Pleasures of the text: readings in contemporary French fiction

This thesis focuses on readings from the oeuvre of four contemporary writers of French fiction: Jean Echenoz, Michel Houellebecq, Jean-Claude Izzo and Lydie Salvayre, supported by references to texts of several writers of the recent and distant past, the most important of whom is Gustave Flaubert. Through textual analysis, the overall aim is to identify narrative strategies which are sufficiently general to enable the construction of a typology of reading pleasure, applicable beyond the confines of the novels and novellas in question. In order to do this, arguments will be drawn from a variety of disciplinary sources, only some of which would be considered directly literary. Several of Roland Barthes‘s short articles serve as both springboard and foil to the development of this thesis. In one case a well-known literary artefact, l'effet de réel, will be closely examined, and finally declared to be an inescapable, but short lived, mode of entry into a world governed by the much broader l'effet de fiction, itself a consequence of a silent pact of make-believe between author and reader. Even though pleasure in general results from a complex emotional/cognitive response to some kind of stimulus, it is tentatively concluded that, in spite of inevitable variability in terms of intensity and duration, based on past and present subjective experiences and motivations, reading pleasure can be classified under five main headings. These are familiarity, surprise, discovery, ambiguity and anomaly.