We use cookies to distinguish you from other users and to provide you with a better experience on our websites. Close this message to accept cookies or find out how to manage your cookie settings.
We use cookies to distinguish you from other users and to provide you with a better experience on our websites. Close this message to accept cookies or find out how to manage your cookie settings.
Reality is always anachronous.
– Jorge Luis Borges, from ‘Two Books’From Rouaud's polemical denunciations of ‘modern’ scientific literature to Volodine's weird post-exotic dystopias, these different modes of engagement with genre fiction and notions of literary return reveal radically dissimilar ways of conceptualizing literary history and politicizing the literary. At the beginning of this book, I suggested that the paradigmatic account of the return to the story was provided by the writer Daniele Sallenave, who embraced a break with the nouveau roman and the aesthetics of intransitivity. Rather than return to Sallenave's argument, which has been quoted and reformulated many times over the years, I would propose that it is another conception of return, one that is never quoted today, that helps us think through the trajectory of this study. That conception of return is bathmological, and it is outlined in Renaud Camus's response to La Quinzaine Littéraire's questionnaire about the ‘end of the avant-gardes’ and the ‘return to the story.’ To the question of whether there had been a liberation from ‘theory’ and a return to the story, Camus replied that this characterization of return risked creating significant misunderstandings:
As for the old question of the ‘return to the story,’ I’m afraid that once again the best approach to it is Barthesian ‘bathmology,’ a half-serious (and all the more effective) science of the degrees of discourse, which allows us to see that serious differences—due for example to the itineraries followed to arrive at an illusory coincidence—can exist between apparently similar and superficially identical positions. In this particular case, everyone is indeed more or less on board when it comes to a ‘return to the story,’ but the story is not an unambiguous meeting place for those who never left it, on the one hand, and, on the other hand, for those like me who went outside of it a little ways to see what it was made of and to figure out what could still be done with it. (1989, 8)
To save this book to your Kindle, first ensure [email protected] is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about saving to your Kindle.
Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.
Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.
To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Dropbox.
To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.
