Introduction “Un cinéma dans le citron”: Interiority and the challenge of representation

Balzacian psychology is part of the history of representations of the ego. Although it is taken to be realist, it is still worked out within the framework of a fiction. Our presentation attempts to tie these two parameters together and to outline the critical overview that is needed on the threshold of a whole dossier devoted to the cognitive resources on which the novelistic enterprise prides itself.