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Universidad De La Laguna UNIVERSIDAD DE LA LAGUNA Alterity and metafiction: poetic design in the work of Michael Ondaatje Autor: Llarena Ascanio, María Jesús Director: Bernhard Dietz Guerrero Departamento de Filología Inglesa y Alemana A Janet Inksetter y a Eugenia Estanga Acknowledgements This study would have been impossible without the help of numerous people and institutions.. I wish to thank the Government of the Canary Islands and its Consejería de Educación, Cultura y Deportes for both a generous four-year Research Scholarship, “Beca de Postgrado Conducente a la Obtención del Grado de Doctor,” (1992-1996),and a second four-month grant to be part of the Canadian Studies Program of the University of Ottawa (1997). Both the Government of the Canary Islands and the Spanish Association for Canadian Studies have contributed financially to various of my conference trips in which I have had the opportunity to test my work in progress. They have alsopartially or totally funded my several stays as a Visiting Scholar at theUniversitiesof Toronto,Ottawa and Manitoba. I am indebted to the Centre for Canadian Studies at the University of La Laguna for providing me with the academic forum as well as the institutional support necessary for the research and writing of this project. My most sincere thanks to Professor Sam Solecki, former Dean of Humanities of the University of Toronto,who kindly guided me for several years since I first went to the University of Toronto in the summer of 1994, as well as to the Staff at Robarts Library and the National Library of Canada, especially to its director Mr. Randall Ware and Peter W. Rochon; Morrisett Library in Ottawa, and Elizabeth Dafoe Library, in Winnipeg. Also, since 1994, Janet Inksetter has been a wise counsellor and friend, and has helped me with her encouragement and her comments about my work.. I was fortunate enough to meet and share my project with professors and writers Douglas Barbour, Robert Bringhurst, Dennis Cooley, Michael Holmes, Robert Kroetsch, André Lapierre, Gerald Lynch, Seymour Mayne, Steve McCaffery, Ron Smith, and especially Nicola Vulpe and Maha Albari, whose sense of hospitality and disinterested attitude saved me in a hard academic year in Ottawa. I would like to acknowledge the help of Professor and Dean of Arts at the University of Ottawa David Staines, for his revision of some of my chapters and of Markus Müller for his technical and emotional support all throughout my stay at the University of Ottawa.I cannot forget my colleagues and friends Inés Martín, Beatriz González, Teresa Sandoval, Olga Fernández, Mariluz González, Elena Sánchez, Isaías Naranjo, Maribel García, Eva Darias, Juan Ignacio Oliva, Víctor Álamo, and my whole family, for their unconditional support all throughout these years. Finally, I am most indebted to Professor Bernd Dietz Guerrero,my supervisor, who first introduced me to Canadian literature and who has encouraged and supported me with unusual energy and patience all along. ALTERITY AND METAFICTION: POETIC DESIGN IN THE WORK OF MICHAEL ONDAATJE Acknowledgements Introduction 1-48 PART ONE: POETIC BEGINNINGS 1.1 From Aesthetic Modernism to Poetic Postmodernism 51-84 1.2 Theorizing thePostmodern: Towards a Poetics 85-1114 2.1 Allegorical Abstractions:Poetic Beginnings in The Dainty Monsters 115-146 2.2 Poetic Process: Approaching Reality in Rat Jelly 147-171 3.1 Elegiac Consolation: The Extension of Poetic Form 172-195 3.2 Poetic Design of theSelf: Secul arLove 196-216 4.1 Cinematic and Poetic Elements: Interrelated Strategies 217-231 4.2 Photography and Alterity: New Postmodernist Tools and Illustrations 232-262 PART TWO: GENERIC EXPERIMENTATION 5.1 Between Spiritual Desolation and Anarchy: Alterity and Heteroglossia 263-290 5.2 Destructive Nature and Death: The Fate of the Anti-Hero 291-313 6.1 Visual Images, Oneiric Scenes and Madness: An Escape Towards Romanticism in Billy theKid and Slaughter 314-338 6.2 The Feminine Element: Violence or Security 339-363 7.1 Post-Structuralism, Defamiliarization and the Use of History 365-391 7.2 Intertextuality and Artistic Internationalism 392-413 8.1 Beyond History and Biography: A Historiohraphic Metafiction 414-438 8.2 From Oral Tradition to Written Text: A Documentary Design in Running in the Family 439-466 PART THREE: ARTISTIC INTERNATIONALISM 9.1 Alterity and Resistance in Postcolonial Writing 467-500 9.2 Dispossessed of Identity: The Conflict Between Ideologic and Private Discourse 501-522 10.1 In the Skin of the Other: The Dialogic Configuration of the Self 523-543 10.2 Temptations of Identity: In the Skin of a Lion 544-574 11.1 Post-National Arguments: Narrative as Minefields 575-593 11.2 Narrative and Poetic Wounds: The English Patient 594-631 12.1 Postcript: Other Alterities in Handwriting 632-650 Conclusions 651-686 Bibliography of Works Cited 687-732 INTRODUCTION