Writing Realism: Representations in French Fiction

For centuries, and not just in the period we refer to as "realism," writers of novels and short stories have consciously exploited our ability to believe in what is manifestly fiction. In Writing Realism, Armine Kotin Mortimer contends that we can best understand the illusion of reality by examining works in which acts of writing play an integral part within the story. Characters who are writing letters in Les Liaisons dangereuses, for instance, or writing a book manuscript in Sollers's Femmes are "writing realism." Such depicted acts of writing and storytelling inform readers about the author's own writing of realism.

Writing Realism is a provocative study of how readers can believe in the realism, if not the reality, of what they read, often despite overwhelming evidence of unreality. This persistence of the mimetic illusion is, Mortimer says, the magic of realism. Mortimer analyzes striking examples from the sixteenth through the twentieth centuries, examining works by Balzac, Diderot, Laclos, and Marguerite de Navarre and by contemporary writers Serge Doubrovsky and Philippe Sollers. Each of these texts allows Mortimer to explore how the mimetic illusion operates on readers, both in French literature and in narrative as a genre.

Armine Kotin Mortimer is a professor in the Department of French at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Her previous books include The Gentlest Law: Roland Barthes's "The Pleasure of the Text" and Plotting to Kill.