Lola Lemire Tostevin: A minor perversion.

Abstract

My thesis examines the work of Ontario writer Lola Lemire Tostevin: five books of poetry, Color of Her Speech (1982), Gyno-Text (1983), Double Standards (1985), 'sophie (1988) and Cartouches (1995), and her first novel, Frog Moon (1994). Although she writes primarily in English, Tostevin's first language is French; I am primarily interested in how she makes use of this fact in both the form and the content of her writing. In examining this linguistic dynamic, I make some use of Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari's Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature. In emphasizing her linguistic and sexual difference, Tostevin "perverts" the traditionalist, male-centred, English language in which she is a "minor" writer. Reacting to painful divisiveness with a "paradigm of multiplicity," she creates a new range of possibilities able to exist within one country, person, or text.