Lire, dire, imager le monde — encore et toujours : la fin/les fins de la fiction (à propos de quelques romans britanniques contemporains)

Abstract

We relentlessly insist on confronting the possibility of the end of literature. Literature is said to be on the wane, and the dominant narrative of literary modernity seems to have reached its end. And yet, literature still interests us, as it still is interested in the present and how we process and experience it. And yet, we keep questioning the eventuality of its end and of its ends, and extended purpose. We are thus brought to question literariness itself as well as the situated relation we have to literary texts. Focusing on recent readings of the supposed end of literature and of alternative readings of literary engagement (William Mark, Rita Felski…), this article aims at understanding how literature confronts such a poetics of the end, while also facing up to the present and reinventing the ancient mimetic contract. Turning to recent British novels (Ian McEwan’s Lessons, Ali Smith’s Seasonal Quartet and Kazuo Ishiguro’s Klara and the Sun) the article also ponders lasting forms of attachments to literature and its promises, as well as how such an attachment resonates and persists, thus responding to our anxiety regarding the end of the literary.

Keywords

• attunement
• end of literature
• Rita Felski
• forms of life
• Kazuo Ishiguro
• William Marx