The Work of Editing, its Context and Transformations: Denis Roche’s Fiction & Cie Collection (1974-2004)

Drawing on source material from archives and press articles, this article presents the conditions in which the Fiction & Cie collection, published by Éditions du Seuil, was founded by Denis Roche in 1974 and how it subsequently evolved. Imagined by an avant-garde writer, this collection offered a new editorial model that ultimately brought about a reconfiguration of the power dynamics within Le Seuil. It illustrates how, at the end of the 1970s, as Marxist or structuralist theoretical-political debates subsided, space opened up for other approaches to editing and aesthetics. Through the prism of Roche’s editorial practice, the relationship between different forms of aesthetic discourse and editorial logic over a period of three decades is examined. Translated by Daniel Henkel