Beyond the <i>déjà-vu</i> : Intermedial tranpositions of the <i>film noir</i> motif of the automobile in contemporary Anglo-American and French novel

This article focuses on the stakes of the intermedial transpositions of the filmic motif of the automobile from the noir genre in a corpus of four Anglo-American novels which bear the imprint of cinema: Jean Echenoz's Cherokee (1983), Tanguy Viel's L'Absolue Perfection du Crime (2001), Martin Amis's London Fields (1989), Robert Coover's Noir (2010). Automobile and automobility will be considered as “semantic/syntactic” criteria defining the noir genre (Rick Altman). The transposition of this filmic motif and of genre scenes such as the car chase contribute to the “return to narrative” (Dominique Viart) after the relative decline of narrative fiction in the previous decades, under the influence of the Nouveau Roman in France and of formalist experimentations in the United States and the United Kingdom. It contributes to the renewal of the contemporary novel from in a critical light, denouncing traditional novelistic conventions and genre stereotypes.