Some years ago, in an acidulous book on ‘the end of literature,’ Henri Raczymow asked, ‘since the end of Tel Quel and of the nouveau roman in France, of what could we trace the history?’ (1994, 121). Today, no shortage of answers come to mind. Since the ‘end’ of those movements (let us leave aside for the moment the difficulty of actually dating that end) we could, for example, write the history of literature's engagement with the traumatic events of the twentieth century, the history of literature's alternately playful and pathos-ridden reflection on its own increasing marginality in twenty-first-century image society, the history of the efflorescence of new approaches to writing genre fiction, the history of contemporary auto-fiction or (auto)biographical fiction, the history of the mutations of the French language or of forms of translingualism in France, or the history of literature's assimilation of and reactions to new cultural contacts and conflicts. Raczymow's book is not alone, however, in answering, essentially, nothing. What we are calling literature since the dissolution of those great avant-gardist projects does not, according to Raczymow, achieve enough coherence to allow us to tell something like a story about it or to come up with a convincing name for it. From the perspective of French cultural declinology, there is now no there there, and the only real periodization that could be imagined for contemporary French literature would thus be a kind of postmortem that would describe a void or an absence. It is this argument that undergirds the most pessimistic understanding of the label ‘contemporary’ itself: where the designation ‘modern literature’ at least seemed to hold somewhere within it the promise of a modernism, contemporary literature seems to refer merely to whatever has happened fairly recently. For many readers and critics, the contemporary thus names an aesthetic and intellectual weakness, a post-historicity or an ahistoricity, ‘an inoffensive modernness whose very innocuousness ensures its admissibility’ (Forest, 2010, 89).