Topic
Political Paris 2000–2025: Jean Echenoz, Nathalie Quintane and the contemporary literature in Hexagonal France
Nathalie Quintane and Jean Echenoz have never been studied together, because one was born in the 1960s, moved through poetry and arrived at a form of genre-bending that mixes poetry, essay and narration with a literary and political commitment that became mainstream with the works published by La Fabrique publishing house (since 2014), while the other, born in the 1940s, became mainstream in the 1980s and 1990s as a leading writer for Éditions de Minuit (Goncourt 1999), where he continues to publish.
Despite numerous studies on the ‘minimalist’ literature of Éditions de Minuit, from Schoots 1997 to recent PhD theses (Ieven 2023) and studies that make Echenoz a post-critical writer (Matei 2024), the political dimension of Jean Echenoz's literature, “geographical” (Jérusalem 2005) but essentially urban, has never been directly addressed. However, we find that there is a novel by Jean Echenoz, Au piano (2003), in which Paris as “Hell” but also as a place of origin is a figure of the end of history so celebrated in the 1990s. For her part, Nathalie Quintane wrote poetry before her works were published by La Fabrique. However, over the last ten years or so, her writings have also become geographical: Italy, Belgium and Bulgaria appear in her latest works (notably Quintane 2025). Unlike Jean Echenoz's Paris, which is divided between the intimate and noble city within the walls and the concrete suburbs, the city is, for a writer of another generation whose writings are associated with ‘political literature’ (Pierre Alferi, Leslie Kaplan, Nathalie Quintane, Tanguy Viel, Antoine Volodine, Louisa Yousfi 2024; Huppe 2023), the city is the ultimate place of inequality and agonistics (Quintane 2021, Quintane 2025). This Paris mobilises and stirs, as everyday life erases its noble and soothing architecture.
How do the two Parises, that of the 2000s and that of the 2020s, embody the changes in what we might call a literary “ambiance”? Is there a “disengaged” Paris and another, “engaged” one?
Bibliography
- SCHOOTS, Fieke — Passer en douce à la douane. The minimalist writing of Minuit. Amsterdam, Rodopi, 1997.
- JÉRUSALEM, Christine — Jean Echenoz. Geographies of the Void. Paris, Presses Sorbonne Nouvelle, 2005.
- ECHENOZ, Jean — At the Piano. Paris, Éditions de Minuit, 2003.
- MATEI, Alexandru — “What Jean Échenoz Knew. Pockets and Postcritique in 1980s France” in James Brown, Anna Jamieson, and Naomi Segal, The Cultural Construction of Hidden Spaces, Leiden, Brill, 2024.
- QUINTANE, Nathalie — Un hamster à l'école, Paris, La Fabrique, 2021.
- YOUSFI, Louisa, Pierre Alferi, Leslie Kaplan, Nathalie Quintane, Tanguy Viel, Antoine Volodine) — Contre la littérature politique, Paris, La Fabrique, 2024.
- HUPPE, Justine — La littérature embarquée, Paris, Éditions Amsterdam/Multitudes), 2023.
Alexandru Matei (Transylvania University)
Alexandru Matei is a professor, who teaches French modern/contemporary culture and literature at the Faculty of Letters, University “Transilvania”, Brasov. He studied in Bucharest (Faculty of Foreing Languages) and EHESS in Paris (PhD candidate). His PhD thesis on Jean Echenoz was defended in 2007 and resulted in a book: Jean Echenoz et la distance intérieure. He has published extensively on Roland Barthes and French contemporary literature, but also on Romanian (Socialist) Television. He translates from French into Romanian (Jean Baudrillard, Bruno Latour, Roland Barthes, Michel Serres). He co-edited Theory in the "Post" Era. A Vocabulary for the 21st-Century Conceptual Commons, London, Bloomsbury, 2021, he co-directed the most recent issue of Revue Roland Barthes, no. 8, in January 2026.