“Revolution” in the Epic Form in Contemporary French Literature

Abstract

The basic claim of this thesis is a speculative one: there has been a ‘revolution’ in the epic form in the late twentieth- and twenty-first centuries that challenges how this form has been formulated in French literary theory in the 1960s and 1970s, most notably intertextual theory. Contrary to the critical view proposed by Julia Kristeva and, later, Franco Moretti that the epic form is monological, that is, reducible to a single perspective, whether cultural or linguistic, and totalising, I argue that certain literary works by Michel Henry, Georges Perec, Édouard Glissant, and François Laruelle indicate a plural and decentred reformulation of it. This reformulation of the epic form involves a transformation in how the real and language relate to one another. I argue that the critical response to the epic lapses into a dualism, where the real is foreclosed to language, though still obliquely present as a disruptive or interruptive force. This is asserted, in part, to preserve the real from any overarching mimetic relation that might reduce it to a passive, static image. Yet this loses access to the real in a way that is equally stultifying. In response, I propose a speculative figure of the epic as immanently co-emergent with the real, that is, shaped by and shaping the real. Such a figure takes the epic back, not only to the risk and struggle of classical epic works, but also its ancient communal and ritual setting, transforming the epic from the mimetic and reflective to the participatory. Underpinning this argument is a further claim that recent developments in French theory, in particular a revision of the relation between the real and language that is implicit within the realist thought of François Laruelle, provide the basis for a novel literary realism. From the works examined in this thesis, the epic form is understood, then, not only in terms of the textual, but also in terms of community, music, and image as a response to and from the real.