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 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.