Life writing in extreme contemporary French literature

Throughout an array of writers and works, this article tries to reconstruct the conditions by which the so called "writings of the self" have become hegemonic in French literature since 1980 to the present. On the one hand, the hypothesis is that there is a shared aesthetics that gathers recent works involving real lives. On the other hand, this aesthetics defines the features of a new form of novel, first because these "writings of the self" have replaced the strictly novelistic production, and second because their own bases have opened a new era for the genre that cannot further be defined under the nineteenth-century paradigm.