L'expérience plurielle du quotidien : Georges Perec, Philippe Vasset, François Bon, Annie Ernaux et Jacques Roubaud

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Zhang, Dan, author

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The question of the everyday has been at the heart of French literature and culture over the past several decades. Maurice Blanchot sees indeterminacy as the everyday's predominant characteristic a...

The question of the everyday has been at the heart of French literature and culture over the past several decades. Maurice Blanchot sees indeterminacy as the everyday's predominant characteristic and considers the experience of everyday life as a process of "devenir perpétuel" ("perpetual becoming"). His observation echoes the thinking of many others. There is a lot of research to say that everyday life is about opacity, ambivalence and dynamism. Behind the apparent repetition of everyday life, there is a hidden richness. The central purpose of my dissertation is to (re)think the nature of the everyday through close readings of post-1970 texts - over half published this century - which blur the boundaries between fiction and reality and draw on investigations into real everyday spaces. The authors concerned are Georges Perec, Philippe Vasset, François Bon, Annie Ernaux and Jacques Roubaud. The works in the corpus employ ludic constraints closely related to both space and time, form part of what Dominique Viart called "Fieldwork Literature" and offer a plural image of ordinary existence. By giving special value to the process, they also shed light on the nature of everyday life. I analyze the ways in which various writers engage with the everyday through their literary fieldwork and put forward the concept of "excès de réalité" ("excess of reality") which relates to an aesthetic of gaps, namely the inability to fill the gaps in our knowledge of the everyday. I will examine how this "excès de réalité" is introduced in the texts and discuss how it is contributing to the elusive nature of the everyday. Conceived as both the means and result of discovery, experimental projects remain intrinsically open and are reflective of everyday life. Moreover, rather than presenting themselves as duplicates of daily life, they become its metaphors and provide examples of creative and inventive initiatives in the overlooked and seemingly insignificant everyday experience. From people to place, from city to suburb, from France to Japan, what is the essence of the everyday, why it deserves our special attention, and how to engage with it represent the main thrust of my research.

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