On the occasion of the 5189^th post of L’autofictif, on October 29, 2022, Éric Chevillard made the following observation: "Isn’t it astonishing that in recent years the Nobel jury has chosen to reward three French writers who are completely devoid of humour? Le Clézio, Modiano, Ernaux... not a single laugh in tens of thousands of pages. Yet is there a single great writer who has not also invented his or her own form of humour? I'll leave the question open (with a wink). Ten years earlier, on October 26, 2012, in his review of Joyeux Noël by Alexandre Jardin for Le Monde des Livres, Chevillard had complained about the novel’s ponderousness, and argued that its author "is our greatest comic genius and probably doesn’t know it." Chevillard, who has often commented on his own relationship with humour, defines a personal Hell as one which brings together books that are too serious and offer no comic relief, and those that make you laugh in spite of themselves. In literary studies, the related questions of laughter and humour have long been tainted by a certain illegitimacy: they are sometimes approached indirectly, through the prisms of satire (Saint-Amand and Vrydaghs, 2021), intertextuality (Aron, 2008), irony (Alexandre and Schoentjes, 2013) or, more occasionally, incongruity (Jourde, 1999), but they are rarely directly addressed. Perhaps laughter, while considered a human characteristic, is also taken as a sign of animality and instinct, revealing the uncontrollability of the body (Vaillant, 2016). Recently, however, laughter seems to have acquired a certain legitimacy, as demonstrated by publications, exhibitions, and conferences devoted to this vast topic. This change in perspective may be due to two apparently contradictory phenomena. On the one hand, France has seen the development of a viewpoint inspired by cultural studies, one that is clearly less elitist and more attentive to all kinds of cultural production. On the other hand, there is the hard-won respectability of a comic culture that is crucial to the history of Western civilization (a respectability to which the perpetrators of the Charlie Hebdo attack unwittingly contributed, by inadvertently transforming laughter into a kind of uniting tradition) (Letourneux and Vaillant, 2021).

The 29th issue of the Revue critique de fixxion française contemporaine will focus on laughter in the contemporary context. Without wishing to overly constrain potential avenues of thought, we propose three main lines of enquiry:

1. Forms, mechanisms, and functions: What place does contemporary French-language literature accord to laughter? How does it take shape? What processes and devices are used to activate it? How does literary fiction play with the clichés and taboos of its time? Does laughter only make sense as a vector for fundamental questions (about the role and logic of the novel or, more broadly still, about the function of literature) or does it sometimes constitute a specific issue? What colours (Noguez, 1996) and modes does laughter adopt in fiction? If laughter is a physiological reaction, how can we define the genres and types of texts that use it?

2. Authors and spaces: which authors make laughter central to their literary practice? Is it really true that Le Clézio, Modiano and Ernaux are devoid of humour? If Houellebecq's laughter is contained in a falsely naive and sardonic smile (Vaillant, 2017) and Toussaint's laughter plays on self-mockery and false anecdotes (Demoulin, 2012), what can be said of the respective laughter of Nathalie Quintane, Antoine Volodine, Ousmane Diarra, Alain Mabanckou and Guillaume Lebrun? How do Chloé Delaume, Wendy Delorme, Virginie Despentes and Alice Zeniter combat misogynist laughter? What variations in terms of laughter can be observed in French-language literature? How can we link the comic singularities of David Turgeon, Catherine Lalonde and Mathieu Arsenault to the overall characteristics of laughter in Québec? How does a publisher like L'Arbre vengeur make laughter one of its specialties? From Cyrille Martinez to Jean-Charles Massera, from Noémi Lefebvre to Frédéric Ciriez, and from Anne-James Chaton to Gaëlle Obiégly, is there a laughter that is typical of works published by Verticales? How does laughter fit in with the large contingent of literary works now being developed outside the traditional format of the book?

3. Applied theories and fictions of laughter: Pierre Jourde, author of an essay on the incongruous in literature, is also a novelist who, from La Cantatrice avariée to Voyage du canapé-lit, accords a special place to the unexpected in his works. Fabrice Erre, who has written a study of caricature in the 19th century (Le Règne de la poire, 2011), is a cartoonist with a penchant for satire. François Caradec, a specialist of Alphonse Allais and fin de siècle laughter, recounted the adventures of Monsieur Tristecon in a recently republished novel. Other authors, from Chevillard to Romain Puértolas, from Fabcaro to Yves Pagès, are frequently asked in interviews to comment on the comic dimension of their work. How do their theories of laughter relate to their literary practice? How do they transition between the two? How are questions regarding the dominating effect of laughter extended into fiction? As well as being provoked by fiction, laughter is itself capable of being recounted: how do groups of friends laugh in Dominique Noguez’s Martagons, Olivia Rosenthal’s Éloge des bâtards or David Lopez’s Fief? How are the discriminatory effects of laughter, long ignored, now being examined in fiction? Can we identify certain comic chronotopes? Which characters are emblematic of contemporary laughter?

Deadline: December 1, 2023. Proposals for contributions (approximately 300 words), covering French-language literatures, should be sent in French or English to fixxion21@gmail.com (an assistant will register you as the author and send you the journal’s MSWord template).

After notification of the acceptance of the abstract, the text of the final article (entered in the Word template and respecting the styles and instructions of the Editorial Protocol) must be sent to fixxion21@gmail.com before Juin 15, 2024 for evaluation and proofreading by the members of the Revue critique de fixxion française contemporaine/Critical Review of Contemporary French Fixxion.

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