Abstract EN:

Although the concept of detail is at the heart of a history of aesthetics, it generally remains elusive from a theoretical point of view. Such theoretical negligence or powerlessness is startling. Our first intuition was that the end of the XX century novel writing has inherited this great history of detail and draws its own resources from it. The novels of the Argentinean Juan Jose Saer, of the French Jean Echenoz and the Italian Daniele Del Guidice bear witness of the vitality of the uses of detail and their narrative, semiological and poetic stakes. Defined as what appears while it could or should have remained unnoticed, detail upsets, or even brings about a crisis in the order of representation and narration, as well as in the construction of meaning. Derived from an act of detailing (that we called in French détaille) on the part of the novelist, the narrator or the reader, through which they appropriate the text, it is the minimal but fondamental meeting point of attention and intention and the place where the rhythms of writing and reading take shape. We began our analysis by focusing on the perceptive act of detailing depicted through the eyes of the characters of the novel, we then turned to the textual act of detailing, le. The effort of the novelist and narrator to draw attention to such or such detail, but also to the personal involvement of the reader. We then focused on the question of meaning and insignifiance of detail by studying the indication and detail that convey a reality effect. Finally we dealt with the question of the place, measure and functions of detail in the narrative economy and, more generally, in the poetics of these three novelists.