Un réalisme contemporain: Les narrations documentaires

Abstract

The present period has seen the development of the documentary literary narrative, a type of work which relates all at once to travel literature, sociological enquiry, the art of the political essay, biography and autobiography. Heterogeneity signals out the documentary narrative in its very foundations. This also goes for its auctorial status, that of "literary journalism", a genre scorned in France but which has a recognised status in the anglosphere. The "materials" they are made from are just as composite, including among others geographical descriptions, historical narratives, interviews in great numbers, brief stories, "confessions", etc. This affects the physical aspects of the texts, since they often resort to differences in typography and to illustration (drawings, photographs, all types of explanatory graphs). Far from trying to hide these different layers of heterogeneity, these documentary narratives are proud to lay claim to them, without nonetheless letting themselves be overwhelmed by chaos, because they see themselves as engaged in the cognitive charting of the world. Because they show such a determination to engage with the full force of reality, they contest the powers of journalism, the social sciences, and that aspect of literature predicated on realism in the same breath as they adopt their methods, and thus put into question in a new way the very notion of literature.