(De)Formed Melancholic Depictions of Identity: Digitizing Aesthetics, Memory, and Culture

Abstract

This thesis takes up France Daigle’s postmodernist Pour sûr (2011), a Governor General’s Award-winning novel that depicts the day-to-day lives of a group of Acadians in Moncton, New Brunswick, over the course of 1728 fragments that belong to various aspects of Acadian culture, as a case study for a new methodology that aims to offer innovative means of studying minor literatures in Canada. First, it does so by distant reading the novel’s quantifiable aesthetics—fragments, intertextuality, self-reflexivity—using digital tools, with data visualizations that show hidden patterns and clusters indicative of an unconscious cultural memory; second, it close reads these patterns and clusters alongside the author’s melancholic, self-reflexive interjections as sites of conflict, sites that affectively construct her depiction of Acadian identity. Chapter 1 introduces readers to the novel of study, the significance of cultural memory for a minor literature such as Acadie’s, and to the project’s objectives, while Chapter 2 conceptualizes the methodological framework of “sieve reading” that this thesis employs, and which combines distant and close reading. Next, Chapter 3 contextualizes Daigle and Pour sûr within the history of Acadian fiction and the tradition of literary postmodernism. In Chapter 4, I present data visualizations of the text that represent its fragmentation, self-reflection, and language before analyzing these findings alongside close readings of the novel in Chapter 5. Lastly, Chapter 6 discusses other possible applications for “sieve reading,” namely with respect to other minor literatures.