The overall aim of this thesis is to examine the encounter of the real and literature – as thematically crystallized in the contrivance of the literary real – in terms of an irreducible tension. The encounter of literature and the real (their coexistence and inseparability) is examined conjointly with the encounter (the meeting and interlinking) of Georges Bataille and Maurice Blanchot – as generated by the comparative angle that structures the thesis. The literary real addresses both the question of what kind of ‘real’ is involved and disclosed in writing (and how that might differ from reality in its more traditional sense – or more precisely from more conventional representations of reality), as well as the question of writing’s own ‘being’ (that is, the particularity of its mode of being, its peculiar reality/unreality). The thesis aims to provide a renewed (and overlooked) reading of both thinkers as situated at the crossroads of post-deconstruction (welcoming the real, experience) and anti-realism (differentiating the real from – its equation and reduction to – empirical reality and the current state of affairs). In parallel, and more broadly, the project, via Bataille and Blanchot, calls for a recasting of key terms of the literary and aesthetic tradition (such as creation and inspiration, autonomy and mimesis), but also of concepts relevant to wider current debates, such as space, inside and outside, time, experience and the event, visibility and invisibility, intimacy and distance.