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28 - Suspicion and Novelty: The Nouveau Roman

from Part IV - From Naturalism to the Nouveau Roman

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  04 February 2021

By
Hannah Freed-Thall
Edited by
Adam Watt
Adam Watt
Affiliation:
University of Exeter
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Summary

This chapter argues that the postwar nouveau roman is more than an avant-garde experiment in novel form. The movement must also be understood as the product of a particular publishing house (Les Editions de Minuit) and as an aesthetic phenomenon that registers historical trauma, despite its apparent withdrawal from the social. Special attention is paid to convergences and divergences among authors, including Alain Robbe-Grillet, Nathalie Sarraute, Marguerite Duras, Michel Butor, Robert Pinget, Claude Simon, and Samuel Beckett.

Keywords

Nouveau romanRobbe-GrilletSarrauteMinuitself-reflexivitystructuralismhistorical violence
Type
Chapter
Information
The Cambridge History of the Novel in French , pp. 508 - 522
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2021

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References

Further Reading

Barthes, Roland, Essais critiques (Paris: Seuil, 1964)Google Scholar
Freed-Thall, Hannah, ‘Sarraute’s Bad Taste’, in Spoiled Distinctions: Aesthetics and the Ordinary in French Modernism (New York: Oxford University Press, 2015), pp. 113–42Google Scholar
Jameson, Fredric, ‘Modernism and its Repressed: Robbe-Grillet as Anti-Colonialist’, Diacritics, 6.2 (1976), 7–14Google Scholar
Jefferson, Ann, The Nouveau Roman and the Poetics of Fiction (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980)Google Scholar
Morrisette, Bruce, The Novels of Robbe-Grillet (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1975)Google Scholar
Prince, Gerald, ‘The Nouveau Roman’, in A New History of French Literature, ed. by Hollier, Denis (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1994), pp. 988–93Google Scholar
Ricardou, Jean, Pour une théorie du nouveau roman (Paris: Seuil, 1971)Google Scholar
Robbe-Grillet, Alain, Pour un nouveau roman (Paris: Minuit, 1963)Google Scholar
Ross, Kristin, Fast Cars, Clean Bodies. Decolonization and the Reordering of French Culture (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1994)Google Scholar
Sarraute, Nathalie, L’Ère du soupçon: essais sur le roman (Paris: Gallimard, 1956)Google Scholar
Simonin, Anne, Les Éditions de Minuit, 1942–1955: le devoir d’insoumission (Paris: IMEC Editions, 1994)Google Scholar
Simonin, Anne, ‘La Littérature saisie par l’histoire: nouveau roman et guerre d’Algérie aux Éditions de Minuit’, Actes de la recherche en sciences sociales, 111–12 (1996), 59–75Google Scholar
Simonin, Anne, ‘La Mise à l’épreuve du nouveau roman: six cent cinquante fiches de lecture d’Alain Robbe-Grillet (1955–1959)’, Annales HSS, 55.2 (2000), 415–37Google Scholar
Smart, Marie, ‘New Novel, Old Tune: Beckett and Pinget in Postwar France’, Modernism/modernity, 21.2 (2014), 524–46Google Scholar
Wolf, Nelly, Une littérature sans histoire: essai sur le nouveau roman (Paris: Droz, 1995)Google Scholar
Yanoshevsky, Galia, Les Discours du nouveau roman: essais, entretiens, débats (Lille: Presses Universitaires de Septentrion, 2006)Google Scholar

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