The shipwrecking of literature: All at sea with Olivier Cadiot

Abstract

It has become something of a cliché to say that avant-garde literature died in France in the early 1980s. Yet, while it is evident that the beginning of the decade marked a turn in literary history, it is also clear that experimental writing practices have emerged since then, and that any assertion of the death of (post)modernism must therefore be relativized. This article considers the work of one writer, Olivier Cadiot, who entered the literary scene with fracas in 1988 with the publication of L'Art poétic'. Over a period of roughly thirty years, Cadiot has questioned what it means to read and write literature through producing a body of imaginative and theoretically dense cross-genre works. In so doing, he has asserted the creative and intellectual vibrancy of contemporary literary practices in the face of discourse which identifies French literature as being in a state of decline.