Cao Danhong, Ph. D., is professor in the Department of French at the School of Foreign Studies, Nanjing University. Her research interests include translation studies and French literary theory. She has completed several research projects sponsored by the National Social Science Fund of China, the Humanities and Social Sciences Fund of the Ministry of Education and the Jiangsu Provincial Social Science Fund. She has also published one monograph on poetics of translation, two edited books, fourteen translations and over 40 research papers on translation studies, French literature, and literary theory on domestic and international academic journals and periodicals.
On the ¡°New Realism¡± Writing of Contemporary French Writers
In the contemporary French literary scene, there has emerged a literary practice referred to as ¡°New Realism¡± by French critic Alexandre Gefen. Writers such as François Bon, Maylis de Kerangal, and others, can be seen as representatives of this ¡°New Realism¡±. Mirroring 19th- century realist writers, the ¡°New Realism¡± writers focus on social realities. Faced with societal disruption triggered by issues such as corporate relocation and worker unemployment resulting from globalization, they respond proactively to reality through their literary creations, manifesting as a form of ¡°Interventional Realism¡±. However, unlike their 19th-century counterparts, the writers of ¡°New Realism¡± abandon the form of the novel cherished by those writers. On the one hand, they inherit post-modern writers¡¯ emphasis on ¡°heterogeneity¡±; on the other hand, they often adopt a sort of posthuman perspective, forgoing the hierarchization or judgment of their writing subjects and refusing to artificially impose uniformity on them. Instead, they attempt to maximize the depiction of reality through faithful recordings of the juxtaposition and resulting chaos of heterogeneous elements in the real world.