of France to win the Prix Goncourt,
  France's prestigious literary award. The novel is
  about the Acadians' return from exile in
  Louisiana.
• Notable books for children included Antonine
  Maillet's delightful Christophe Cartier de la
  Noisette dit Nounours.

16

• Émile Nelligan (Poetry) (Montréal, 1879 - 1941)
• Émile Nelligan, an outstanding turn-of-the-century
  writer, is French-Canadas most beloved and
  admired poet. A romantic figure whose literary
  career was tragically short-lived, Nelligan
  ushered French-Canadian poetry into the modern
  age. Nelligan was born in Montreal on Christmas
  Eve, 1879. His parents, who had a troubled
  marriage, embodied the two solitudes of Canada.
  His father, David Nelligan, was an Irish
  immigrant with little appreciation for
  French-Canadian language or culture. His work as
  a postal inspector necessitated frequent absences
  from home. Nelligans mother, Émilie-Amanda Hudon
  Nelligan was a French Canadian who was musically
  talented, proud of her culture and heritage and a
  devout Catholic.
• In 1897, against his parents wishes, he
  abandoned his studies to pursue his poetry. He
  was actively writing verses and could envision no
  other profession for himself. In 1896, he met his
  mentor and future editor, the priest Eugène Seers
  (later called Louis Dantin) and Joseph Melançon,
  who introduced Nelligan to the literary circles
  of Montreal. Under the pseudonym Émile Kovar, he
  published his first poem "Rêve fantasque" in Le
  Samedi (June 13, 1896). By September of that
  year, eight more of his poems had appeared in
  local papers and journals such as Le Monde
  Illustré and Alliance nationale. Nelligans poems
  showed a remarkable sensitivity to the power of
  words and the music of language and were tinged
  with melancholy and nostalgia. By 1897, poems
  appeared for the first time in Le Monde Illustré
  and La Patrie under his real name, which was
  sometimes modified to "Nellighan" or "Nelighan".
• In 1899, at the age of 19, he was confined to a
  mental asylum, where he lived until his death in
  1941. During his years of confinement, Nelligan
  continued to write, but he had lost the capacity
  to create a body of work and spent his time
  rewriting his earlier poems from memory.
• Émile Nelligans body of work comprises some 170
  poems, sonnets, rondels, songs and prose poems.
  Astonishingly, these were all written when he was
  between the ages of 16 and 19. Nelligan had
  published only 23 poems before his incarceration,
  but in 1904, thanks to the diligence of his
  friend Louis Dantin and with his mothers help,
  107 poems were published in Émile Nelligan et son
  oeuvre with a preface by Dantin.
• Émile Nelligan was a pioneer of French-Canadian
  literature. In his poetry, he threw off the
  time-worn subjects of patriotism and fidelity to
  the land that had so occupied his literary
  predecessors, and explored the symbolic
  possibilities of language and his own, dark,
  inner landscape. Although his writing was
  influenced by symbolist poets such as
  Charles-Pierre Baudelaire and Arthur Rimbaud and
  English-language writers such as Lord Byron and
  Edgar Allan Poe, Nelligan created a poetic
  sensibility that was uniquely his own. In so
  doing, he struck a chord of recognition with
  French Canada that remains to this day, for his
  work continues to be celebrated. His poems have
  been translated into English, and he is the
  subject of numerous colloquia, films, novels,
  poems, and a ballet and an opera. A hundred years
  after he created his last poem, the poetic vision
  of Émile Nelligan endures.
• Unlike other French Canadian writers of the 19th
  century, Nelligan makes no references to history
  or politics. However, critics have interpreted
  the dreams and frustrations he expresses as
  symbolic of the mood of the French Canadian
  people at the end of the century stifled by the
  control and political domination of the Roman
  Catholic Church.
• Many of his poems can be found here
  http//poesie.webnet.fr/auteurs/nelligan.html

