Emmanuel Buzay, "Contemporary French and Francophone Futuristic Novels: The Longing to be Written and Its Refusal" (Palgrave Macmillan, 2022)

About this episode

Emmanuel Buzay discusses the metafictional aspects of contemporary French and Francophone futuristic novels and their philosophical implications.

Contemporary French and Francophone Futuristic Novels: The Longing to be Written and Its Refusal (Palgrave Macmillan, 2022) sheds a new light on the metafictional aspects of futuristic and science fiction novels, at the crossroads of information and media studies, possible worlds theories applied to cognitive narratology, questions related to the criticism of post-humanity, and, more broadly, contemporary French and Francophone literature. It examines the fictional minds of characters and their conceptions of resistance to the anticipated worlds they inhabit, particularly in novels by Pierre Bordage, Marie Darrieussecq, Michel Houellebecq, Amin Maalouf, Jean-Christophe Rufin, Antoine Volodine, and Élisabeth Vonarburg. It also explores how corporal postures serve as a matrix for philosophical quests in novels by Amélie Nothomb, Alain Damasio, and Romain Lucazeau. More specifically, from the fictional readers’ points of view, it provides a critical approach to the mythologies of writing, in the wake of the French philosophical tales by authors including Cyrano de Bergerac and Voltaire, to question the traditionally expressed formulations of the mythologies of writing, that is, of…

People in this episode

Host: Marshall Poe

Guest: Emmanuel Buzay

Topics covered

• metafiction
• futuristic novels
• science fiction
• cognitive narratology
• post-humanity
• French literature
• philosophical quests

Keywords

• metafiction
• futuristic novels
• science fiction
• cognitive narratology
• post-humanity
• French literature
• philosophy
• writing mythologies

Mentioned in this episode

Organizations: Modern Language Association, French Embassy, Palgrave Macmillan

Books & works: Contemporary French and Francophone Futuristic Novels: The Longing to be Written and Its Refusal

More episodes of New Books in Critical Theory

• Jeffrey R. Di Leo et al. eds., "Theory as World Literature" (Bloomsbury, 2025) · June 12, 2026 · 32 min
• Don Thomas Deere, "The Invention of Order: On the Coloniality of Space" (Duke UP, 2026) · June 11, 2026 · 46 min
• Natalia Rogach Alexander, "Growing People: The Enduring Legacy of John Dewey" (Columbia UP, 2025) · June 10, 2026 · 52 min
• Arlene W. Saxonhouse, "Athenian Democracy: Modern Mythmakers and Ancient Theorists" (U Notre Dame Press, 2026) · June 10, 2026 · 58 min
• Joanna Stalnaker, "The Rest Is Silence: Enlightenment Philosophers Facing Death" (Yale UP, 2025) · June 9, 2026 · 1h 8m
• Javier Arbona-Homar, "Explosivity: Following What Remains" (U Minnesota Press, 2025) · June 8, 2026 · 1h 6m