Areas of temporary defection. Refigurations of Bartleby and of Esseintes In a few contemporary novels

摘要: Concerned by the exploitation of narrative and fiction for commercial or strategic purposes, many writers and observers wonder what power literature still has today, when the logic of capitalism took over its tools and seems always one step ahead of its critical potentialities. To use Albert Hirschman's terminology, if the possibilities of voice seem exhausted, can the same be said of the exit strategy, in a networked world precisely fortified by the constant injunction to freedom and autonomy? Moving the issue to the field of the novel, our contribution focuses on some contemporary characters' wish to withdraw (geeks, secluded artists, autonomous activists, hermits of the virtual age, etc.), compared to emblematic literary figures of exit in the XIXth century (des Esseintes, Bartleby, Oblomov, Emma Bovary), so as to measure the changes that affected the very space of possibilities of exit, and their consequences for forms of …