Adventure fiction and event. Towards a (truly) popular literature

Questioning the place of the event in the fiction narrative through naturalism in turn led some writers – such as Stevenson, London, Conrad – to set it at the core of the plot itself. This pre-eminence might then well be used as a standard for a literature known as « popular ». Those writers – whose lineage is huge in comics, crime fiction and cinema – have the « hero » become the one to be faced with the very events he or she causes to happen, and which henceforth makes up the core of any narrative. The latest avatar of those seesaw movements can be found in the modern generalization of « storytelling », a trend which responds to the New French Fiction, for example. Couldn't this contemporary obsession for 'storytelling' then be the sign of what purports to be a reenchantment of the world, as if it was not possible to contemplate the world in any other way than rife with events through which alone it can make sense.

Adventure fiction and event. Towards a (truly) popular literature

Questioning the place of the event in the fiction narrative through naturalism in turn led some writers – such as Stevenson, London, Conrad – to set it at the core of the plot itself. This pre-eminence might then well be used as a standard for a literature known as « popular ». Those writers – whose lineage is huge in comics, crime fiction and cinema – have the « hero » become the one to be faced with the very events he or she causes to happen, and which henceforth makes up the core of any narrative. The latest avatar of those seesaw movements can be found in the modern generalization of « storytelling », a trend which responds to the New French Fiction, for example. Couldn't this contemporary obsession for 'storytelling' then be the sign of what purports to be a reenchantment of the world, as if it was not possible to contemplate the world in any other way than rife with events through which alone it can make sense.