French Fiction Today听focuses on the French novel in the twenty-first century, examining a series of works that are exemplary of broader currents in the genre. Each of these texts wagers insistently upon our willingness to speculate about literature and its uses, in an age when the value of literature is no longer taken as axiomatic. Each of these texts may be thought of as a听critical novel, a form that calls upon us to engage with it in a critical manner, promising that meaning will arise in the articulation of writing and reading. Each of these authors participates in a debate about what the novel is as a cultural form in our present鈥昦nd about what it may become, in a future that begins right听now.
Warren Motte is a Professor of Distinction at the University of Colorado and a Chevalier in the Order of Academic Palms. He specializes in contemporary French literature, with particular focus upon experimentalist works that put accepted notions of literary form into question. His recent books include听Fables of the Novel: French Fiction since 1990听(2003),听Fiction Now: The French Novel in the Twenty-First Century听(2008), and听Mirror Gazing听(2014).