The Demand for Reality. The Politics of Narrative and Practices of the Practices of Non-Fiction in the Work of Marie Cosnay and François Beaune

Abstract

Since the 1980s, the practice of enquiry has been developed in French literature to the point of redefining the art of the novel, the status of the writer and the practice of reading: "literature" may no longer mean exactly what it meant in the twentieth century. This article attempts to situate this turning point by taking the examples of two emerging writers, François Beaune and Marie Cosnay, who are very different from each other, but who both construct their works with the same urgent need to document social reality. Their books are presented as the results of fieldwork, producing first-hand knowledge. This passion for the real engages their lives, defines their status as writers, and means that books are no longer the Aristotelian beautiful object, soaring in its singularity, but a written thing among others, the product of human labour, a modest testimony to fragile, unfinished and perhaps unfinishable knowledge, raising the question of what literature is.