In the past twenty years, French literature lived on credit: on the credit of the last century. Now at the heart of a crisis of trust in public speech and in democracy (still undergoing a state of emergency), it has decreased in fiduciary value. This article pleads though for a new strength and a new authority for the French novel: a strength and an authority that are related to what I call epimodernism. Epimodernism denotes a kind of “post-postmodernism”. It replaces the double post by six different values of the Ancient Greek prefix epi: surface contact, origin, extension, duration, authority, and finality. Epimodernism thus sets up six different relations to the heritage of modernist utopias, re-orienting postmodern critique and rebooting, with all due irony, its forms of anti-late-capitalist engagement and paradoxical empowerment. The six epimodernist values would now be: Superficiality, Secret, Energy, Acceleration, Credit, and (again) Consistency. Epimodernism thus represents a way to help us foresee what literature can describe, imagine, or invent for our difficult times, as in the most recent book by Sandra Lucbert: Personne ne sort les fusils.
