Quebec feminist writing: Integrating the avant-garde and the political in the works of Nicole Brossard and France Theoret.

Abstract

This dissertation explores the problematic connections between avant-garde art and politics, principally the attempt to integrate experimental literary production into life praxis. Defining Quebec feminisms of the 1970s as a movement that sought political and social change, this study examines the meaning of the term "avant-garde" in relation to feminist experimental texts, and highlights the strategies used to achieve the political objectives that their authors set forth in--and for--their specific context. I focus on the period 1975 and 1985, and on writers Nicole Brossard and France Theoret as emblematic of this complex initiative. In the 1970s in Quebec, when counter-cultural and mainstream political movements competed for influence, nationalist discourses and attempts to create a "modernite" in Quebec art and letters had a major impact on Brossard, Theoret and other members of the feminist avant-garde (Chapter one). Existing theories of the avant-garde, notably those of Peter Burger, provide a model for investigating the implications of Quebec feminist writing, even though gender represents a crucial new category for this avant-garde practice (Chapter two). The analysis (in Chapters three and four) of the texts of Brossard and Theoret between 1975 and 1985, their most intensively experimental period, centers on the feminist components of their writing. But the fact that their work reveals a "split practice," that they alternate between being literary experimentors, on the one hand, and on the other, journalists, playwrights, academics, mentors, and public figures suggests a desire to address different audiences in different "political" ways--a tendency that does not seem to exist in earlier avant-gardes. This duality may have made the "oblique" political criticism in their experimental texts more accessible to a greater audience. Inevitably, the example of Brossard and Theoret raises questions about the capacity of experimental writing to incorporate the political critique inherent in feminism or any other radical political movement.