Show notes
Contemporary French and Francophone Futuristic Novels: The Longing to be Written and Its Refusal (Palgrave
Macmillan, 2022) 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.
Guest Emmanuel Buzay is currently working as an international
technical expert for the Modern Language Association and the French
Embassy in the US, having previously held appointments at UMass Amherst
and the University of Connecticut. In addition to this monograph, he has
published book chapters on topics from Frankenstein to Michel Houellebecq, and his articles have appeared in Nouvelles Études Francophones, Res Futurae, and Contemporary French and Francophone Studies.
Host Gina Stamm is Associate Professor of French at The University of
Alabama, with research concentrated on the environmental humanities and
speculative literatures of the 20th and 21st centuries, from Surrealism
to contemporary science fiction and feminist utopias, in Metropolitan
France and the francophone Caribbean, with a book manuscript under
review on posthumanist ecological engagement in the surrealist movement.
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