Introduction: The Documentary Mode

French literature in the last few decades has undergone a series of important transformations, prominent among them the increasingly urgent desire to explore the connection between the literary text and the documentary or investigative mode. Indeed, works belonging to referential or “factographic” literature (M.-J. Zenetti) have multiplied to such an extent that commentators – echoing Husserl’s famous exhortation – have spoken of a “return to the real” (D. Viart), as if literature, in this “new age of investigation” (L. Demanze), was turning away from fiction to better immerse itself anew in the world. And yet, it seems that contemporary practices might now be moving beyond the traditional antithesis opposing fiction and fact, literary text and document. It is to such practices that this issue of L'Esprit Créateur is devoted.