The aim of this book is to understand why and how a certain history of literary modernity was played out in France in a paradoxical but fruitful relationship with the idea of an impossible literature. Initiated by Mallarmé and Rimbaud on the side of poetry, it is in narrative prose that this research is pursued under the double patronage of Monsieur Teste de Valéry and Paludes de Gide. In this wake, it is a story of the "narrative" that emerges as many leading writers turn away from the novel, which they aggravate the crisis, but without giving up a form of relationship that prohibits a narrative classic or happy. It is this relation to the impossible, which makes itself a relation of the impossible, that this essay envisages for the whole of the twentieth century. It is therefore necessary to identify a paradigm of what will be called "narrative" (a revealing anagram of the word "writing"), to follow its rich and different forms - through surrealism, according to the inflection imposed on it by Battle and Blanchot, or in the vertigo of Beckett's voice - to a sort of exhaustion of this quest that marked the twentieth century, when the cliché and the pathos of the impossible are clichés of a modernity absorbed by his reflexive mirror. In a certain way, we go out of this period, of which we must then measure the way, the dead ends, as well as the extraordinary ambitions, in order to understand the legacy inherited from our time. After having posited the hypothesis of the narrative, I trace, in the first part, the course in a story which proposes the essential scansions and elements of negative definition. The second part focuses on a series of case studies (Bataille, Thomas, Blanchot and Beckett) who are interested in the paradoxical space of the enunciation of these texts.
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