Literatures in French Today: Markets, Centres, Peripheries, Transition

This article draws on Pierre Bourdieu's analysis of the relationship between contemporary developments in print-capitalism such as the vertical integration of means of production and distribution and the literary avant-garde, and takes it in two directions. The first questions the extent to which these developments have, or have not, weakened the hold of Parisian publishers - and the dominance of French literature on literatures in French published outside France. The second, related angle of enquiry questions the decline of the avant-garde at the expense of a thematics of the "real" that takes a number of forms, one of which is the postcolonial. The thrust of the argument is that this contemporary transitional moment sees French literature in a state of flux within broader, transnational configurations.