The creative component of my project is a conteporary, confessional novel, Refrain. The narrator, Jake, has spent his youth chasing a life that matched his dreams - first as a would-be rock star and then by fleeing to India in search of exotic adventures with his girlfriend. Now he returns alone to the suburban backwater he'd tried so hard to escape, ready for stability and responsibility. However, his attempts to reinvent himself in this world of chronic unemployment and limited horizons are thrown into confusion by old friends, estranged fmaily members, an unresolved attachment, and by his musical successor - a volatile young woman with her own problems, who draws him back to things he'd rather forget and towards a future he isn't ready to face. Refain is a story of idealism and desire, fading hopes and unexpected opportunities, long-distance love and short-sightedness. The exegetical component of my project investigates the term 'portmodern confession' as an i ntersection of the confessional narrative mode and postmodernism, and its application to two recent texts: The sportswriter by Richard Ford, and The remains of teh day by Kazuo Ishiguro.

Thesis (M.A.)--Memorial University of Newfoundland, 2004. / Bibliography: leaves 141-146.

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Richard Ford’s Canada, published in 2012, seems to have evaded literary studies. This essay—which is an early contribution to the undoubtedly growing range of studies on Canada that will be published in the future—is concerned with how alienation is constructed in the novel. I refer to alienation as a sense of being out of place and becoming estranged, both to others as well as to one's self. The essay focuses mainly but not exclusively on the point of view of the fifteen-year-old protagonist Dell, who is thrown out into a world that has ceased to be adapted to his needs and which seems to threaten his very existence. To speak with Lukács, the protagonist steps out from an unproblematic world into a problematic one and is divided in the process as his ideas are no longer attainable. But this very process of division or alienation also creates room for agency, in the sense of independent action or the will to act independently. In Canada—particularly in the second part of the novel—alienation is constructed in the meetings between Dell and fragmented and morose characters. Dell is required to adapt to these people and the circumstances in which they meet, but in those same processes of adaptation he manages to find small ways out. This makes it possible for Dell to keep himself whole despite his deteriorating circumstances. Equally important for how alienation is constructed in the novel is the meeting between Dell and the landscape of the prairie. While the landscape at first seems to be a source of further alienation, it ultimately proves to be the only place where Dell experience communion.

Cette étude se penche sur les œuvres de Russell Banks, Raymond Carver et Richard Ford, qui ont débuté leur carrière dans les années 1960-1970. À une époque où les milieux académiques s’intéressent davantage à l’autoréflexivité et aux jeux métafictionnels des écrivains postmodernes, les trois auteurs revendiquent, quant à eux, leur appartenance à la tradition réaliste. Dans « Quelques mots sur le minimalisme », John Barth suggère que le retour du réalisme social à partir des années 1970 peut être vu à la fois comme une réaction à la fiction dite « postmoderne » et comme un symptôme du malaise social et économique de l’époque. En effet, Cathedral, Continental Drift et The Sportswriter décrivent, dans un souci de vraisemblance et d’exactitude, la vie quotidienne d’Américains ordinaires malmenés par la politique de Reagan. Cette étude montre que les trois auteurs s’inscrivent dans la tradition du réalisme social, mais qu’ils sont influencés par le contexte postmoderne dans lequel ils écrivent et tiennent compte des problèmes de représentation typiques de cette période. Leurs œuvres sont donc marquées par une tension entre le respect des conventions littéraires propres à la tradition réaliste et la mise en évidence de l’artificialité de l’illusion mimétique, à une époque où la réalité elle-même est vue comme une construction linguistique. / His study focuses on the works of Russell Banks, Raymond Carver and Richard Ford. They started writing during the 1960s and 1970s, at a time when the self-reflexivity and metafictional play of postmodernist writers were drawing a lot of critical attention in academic circles. However, they consider themselves to be realist writers. In “A Few Words about Minimalism,” John Barth suggested that the return to realist fiction in the mid-1970s could be both a reaction against so-called “postmodernist” fiction and a symptom of the social and economic unease of the period. Indeed, Cathedral, Continental Drift and The Sportswriter describe in accurate detail the everyday lives of ordinary American men and women during Reagan’s presidency. This study demonstrates that these authors are part of the American realist tradition, but that their strand of social realism also takes into account the postmodern context in which they write, by dealing with problems of representation that are typical of the period. Their works both use and challenge the literary conventions associated with the realist tradition, by underlining the artificiality of mimetic illusion at a time when reality itself is seen as a linguistic construct.