Mémoire - Leslie REMPEL

Postmodernism's defeat : Beautiful Losers and Prochain épisode as postcolonial works

Leslie REMPEL 

This thesis investigates Leonard Cohen's Beautiful Losers and Hubert Aquin's Prochain épisode in terms, of postcolonial and postmodern theory. These novels are often interpreted as being either one or the other. Critics rarely take into consideration that both of these works have features which can be seen to fit both theories. Both of these authors are valued as some of the more difficult novels to comprehend in terms of Canadian novels making this thesis even more complex and a challenge to write. It made sense to choose to investigate these two works side by side because they have a lot of similarities. Some of these resemblances range from aspects as basic as the time period when the novels were written to the author's methods of using history to make social commentary. It was also important to use two writers from Montreal, each from one of the two solitudes, in order to explore how their novels fit postmodern and postcolonial theories. This theoretical thesis attempts to show how both Leonard Cohen and Hubert Aquin do not use their writing for a nihilistic purpose. Each author uses historical situations to display a hope for new beginnings in the future. Despite all of the literature that exists on both Leonard Cohen and Hubert Aquin, this study tries to show a different interpretation then what has already been done.