Quelques aspects métadiscursifs de la norme littéraire contemporaine: La carte et le territoire de M. Houellebecq et Rose bonbon de N. Jones-Gorlin

Thanks to a bi-disciplinary approach combining discourse analysis and literature, this contribution deals with contemporary norms in literary fiction, asking what is established as acceptable by commentators. The objects of this study are normative metadiscourses produced during the controversies that emerged after the publication of two French novels, namely La carte et le territoire by Michel Houellebecq and Nicolas Jones-Gorlin's Rose Bonbon. The aim of the analysis is to understand whether the normative reactions these two books have generated have linguistic motivations. The normative metadiscourses under analysis, collected in heterogeneous media (the specialized press, mainstream newspapers, social networks dedicated to books, and commercial websites), point towards some specific definitions and values of contemporary literary fiction. While the treatment of the taboo of paedophilia in fiction is debated, the normative prohibition of plagiarism seems to be more context-dependent and to depend on the three instances at stake in the debate (the plagiarist, the plagiarized author and the medium).