17

• Hubert Aquin (Essays, Novels)
• (Montréal, 1929 -1977)
• Hubert Aquin was, briefly, Quebec's great
  warrior-intellectual. His life was short and
  intense between the late '50s and his suicide in
  1977 he wore the hats of novelist, essayist,
  terrorist agitator, politician, prisoner, film
  producer, literary editor, and stockbroker. After
  receiving his degree in philosophy from the
  University of Montreal, he spent three years at
  the Institute of Political Studies in Paris, then
  returned to the University of Montreal, where he
  studied for one year at the Institute of History.
  Aquin worked as a radio and television producer
  with the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation's
  Public Affairs division in Montreal and won many
  awards for his work as a director with the
  National Film Board.
• Next Episode, Aquin's first novel, is a brilliant
  offshoot of its author's early political career.
  Written while Aquin was being held at a Montreal
  psychiatric hospital, pending trial for the
  possession of a stolen automobile and an
  automatic firearm, Next Episode is narrated by a
  young revolutionary, an Aquin double who's also
  imprisoned in a psychiatric institution. In an
  attempt to while away the hours, the narrator
  begins writing a kind of political thriller
  concerning a Québécois terrorist who, while
  abroad in Switzerland, unexpectedly rediscovers
  his long-lost lover, K., a sort of
  eternal-feminine figure and personification of
  the nation of Quebec. K. instructs the narrator
  to murder one H. de Heutz, a spy-banker-historian-
  aristocrat who has apparently been sending
  information about radical Québécois bank accounts
  to the RCMP. The convoluted chase that ensues is
  a Kafkaesque exercise in futility, in which the
  twinned agents pursue one another through a
  symbol-strewn landscape of cultural memory. Two
  factors are likely to keep Next Episode from ever
  gaining a wide readership in English Canada.
  Aquin's French is too rich and lyrical to
  translate well the ever-capable Sheila Fischman
  has produced a workable version of the text, but
  the florid, romantic prose of Next Episode will
  always sound forced in English. Furthermore, this
  is a book of great political and cultural
  specificity. Readers who have never lived in
  Quebec or are unfamiliar with its history will
  likely find the most crucial elements of the
  novel incomprehensible. Many readers will be able
  to enjoy the novel's acute deconstruction of the
  political thriller, but Next Episode's true fire
  lies in its nationalist fervour.
• In Trou de mémoire, Hubert Aquin used the same
  amalgam of crime, metaphysics, sex, and politics
  as in his first novel, with the same dazzling
  results.
• Hubert Aquin, in Neige noire, illuminates the
  political context of psychological obsessions.

18

• Louis Hémon (Novels)
• (Brest, France, 1880 - Chapleau, Ontario, 1913)
• LOUIS HEMON (1880-1913) was born in Brest in
  France and began his writing career there, but
  emigrated first to London, and then to Quebec,
  the land with which his name is now indelibly
  linked (literally, in fact, as maps of the
  province show lakes bearing both his name and
  that of the heroine of his single masterpiece).
  After studying for a diplomatic career, he went
  to Canada in 1911 and worked as a farm laborer
  near Lac Saint-Jean, Québec, while gathering
  material for his major work, Maria Chapdelaine
  (1914 trans. 1921). He lived less than two years
  in rural Quebec, long enough to write Maria
  Chapdelaine, but not long enough to see its
  publication. He and a companion were killed by a
  train while walking along tracks in a remote part
  of Ontario.
• The novel saw publication first in Paris, as a
  serial in Le Temps. It attracted no particular
  notice at first, but in 1921 an influential
  French literary critic revived it as the initial
  number of a popular series of books, and it
  became a best-seller both in France and in
  Quebec. A 1921 English translation, by W. H.
  Blake, appeared almost simultaneously, and
  likewise achieved popular success.
• Three of Hémon's earlier novels and a travel
  journal were published posthumously.
• In fiction, the novel of the land reached the
  level of great art with the appearance of Louis
  Hémons novel Maria Chapdelaine (1914 translated
  1921). An evocation of the harsh but exalting
  life of French Canadian settlers and of their
  struggle to keep their culture alive in a hostile
  Anglo-Saxon environment, the novel became a model
  for French Canadian writers.
• In French fiction, the regional classicism of
  Louis Hémon's Maria Chapdelaine had given way to
  sociological and psychological studies of the
  clash between parochial traditionalism and
  various forms of liberalism and progress.
• You can read it in English here
  http//www.litrix.com/mchap/mchap001.htm

