Feminism and nationalism in the works of Nicole Brossard and Oksana Zabuzhko

This dissertation sets precedence for comparative studies of Ukrainian and Quebecois literature through an analysis of the role of feminism and nationalism in the works of two contemporary authors. My readings of Brossard and Zabuzhko are framed by a discussion of the development of the feminist and separatist movements in Quebec in the 1960s and of the feminist and contemporary independence movements in Ukraine in the mid- to late-twentieth century. In both cultures, nationalist and feminist movements developed simultaneously, resulting in continuous interanimation between conventionally oppositional ideologies.;I interrogate the tensions and compatibilities between these two ideological perspectives in the authors' experimental narrative strategies. Authors of poetic prose who take seriously the sonorous and elastic qualities of language, Brossard and Zabuzhko create radically altered semantic and narrative structures to critique conventional paradigms of gender and nationality. At stake in this query is how these authors reconcile the tension between preserving their linguistic purity as writers in minority languages while producing alternative concepts through radical linguistic and narrative experimentation. As bilingual authors in bicultural contexts, both Zabuzhko and Brossard are attentive to issues of translation and communication. Incorporating a perspective grounded in feminist theory and criticism, particularly semantically-inflected French feminisms, I pay close attention to the way these authors play, seriously, with words. Through their linguistic and narrative experimentation, I argue, Brossard and Zabuzhko create new theoretical paradigms for exploring nationalistic-gendered problems of representation.;This dissertation rearticulates feminist literary readings by highlighting similarities between two cultures and ideologies that are traditionally kept apart. Further, this dissertation contributes to existing Brossard criticism by proposing new conceptual categories in her work, such as a homological model that offers an alternative approach to difference. Rather than applying Brossard's own theory to her fiction, I articulate alternative conceptual models within her work, which find echoes in the work of Zabuzhko as well.