Abstract
_Brouillon.net: l'héritage du cahier de l'écrivain sur le web_ examines a strand of digital literature that emerged online amid a general climate of reluctance, suspicion, and uncertainty about the rise of the web. Decried as antithetical to the book, the web was an easy target to blame for a declining market saturated by an increasing number of prize-oriented novels with every _rentrée littéraire_. It is within this context that François Bon, Philippe De Jonckheere, and Éric Chevillard, each entrenched in the tradition of _Belles Lettres,_ claimed the electronic turf as a new territory for the creation and dissemination of their work. Neither finished nor polished, these writers’ blogs and websites provide access to their works-in-progress. In my analysis, I argue that they revisit and bring up to date the idea of the notebook in the form of a new poetics that I call _brouillon.net._ Borrowed from genetic criticism, the term _brouillon,_ as I apply it to digital media, does not refer to a set of preparatory documents studied in contrast with a published novel, but rather to an imbroglio of texts, photos, code, and recordings. In light of this new poetics, I theorize the notion of _brouillon,_ and I demonstrate, in three chapters, how it applies to each writer. We see _brouillon_ at work in François Bon's _Tierslivre_, strewn with his cross-disciplinary and transmedia experiments. We follow Philippe De Jonckheere’s _Désordre_ to show how he playfully highlights the Oulipian qualities of the web. And we read Eric Chevillard’s journal _L’Autofictif_ with particular attention to the ways in which he positions himself against _“le bon vieux roman.”_ Ultimately, through my examination of these born-digital _brouillons,_ I suggest that writing against the novel as a genre, like these three writers do, shifts our focus to their notebooks, which demand new ways of engagement and reading in the 21st century. With my thesis, I propose their inclusion within the study of contemporary French literature as a timely intervention into the way that digital technologies alter the very fabric of the letter.
