Diderot et Kundera entre tradition et innovation. Compte-rendu de lecture
Diderot and Kundera Between Tradition and Innovation. A Reading Account

Summary/Abstract: Talking about the dilemma in front of which the novel of the 20th century finds itself and which resumes in an alternative – the choice of realism or that of the casualness and of the imaginary - , Kundera assumes that the study of the relationships between the narratives of the 18th century (especially Diderot’s Jacques le fataliste) and those of the 20th could help us solve them. Having two works as a starting point, that is Diderot’s novel already mentioned and Kundera’s volume of short-stories entitled Risibles amours, Jocelyn Maixent, in Le XVIIIe siècle de Milan Kundera ou Diderot investi par le roman contemporain, proposes an answer through a deepened analysis in three steps: the double postulation of the narrative in relation to reality; the lively word as a place of novelistic truth; the impossible truth of an improbable reality or the reduction of the territories of the novelistic “seriousness”.

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