Montreal et la metropolisation: Une geographie romanesque

Abstract

This thesis is a work of literary geography that addresses a phenomenon generally studied through its economic and political components: metropolization. This concept is approached through the study of Montreal as depicted in a corpus of novels published between 2003 and 2006. The resulting focus, then, is less on themes such as metropolitan governance for instance and more on lived spaces to which characters are emotively bound through their fears and aspirations. More specifically, the city centre is regarded as a space of anamnestic practices. The crime fiction genre and rules that govern it evoke a fragmented urban space in which the work of decoding inherent to investigation provides the illusion of power over the city. However, the multiple and constantly reconfigured connectivity enlarges the territorial framework where the life of the characters unfolds, and dissolves Montreal into a very contemporaneous globality.