Chapter 2 focuses on literary representations of the consumption of such mediated crime stories. I analyze Moderato cantabile (1958) and Dix heures et demie du soir en été (1960), to illustrate how Duras thematizes reader identification with sensational crimes in the media by staging the identification of her heroines with fait divers-style crimes of her own invention. Where in “La Maladie de la douleur” [The Malady of Grief] Julia Kristeva (Soleil noir,1987) claims that Duras’s work is non-cathartic, I contend that Duras uses the model of an anonymous fait divers to demonstrate how reader/witness identification with “true” crime and its aftermath can occasion the processing and purging of the intense affective responses they inspire.

Chapter 4 studies what have come to be known as Duras’s “erotic texts:” L’Homme assis dans le couloir (1980) and La Maladie de la mort (1982). In these brief but provocative works, Duras combines the lurid sensationalism of the tabloids with the transgressive philosophy and literature of writers such as Sade or Bataille. After a close reading of the intricate interplay between gender, violence, and erotics, this chapter argues that Duras takes advantage of these audacious texts as springboards to expose her own personal sexual scandals in the media and to make provocative public remarks about sexuality more broadly. She even goes so far as to deride homosexuality as a diminished form of desire as she attacks Roland Barthes, among others, in a series of unsettling homophobic remarks in the media.

The introduction considers Duras as an important literary persona in a critical period where rapidly changing media helped to enhance and alter the already elevated status of the French public intellectual. I argue that despite the apparent rise in media attention accorded the author after the publication of The Lover in 1984, Duras had in fact been extremely attentive to the media throughout her career. I outline how her oeuvre can be characterized as a porous interface between literature and mass media, reflecting the changing media landscape in the twentieth century. After an overview of the distinguishing characteristics and the cultural significance of the fait divers, I trace the rubric’s critical role as an inspiration in ninteenth- and twentieth-century French fiction. My interdisciplinary methodology allows us to see the compatibility between high literature and mass media and to imagine the future of serious thought in the public sphere.

Chapter 5 studies one particularly famous and controversial rewriting of a fait divers in Libération in 1985: “Sublime, forcément sublime Christine V.” Here Duras rewrites a very famous, ongoing true crime case, transforming the suspect, Christine Villemin, into a prototypical Durassian heroine who kills her own son in revolt against a brutal, patriarchal order. Because of the way that Duras accuses (and absolves) the woman in public before her trial, and, significantly, because the media was saturated with images of the author during this time, the article caused a major scandal, and Duras became a sort of sensational fait divers in her own right.

Chapter 3 looks at Duras’s adaptation and serialization of an actual fait divers from the press in Les Viaducs de la Seine-et-Oise (1960), L’Amante anglaise (1967), and finally Le Théâtre de l’Amante anglaise (1968, 1991). Like a “copycat killer,” I argue that Duras copies the sensational media style of the true crime case in her three works by insisting on the power of fascination in such stories. She creates mises en abyme in the three works as her characters read and discuss newspaper reports on the crime. In so doing, the fait divers at the origin of the works becomes a sort of “found object,” circulating within the fictional world created by the author and calling attention to itself as an outside, real-world referent.

Chapter 1 introduces Duras the journalist to English-speaking audiences less familiar with this important aspect of her work as a writer and public persona. I analyze a number of her journalistic writings, in particular, her chroniques judiciaires and rewritings of faits divers in the press in the 1950s and 60s. I examine the way that she engages in public conversations around popular representations of crimes in order to subvert them. Because she is not a trained journalist but a literary writer, she claims to have a deeper insight into crime, criminals, and the judicial process. The writer therefore attempts to correct what she considers erroneous reports already printed in the press – based not on systematic examination of evidence but on close readings of these reports and at times on her presence in the courtroom – with her own interpretations and representations of the crime. According to Duras, dismissing a rationalizing rubric improves the conditions for examining the crime’s specific circumstances and its implications for possibilities of transgression and social critique. This chapter reveals how a keen literary eye can help readers to decipher the news.

The conclusion of the book studies one final intervention in a fait divers that pushes the role of the writer in public debates to new limits. In the case of Luc Tangorre, Duras seems to defend the indefensible in the interest of following her own passion, performing a version of her persona out of sync with public opinion. I maintain that Marguerite Duras represents a case study for the growing relationship between the media and literature and argue for the importance of looking at literature as an enduring, meaningful part of a broader culture as it reflects upon and interacts with vital elements of the mass media. The content of contemporary literary works has come to reflect increasingly the popular media forms that promote it, inspire it, and interface with it.