Carnets (May 2022)

« Ironihilisme » : le roman noir français sur un autre ton

  • Stéphane Ledien

DOI
https://doi.org/10.4000/carnets.13598
Journal volume & issue
Vol. 23

Abstract

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This article analyzes the ideological rupture and the ambiguity of the narrative voice at work in the French noir novel of the 21st century, in particular through the texts of the writers Jérôme Leroy, Antoine Chainas and DOA. Through a stylistic and sociological approach to these novels rooted in the crises of the 3rd millennium, the study points out the aesthetic confusions and the formal paradoxes – which very often border on a sarcastic negation of any moral value – with which the narrators and characters play. If the observed irony and disillusionment are a conscious legacy of the classic American noir novel and the ‘‘neo-polar’’, the denial of progressivism dear to the ‘‘left-wing whodunit’’ contributes to the emergence of an unprecedented expression of disillusion: ‘‘ironihilism’’, a point of view that is at the same time impertinent, distanced, misleading and compromising on the speeches and gestures of the enunciators as well as the actors of the narrative.

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