Chloé Delaume (born in 1973) is a writer fascinated by the media and technologies of her time. Since her debut in 2000 she has explored the notion of identity in texts blurring the fine line between fiction and reality and has addressed the (auto)fictional dimension in most original ways, from a simultaneously literary and theoretical perspective. Belonging to the generation raised during the pictorial turn with video games, internet and television, she is a writer in constant dialogue with visuals and sounds, and the performative aspects and the invention of avatars are fundamental to her work. Visual media here serve not only as material/inspiration for new fictional work but also offer an important ground for theoretical reflection about the contemporary. This paper takes its starting point in Delaume’s J’habite dans la télévision from 2006. It aims to closer examine how the notion of mimesis, by tradition closely associated with text and image-relationships, is revisited in the work of a contemporary author such as Delaume, haunted by the real and whose writing many times integrates collaborations with visual artists and/or musicians.
