Perhaps the most interesting development on the French cultural landscape of the last few years has been the crystallization of a kind of “opposition” to the reigning cultural norms, centered around an attempt to cast a critical eye, unobstructed by professional loyalties and interests, on the art and literature of the last three decades or so. Disgruntled with what they see as the low quality and the intellectual and aesthetic laisser-aller of much contemporary culture, and the apparent unwillingness of the art establishment and the cultural press to engage in any kind of open debate about it, a group of writers, many of them gathered around the intellectual review Esprit, have undertaken to analyze and debunk many of the basic premises of contemporary French culture and literature. For their efforts they have been tarbrushed variously as “philistine,” “elitist,” “passéiste,” and worse, but they are too serious in purpose and too rigorous in method to be daunted by such facile dismissals. Nor, in many cases, is the label of “conservative,” though brandished with relish against them, even applicable, at least not in any strict political sense. Mostly, they want to sort things out, to determine why so much contemporary literature and art, while initially praised to the skies by the cultural media—which in France are far more dominated by literary intellectuals than in the U.S.—does not appear to stand the test of time or intelligent scrutiny.

“The future belongs to dogma; the literary genre is now