DOCUMENT IMAG 20TH CENT FRENCH LIT C

The Documentary Imagination in Twentieth-Century French Literature identifies a documentary impulse in French literature that emerges at the end of the nineteenth century and culminates in a proliferation of factual writings in the twenty-first. Focusing on the period bookended by these two moments it highlights the enduring concern with factual reference in texts that engage either with current events or the historical archive. Specifically it considers a set of ideas and practices centered on the conceptualization and use of documents. In doing so it contests the widespread narrative that twentieth-century French literature abandons the realist enterprise and argues that writers instead renegotiate the realist legacy outside or at the margins of the fictional space of the novel.Analyzing works by authors including Gide Breton Aragon Yourcenar Duras and Modiano the book defines a specific documentary mode of literary representation that records assembles and investigates material traces of reality. The document is a textual visual or material piece of evidence repurposed through its visual insertion textual transcription or description within a literary work. It is a fact but it also becomes a figure standing for literature''s confrontation with the real. The documentary imagination involves a fantasy of direct access to a reality that speaks for itself. At the same time it gives rise to concrete textual practices that open up new directions for literature by interrogating the construction and interpretation of facts.