Summary: | This contribution understands the phenomenon of irony on two distinct levels of analysis. First, from a textual point of view, irony conveys a sense of legitimacy within the literary field. It provides a guarantee of literarity and functions as a shield from the risks of first-degree literature. The demonstration then moves on to a metatextual level, to study the mental representation of literature carried by all accompanying discourse, especially critics and academics. In this perspective, it seems as if the 2000s saw a turn in how we describe French contemporary fiction: the productions of the years 1980-2000 were broadly characterized by irony as a predominant feature; whereas literature from the 2000s and on is seen as embracing themes and content that are more explicitly related to the daily and historic human experience, at the same time as it re-establishes more canonical types of narration and plots. The article thus aims at offering a panoramic view of how the use of the notion of irony has transformed when talking about French literary production since the 1980s, using Gilles Philippe’s concept of “moment”.
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