Résumé du roman: La fréquentation de l'horreur et de la violence ont épuisé Damien Martel, photographe de guerre. Après un tragique incident qui le touche de proche, il glisse lentement vers le désespoir. Le directeur de son agence de presse l'envoie se reposer à Québec, avec la mission d'écrire un roman dans lequel il réglera leur compte aux démons qui le hantent. Dès les premiers instants de son séjour, Damien rencontre des personnages bien réels qui se sont donné rendez-vous pour lui faire revisiter le passé. Certains pourraient s'être échappés d'une bande dessinée, d'autres d'un récit d'aventures. Heureusement, tout le monde finit par trouver sa place dans l'éternel roman de la vie. Résumé de l'essai: L'entrelacement de la musique et de la littérature romanesque n'est plus à découvrir. De nombreux auteurs ont pratiqué la musicalité dans la fiction, que ce soit sous forme de thématique musicale ou d'analogie formelle. L'usage de variations sophistiquées sur un thème initial et la composition en contrepoint propres à la fugue invitent à s'interroger sur les chemins communs parcourus par les deux arts. Le roman Auprès de moi toujours de Kazuo Ishiguro sert d'exemple dans cet essai pour étayer l'intuition de la narration contrapuntique. L'auteur de ce mémoire propose cet essai à la suite du roman intitulé La violoncelliste est disparue, qui ne prétend pas à la forme musicale, mais certainement à sa thématique.

This essay investigates the colonized self in Kazuo Ishiguro’s An Artist of the Floating World and The Remains of the Day, by analyzing the novels from a postcolonial perspective. Furthermore, it discusses how and why Masuji Ono and Mr. Stevens are affected by Japanese imperialism and British colonialism. Through a close reading of the novels, this essay argues that the protagonists are ‘colonized’ by their own countries, and eventually also ‘imperialized,’ or influenced, by America following the Second World War. Ono is ‘colonized’ by his colleague Matsuda, while Mr. Stevens is ‘colonized’ by his employer, Mr. Darlington. Later on, they are both ‘imperialized’ through the American occupation and influence.

This essay argues that repression and defense mechanisms contribute to the unreliability of Stevens’ narrationthrough three aspects: Stevens’ uncertainty of certain memories, his failure to report certain scenescorrectly and his defensive, self-contradictory discourse. There is no single best way to define what is consideredreliable and what is unreliable in narratology because the complexity of fictional characters will renderdifferent kinds of unreliability. This essay detects three kinds of unreliability of Stevens corresponding to thethree aspects mentIoned above: the first kind results from the untrustworthiness of our memory, the secondkind is the contradiction between the voice of the narrator and the other characters and the third kind lieswithin the narrative discourse. The unreliability of Stevens’ narration attributes to repression and defensemechanisms. The five kinds of defense mechanisms analyzed in the essay are selective memory, denial,projection, reaction formation and rationalization. In order to defend his self-image as a great butler, Stevenslies to or hides from himself and tries to avoid acknowledging certain undesirable thoughts or emotions. Eventhough Stevens becomes more reliable as he gains more self-realization during the road trip, his defensesare still on.

This thesis undertakes a critical study of ethics in the postcolonial novel. Focusing on four authors, namely Amitav Ghosh, Chimamanda Adichie, Caryl Phillips, and Kazuo Ishiguro, I conduct a comparative analysis of the ethical engagement offered in a selection of their novels. I argue that the recognitions and related emotional responses of characters are integral to the unfolding of these novels’ ethical concerns. The ethics thus explored are often marked by the complexity and impurity characteristic of the tragic – an impurity which is productively thought together with Jacques Derrida’s understanding of “radical evil”. I arrive at this through deploying an approach to ethics in the postcolonial novel that is largely drawn from the work of Martha Nussbaum, David Scott, and Terence Cave. This approach is attentive to both the particular contexts in which the novels’ ethical concerns unfold, as well as the general ethical questions in relation to which these can be understood. Crucial to this is the concept of anagnorisis, that is, the recognition scene. Functioning as both a structural and a thematic element, it serves as a hinge between the general and the specific ethical considerations in a novel. There are three ethical themes that I consider across the thesis: the ethics of remembrance, the human, and religion. The works of these four authors cluster around these concerns to differing degrees and with differing perspectives. What emerges is that while each engagement is focused on the particular details that the novel represents, the range of perspectives can nevertheless be productively read alongside one another as interventions into these general concerns. Following from this I also conclude that as a suitable, if not privileged, form in which to engage questions of the ethical, the postcolonial novel hosts the ethical difficulty that I name as the tragic, and which is characterised by the term radical evil.

This dissertation analyzes how twentieth- and early twenty-first- century novelists respond to the English landscape through their presentation of narrative and their experiments with novelistic form. Opening with a discussion of the English planning movement, "Narrative Topography" reveals how shifting perceptions of the structure of English space affect the content and form of the contemporary novel. The first chapter investigates literary responses to the English landscape between the World Wars, a period characterized by rapid suburban growth. It reveals how Virginia Woolf, in Mrs. Dalloway and Between the Acts, reconsiders which narrative choices might be appropriate for mobilizing and critiquing arguments about the relationship between city, country, and suburb. The following chapters focus on responses to the English landscape during the present era. The second chapter argues that W. G. Sebald, in The Rings of Saturn, constructs rural Norfolk and Suffolk as containing landscapes of horror--spaces riddled with sinkholes that lead his narrator to think about near and distant acts of violence. As Sebald intimates that this forms a porous "landscape" in its own right, he draws attention to the fallibility of representation and the erosion of cultural memory. The third chapter focuses on Kazuo Ishiguro's Never Let Me Go, a novel in which a cloned human being uses descriptions of landscape to express and, more often, to suppress the physical and emotional pain associated with her position in society. By emphasizing his narrator's proclivity towards euphemism and pastiche, Ishiguro intimates that, in an era of mechanical and genetic reproduction, reliance on perspectives formed in past and imagined futures can be quite deadly. The fourth chapter analyzes Ian McEwan's post 9/11 novel, Saturday--a reworking of Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway. In reading these two novels side-by-side, it reveals how London, its suburbs, and the English countryside might be imagined differently in the contemporary consciousness. Together these chapters investigate why novelistic treatments of the English landscape might interest contemporary readers who live outside England (and/or read these works in translation), especially during an era in which the English landscape has ceased to function as the real or metaphorical center of empire.

The purpose of this thesis is to analyse unreliable narration and its motivation in the two novels by Kazuo Ishiguro, An Artist of the Floating World (1986) and The Remains of the Day (1989) using the taxonomy of Zuzana Fonioková and James Phelan and Mary Patricia Martin. In its theoretical part, this thesis explores the concept of unreliability in contemporary narratology, furthermore, it studies self-deception and memory, two phenomena essential for understanding the motivations for unreliable narration. The practical part consists of an analysis of the textual signals of unreliability, which proves the complexity of Ishiguro's narrative strategies. The thesis concludes that the climax of both the novels is created through the spelling out of the narrators' self-deception, which is the cause of their unreliability in the first place. KEYWORDS Kazuo Ishiguro, unreliable narration, self-deception, memory, An Artist of the Floating World, The Remains of the Day

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