L' ironie dans la prose fictionnelle des femmes du Québec: 1960-1980

This thesis explores the various manifestations of irony in prose-fiction by women in Quebec from 1960 to 1980. Traditionally used by men, irony is gradually becoming more widespread in women's writing, which in itself is an interesting reversal: more often "objects" of irony, women now reverse the rules of the game and become ironizing "subjects". The first part of the thesis investigates explicit irony; that is, irony which is duly identified and already decoded for the reader; for example, the author might emphasize an ironic fate or destiny for her characters, or might invest a character with an attitude, a smile, or remarks that are ironic. Explicit irony most often appears in works published during the first decade of our corpus; use of this form of irony constitutes a critical initial phase in women's writing because it enabled women authors to learn about the resources of irony and employ them in their work.Explicit irony, therefore, operates within the text and requires minimal competence in the reader for its decoding; the decoding of the text will play a central role in implicit irony, which will be focus of part two of the thesis. Implicit irony manifests itself in the text in three principal forms: rhetorical, structural, and chromosomic. Rhetorical irony emerges from knowledge of the language and requires the reader to identify occurrences of antiphrases, innuendoes, metaphors, and other types of word-games in the text; structural irony depends upon the inner-workings of the text and demands an aptitude for discerning instances of parody, structural paradox, or intertextuality; that form of irony which we have named chromosomic requires a specific decoding that is effected in function of the author's feminine gender.Following part two, which highlights the reader's role in the process of interpreting irony, the third and final part reveals the principal targets of irony in these women's writings. This tableau of "victims" completes our study by identifying the types of persons, institutions, or ideas that provoke the criticism of women writers. Such a broad range of types, comprising the clergy, education, the family, and foreigners, among others, tends to point toward a common denominator: Power. The authors scrutinize power relationships in all their forms; inspired by their "collective destiny", that persists, even today, in excluding them from positions of decision-making, women now propose a different vision of the world. Irony in the feminine permits an original reading of their struggle and their demands