Contemporary French and Francophone Futuristic Novels

“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
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.
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.