Le roman d’apprentissage à l’ère de la modernité : Foucault, Pirandello, Aragon et le spectacle du siècle
At the crossroads of philosophical, historical and fictional discourses on modernity, this article aims to survey the literary question of contemporaneity’s glare, as posed by the archaeological project of Michel Foucault and recently taken over by Giorgio Agamben. After a demonstration that will directly raise the various issues of this matter, their novelistic remediations will be considered through a comparative analysis of the contemporary’s coming-­of-­age stories that are “On tourne” (“Shoot!”; 1915) by Luigi Pirandello and “Anicet ou le Panorama”, roman (1921) by Louis Aragon. We will see how the formal reflection on literature as a question asked to modernity is inseparable from a theoretical and historical reflection on its conditions and effects.
Aragon, Louis Bildungsroman