Philip Michael Ondaatje was born in September 12, 1943 in Colombo, Ceylon (now Sri Lanka). He is educated in St. Thomas College, Colombo. After his parents’ divorce he follows his mother to London, England, in 1954, where he attends Dulwich College. In High School the young Ondaatje confronts British customs and the strict education which makes him evade himself through the reading of poetry until 1962, when he decides to follow his brother to Canada. There, he attends Bishop’s University in Lennoxville, Québec, from 1962 to 1964, and later, University of Toronto for his B.A. in 1965, and Queen’s University in Kingston for his M.A. Thesis on the writer Edwin Muir in 1967. In 1966 he gets his Canadian citizenship. In Bishop’s University he starts discovering his poetic vocation thanks to the influence of several professors and poets such as D.G. Jones. Later, he marries Jones’s ex-wife and they come to Toronto where he finishes his B.A. Due to his negative stance towards a Ph.D. Thesis he has to leave Western Ontario University and is admitted in York University while he also gets his first Governor General’s Award in 1970. When Ondaatje arrived in Canada he had written nothing and, although he had a voracious appetite for reading, he had no idea that he would eventually become a respected author. His favourite writers at the time were W.B. Yeats, Franz Kafka and Robert Browning. Like the latter poet, Ondaatje dissolves the lines between prose and poetry: “Moving in and out of imagined landscape, portrait and documentary, anecdote and legend ... Ondaatje writes for the eye and ear simultaneously,” Diane Wakoski has stated in Contemporary Poets. Ondaatje’s success as a novelist, however, has taken him beyond the borders of Canadian success and into the world of international acclaim. To approach this study of Michael Ondaatje’s work we have considered pertinent to begin with an overview of English Canadian poetry from its beginnings and with a special focus on the 1960s and on the possible influences and readings the writer has been aware of. After a brief vision of Ondaatje’s cultural and poetic beginnings, we will analyse the poet’s evolution towards a narrative which adds, to the postmodernism of his experimental years, the consciousness of his postcolonial other, and which exposes, beyond a dense and imagistic prose, collective and individual questions of a maturing poet who reaches the international public without losing his sense of Canadianness, namely, his heterogeneous and pluralistic background. At the end of the nineteenth century, poetry in English Canada proclaimed heavy imperialistic views towards the British tradition. It was not until the Confederation poets where we find a subtle consideration of what it means to be North American and Canadian, and to express a local feeling in any of the arts. English-Canadian poetic beginnings are thus imported and unable to be translated naturally into a new landscape. The Confederation poets -Charles G.D. Roberts, Bliss Carman, Archibald Lampman and D.C. Scott- will be the ones to give a new impulse to the local and particular features of the Canadian land despite their traditionalism. The decade of the 1920s will see, however, the emergence of the long poem with E.J. Pratt and the documentary poems of Dorothy Livesay. These and other poets such as Ross, Finch and Kennedy will be the ones to have a renewed sensibility towards European Aestheticism and will help, with their own means, fight against the Canadian Victorian mentality. In 1936, a modernist manifesto will be published with the anthology New Provinces. But modernism will be delayed in English Canada due to the strong attachment to both the Victorian age and sensibility and the lack of a cultural and editorial structure to feel independent and organized as a group. There seem to be two types of modernisms in Canada: an aesthetic one in the 1920s, and a committed and conscious one in the 1940s. The latter, also called neomodernism, appears in Canada with poets like Earle Birney, Irving Layton, Louis Dudek, Miriam Waddington and Raymond Souster. Two important anthologies appear in this decade, A.J.M. Smith’s The Book of Canadian Poetry 2 (1943) and John Sutherland’s Other Canadians (1947), where an argument will be created to confront tradition and colonialism, a cultural debate which opposes a non-nationalist and a nationalist modernist view. Thus, a reflexive modernism slowly develops after World War II with a narcissistic stance that speaks through the voices of Al Purdy or Eli Mandel. Modern Canadian literature is then being built and will be prolongued through the 1950s and even the 1960s. Northrop Frye’s verbal explosion will take place in the 1960s and has its voice in poets such as Phyllis Webb, Al Purdy and James Reaney, together with the Montreal poets Irving Layton, A.M.
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