Un chronotope à personnage ajouté: le nouveau fantastique des Cités obscures (Schuiten-Peeters)

This article examines one of the possible strategies to upgrade the status of fantastic literature. Rather than simply innovating or transforming the fantastic, certain authors make this project part of a larger attempt to question the very notion of genre itself in order to induce new forms of the fantastic. This is what happens in the long running comics series The Dark Cities (1983-) by François Schuiten and Benoît Peeters, who explore various aspects of literary creation (the material dimension of the graphic novel, the narrative technique of metalepsis, the global idea of parallel universes) in order to invent a form of fantastic literature that is radcially trans-genre while blurring also the boundaries between the notions of time-space (chronotope) and character.