Communication Dans Un Congrès Année : 2024

Writing and Difference Today: Contemporary American Fiction and the Aesthetics of Discrepancy

Résumé

21st century American authors experiment with discrepancy, shifts, and lapses as motifs that seemingly lead to aesthetics of absence. The reader, thus confronted with texts which are fragmented or even only intermittently making sense, experiences bouts of disorientation, their understanding of the text being momentarily suspended. This is the case in Tao Lin’s Leave Society (2021) that establishes uneasiness through the random disappearance of words in its narrator’s and characters’ sentences; or in Honor Levy’s “Cancel Me” (2020) in which the blank spaces, the multiplication of random American names and pronouns signal the exhaustion of the English language. I would like to argue that the apparent erasure of meaning, however, becomes meaningful in itself in the sense that it informs aesthetics of discrepancy, rather than of absence, that rests on a rhizomic approach to Derridean difference as it is experienced by the reader. Indeed, part of the fictional content is suspended, postponed, deferred in the diegesis, in order to increase the role of the reader and to put the interpretative process at the center of the project of the novel. Thus, experimental American fiction, by making the reflection on form, structure, content and language, rather than on meaning, the focus of fiction, achieves the simultaneity and circularity of writing and reading theorized by Derrida in Writing and Difference.

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hal-04939342 , version 1 (11-02-2025)

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Maud Bougerol. Writing and Difference Today: Contemporary American Fiction and the Aesthetics of Discrepancy. Derrida Today International Conference, Nicole Anderson, Jun 2024, Athènes, Greece. ⟨hal-04939342⟩
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