| L'ecole selon Rejean Ducharme offers a new view of Ducharme's widely acclaimed novels. Through analysis of three of the author's major works (Le Nez qui voque, L'Hiver de force and Va savoir ), we will discover Ducharme's fascination with the function of formal education as embodied in the cultural structure of the school and we will see the central role that this issue plays throughout his various narratives. Although unexplored by academics, Ducharme's vision of the school touches an significant number of issues at various levels of complexity. In our introduction, we examine the challenge of defining the issues and the scope of the school, and we consider a variety of frameworks for our analysis. The initial portion of the thesis itself takes us through Ducharme's writings, following the thread of this theme and identifying important references. Following this inventory, our second section examines the ways Ducharme's school addresses issues of authority in popular culture through its vision of Literature and History. We also see links to the other classic ducharmian themes of "subversion and salvation". Finally, we propose a model of the fanciful ducharmian school as it emerges from the text of these three novels. Our summary looks at Ducharme's ultimate observation, that in his school, lessons are never fully learned and school is never over. |