19

• Denys Arcand (Screenwriter, Movies)
• (Deschambault, Québec, 1941 -) (Brother of
  Gabriel Arcand, Famous Québec actor)
• Denys Arcand was born on June 25, 1941 in
  Deschambault, a village about twenty-five miles
  southwest of Quebec City. He is known for his
  witty, irreverent films against the pervasive
  influences of the Roman Catholic clergy and the
  English Canadian establishment. Arcand made his
  first films in the 1960s during the Quiet
  Revolution, a period of renewed French Canadian
  nationalism and cultural identity. For many years
  Arcand directed films with strong political
  messages and struggled to find a broad audience.
  He came to international attention in the 1980s
  after some of his feature films won important
  awards at the Cannes Film Festival in France.
• The French Canadian film director Denys Arcand
  had been making movies for twenty-five years
  when, in 1986, he became an "overnight sensation"
  with his witty satire on sex and society called
  The Decline of the American Empire (Le Déclin de
  lEmpire Américain). The critical and commercial
  success of that film thrust Arcand into the
  international spotlight and infused new life into
  his flagging career. Despite the academic
  pomposity of its title, the film is a witty
  comedy of manners about eight faculty
  membersfour male and four femalewho gather for
  a dinner party and discuss sex, history, and the
  relationship between men and women.
  Coincidentally, one of the female characters has
  written a book theorizing that, as civilizations
  approach collapse, people become more concerned
  about their own gratification than about their
  social responsibilities. All but one of the
  characters in the film seem intent on proving
  that theory correct.
• Because Arcand had been careful to avoid
  references to Quebec or Canada, Le declin de
  l'empire Americain found a much broader audience
  than anything he had done before. Made for a
  modest 1.8 million, Le declin grossed more than
  30 million, won several major international
  awards, and took nine Genies, the Canadian
  equivalent of the Oscars. But even more
  gratifying for Arcand was the announcement in
  early 1987 that the film had been nominated for
  an Oscar in the best-foreign-language-film
  category, marking the first time that a Canadian
  feature film had been honored in that way.
• Resisting the obvious temptation to make "Decline
  II," he began work on a totally different kind of
  film called Jesus of Montreal. The story involves
  a young actor named Daniel who is hired by the
  priest of a Montreal church to revitalize its
  annual passion play. The revised drama, which
  suggests that Jesus was the illegitimate son of a
  Roman soldier, is a popular success, but church
  officials find it offensive and want it stopped.
  When Daniel, whose actions in many ways begin to
  parallel those of Jesus, resists, conflict
  results.
• Jesus de Montreal made its debut at the 1989
  Cannes Film Festival, where it captured the
  Special Jury Prize and created a sensation. The
  film went on to win twelve Genie awards,
  including those for best picture, best director,
  and best original screenplay, and an Academy
  Award nomination as the year's best foreign film.
  To Arcand's astonishment, the film also won the
  Ecumenical Prize from the Organisation Catholique
  Internationale du Cinema et de l'Audiovisuel. The
  success of Jesus de Montreal fortified Arcand's
  position as an international talent as gifted in
  directing commercial films as he had been with
  documentaries. It also led some observers to
  conclude that filmmaking in Quebec had at last
  come of age. As some critic noted, "Arcand's
  career mirrors Quebec's cultural evolution over
  the past two decades. His focus has shifted from
  the national to the personal, from political
  issues of oppression to sexual traumas of
  affluence. He appears to relish the paradox of
  his position."

20
Roland Michel Tremblay French Canadian author
published in Paris I have to say that Québec is
not known for having produced many intellectual
authors and that might explain why its
literature stays very local. Philosophy is
virtually non-existent and metaphysic is lost on
the readers. I am that sort of author who loves
metaphysic and complicated books, that do not
give all the answers to the reader and ask from
the readers a certain investment. My first
books were so difficult to understand that it was
hard for me to find anyone around willing to read
them. The Revolution is still a mystery to most
and my guess is that if it were to be studied in
a University, it would become a very interesting
book as there are a lot of different
interpretations at many levels and is not
necessarily taking a point of view. Even
referents are not present, the reader never
really know what is talked about in the book. For
this reason it has been very difficult for me to
find a publisher in Québec, they simply did not
have the market for this sort of books. Only a
French publisher could publish me, and even The
Revolution did not find a publisher in France.
I was lucky the Eclecticism was published but
I have to say that it is my least popular book,
even though I feel it is my best work. In time I
started to write simpler books like
Denfert-Rochereau and The Anarchist. The
scandalous value of The Anarchist was enough to
get me published and it is the book that opened