Contemporary French and Francophone Futuristic Novels

1. Front Matter

   Pages i-xii

   PDF

2. Introduction

   • Emmanuel Buzay

   Pages 1-15

3. Reading the Enigmatic Worlds of Futuristic Novels

   • Emmanuel Buzay

   Pages 17-59

4. Modalities and Fictional Storyworlds in Futuristic Novels

   • Emmanuel Buzay

   Pages 61-106

5. The Idea of the Book and Its Symbolism in Times of Change

   • Emmanuel Buzay

   Pages 107-149

6. Regaining Humanity by Learning from Escapes and Detours

   • Emmanuel Buzay

   Pages 151-193

7. Encounters with Bodies and Narratives: A Matrix of Contemporary Philosophical Quests

   • Emmanuel Buzay

   Pages 195-221

8. Conclusion

   • Emmanuel Buzay

   Pages 223-231

9. Back Matter

   Pages 233-244

   PDF

This book sheds a new light on the metafictional aspects of futuristic and science fiction novels, at the crossroads of information and media studies, possible worlds theories applied to cognitive narratology, questions related to the criticism of post-humanity, and, more broadly, contemporary French and Francophone literature. It examines the fictional minds of characters and their conceptions of resistance to the anticipated worlds they inhabit, particularly in novels by Pierre Bordage, Marie Darrieussecq, Michel Houellebecq, Amin Maalouf, Jean-Christophe Rufin, Antoine Volodine, and Élisabeth Vonarburg. It also explores how corporal postures serve as a matrix for philosophical quests in novels by Amélie Nothomb, Alain Damasio, and Romain Lucazeau. More specifically, from the fictional readers’ points of view, it provides a critical approach to the mythologies of writing, in the wake of the French philosophical tales by authors including Cyrano de Bergerac and Voltaire, to question the traditionally expressed formulations of the mythologies of writing, that is, of the metaphors of the book (the book of life, nature, and the world), to rethink the idea of a humanity within its limits.

• French Literature
• Science Fiction
• speculative fiction
• Francophone literature
• dystopian literature
• transhumanism

“French-language science fiction is an extremely dynamic genre and Emmanuel Buzay’s thesis, centered around the notion of writing and the question of the book, is fascinating. A whole new way of understanding anticipation novels opens up when we consider them as metafiction. A particularly original and promising approach.”

—Alexandre Gefen, Director of Research, Institut des Sciences Humaines et Sociales du CNRS, France

“Emmanuel Buzay’s absorbing book explores the overlap of literature and technology in contemporary French and Francophone works of science fiction and other future-oriented novels. The current tug-of-war between technophilia and technophobia provides the background before which Buzay’s arguments unfold, endowing them with an urgency that many scholarly books on contemporary literature do not have.”

—Christy Wampole, Professor, Princeton University

“Emmanuel Buzay brilliantly anchors the technological, ethical, literary and physiological metamorphoses of French science-fiction characters within old mythologies of writing. (…) Essential to this study is the centrality of the metaphor of the liber mundi as a path toward a political reconstruction of the world that is both critical of totalizing models and in quest of a metaphysical collective unity.”

—Hélène Domon, Professor, California State University, Fullerton

• University of Massachusetts Amherst, Amherst, USA

  Emmanuel Buzay

Emmanuel Buzay is Assistant Professor of French and Francophone Studies at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, USA. His research interests include contemporary French and Francophone literature, literatures of the imagination (science fiction, anticipatory novels, and fantasy), memory studies, and narrative and semiotic studies of film and video games. He has published in Contemporary French & Francophone Studies: SITES, Res Futurae, and Lectures croisées de l’œuvre de Michel Houellebecq (2017), and he has articles forthcoming in Nouvelles Etudes francophones and the Australian Journal of French Studies.