While about recent French literature, this too can be said of many policy narratives and their compositors in many places:
Once a thief of fire, the writer is now a sentinel of the present or a witness of memory, a psychiatrist or a judge, a tailor, a social worker, a priest or investigator, a psychologist, a lawyer, or even a mechanic of the soul: stitching back up, getting better, helping, healing, and saving are the guiding principles for twenty-first-century literature at a time when literature has become a way of coping with terrorism, thinking about the climate crisis, protecting the subject from the logics of digital surveillance, coping with health crises and lockdowns, and rearticulating forms of universality compatible with varied experiences as well as those that suffered from previous domination.
So what? is answered with:
In the face of doctrines in which “literature is called on for assistance,” I have responded with both interest and perplexity: whether this new transitivity [from representing good to doing good] is seen as a fruitful and effective return to humanist literary optimism or an improvised and utilitarian response to the existential and social distress of the contemporary subject remains largely a matter of opinion.
Either opinion is ok with me at a time when, to paraphrase philosopher David Hume, opinions rule the world.
Source.
Alexandre Gefen (2024 [2017]) Repair the World: French Literature in the Twenty-First Century, translated from the French by Tegan Raleigh, Volume 28 of Culture & Conflict, Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston: 236 -237 (accessed online at https://ibrary.oapen.org/handle/20.500.12657/94387, internal footnotes deleted)
WHEN COMPLEX IS AS SIMPLE AS IT GETS 