Literature
Nouveau Roman
Nouveau Roman is a French literary movement that emerged in the 1950s. It is characterized by a focus on form over content, experimentation with narrative techniques, and a rejection of traditional plot structures and character development. The movement aimed to challenge conventional storytelling and create a new kind of literature.
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6 Key excerpts on "Nouveau Roman"
eBook - PDF- Adam Watt(Author)
- 2021(Publication Date)
- Cambridge University Press(Publisher)
On the Nouveau Roman as a ‘child of ruins’, born in the rubble of war, see Johan Faerber (ed.), Le ‘Nouveau Roman’ en questions 7: vers une ruine de l’écriture? (2) (Caen: Lettres Modernes Minard, 2012). 44 On the critical tendency to see the movement as a bête noire at fault for what some see as the dry formalism of the contemporary French novel, see Gerald Prince, ‘Talking French’, PMLA, 131.5 (2016), 1489–94 (p. 1490). 45 Wolf, Une littérature sans histoire, p. 10. Wolf sees the Nouveau Roman as a movement with ‘influence but no heirs’ (pp. 7–8). hannah freed-thall 520 historical importance of this movement – not only for the French-language novel but for the genre more broadly. After all, it instituted a new experience of reading. The Nouveau Roman is the novel as search, as laboratory. As Barthes puts it, we don’t ‘devour’ a Robbe-Grillet novel; instead, our reading habits are relentlessly ‘deconditioned’. 46 And these reading habits extend beyond the page to the very world that surrounds us: the Nouveau Roman invites us to question not only the conventions of the bourgeois novel, but reality itself. In its realist guise, at least, the novel was the first genre to hold a mirror up to ordinary people, reflecting their everyday perceptions and desires. 47 The Nouveau Roman, grappling with the vision of human beings that mass warfare and its horrors had wrought, intentionally frustrates our desires – for identifi- cation, for narrative authority, for closure. It compels us to reckon with the realisation that the world is neither our possession nor a reflection of our will. Rather, it’s unknowable and strange, ultimately indifferent to us. The Nouveau Roman is thus built on the premise of a radical split between human beings and a world that no longer holds or grounds us. As Robbe-Grillet famously declared, ‘man looks at the world, and the world does not return his gaze’. 48 This perception of earthly ungroundedness and precariousness is still keenly relevant today.
eBook - PDFTechnologies of the Novel
Quantitative Data and the Evolution of Literary Systems
- Nicholas D. Paige(Author)
- 2020(Publication Date)
- Cambridge University Press(Publisher)
5 Measuring Romans and Nouvelles 95 contemporary or unspecified settings of indeterminate or invented status, and finally novels claimed as “keyed.” Here, keeping in mind Du Plaisir’s remark about the roman being historically removed from the modern reader’s frame of reference, a first possible permutation involves “strong” Aristotelian novels with classical subject matter. In one scenario, these are put into the nouvelle category [given their relatively tight bond with history], while in a second, they are considered to show the characteristics of romans [because they are historically remote]. A second permutation removes “weak” Aristotelian works having a modern historical setting from the roman category and tabulates them instead with nouvelles.) And it turns out that how one counts matters to the quantity of romans and nouvelles that one locates – restrictive scenarios produce lower counts – but not to their distribution. In Figure 5.2, I’ve reduced the eighteen scenarios for each artifact to six because it turns out that many are redundant or nearly so. At least within the limits set for the variables, the basic fact of the rise and fall of romans and nouvelles should not be a matter of debate. Romans are a five-decade phenomenon, and they come and go with impressive symmetry. The life span of nouvelles is more like eight decades; and while they reach their peak in three decades, just like romans had done before them, they have a longer senescence. The elongated tail end of the nouvelle’s popularity may explain why literary history has so stubbornly viewed the early eighteenth century as a period in which the novel was “in search of itself”: for whatever reason – I will offer a hypothesis in Chapter 10 – document novels simply do not replace the nouvelle as decisively as the nouvelle replaced the roman.
eBook - PDF- Michael F. Leruth(Author)
- 2022(Publication Date)
- ABC-CLIO(Publisher)
Leading proponents of this style include Jean Genet (1910–1986—e.g., The Maids ); Samuel Beckett (1906–1989—e.g., Waiting for Godot, 1952), and Eugène Ionesco (1909–1964—e.g., The Bald Soprano, 1950). Authors associated with Le Nouveau Roman, or New Novel, also rejected tradi- tional narrative in favor of disjunctive depictions of intricate states of mind. The lead- ing exemplars of this current were Alain Robbe-Grillet (1922–2008—e.g., Jealousy , 1957), Claude Simon (1913–2005—e.g., The Flanders Road, 1967), Nathalie Sarraute (1900–1999—e.g., The Planetarium, 1959), Michel Butor (1926–2016—e.g., Passing Time, 1956), Robert Pinget (1919–1997—e.g., The Inquisitory , 1962), and Marguerite Duras (1914–1996—e.g., Moderato Cantabile, 1958). By comparison, writers affiliated with Oulipo (Workshop of Potential Literature, founded 1960) used arbitrary con- straints, games, mathematical calculations, and other contrivances to stimulate their creativity by limiting their ability to write conventionally. For instance, Georges Perec’s (1936–1982) mystery novel A Void (1969) was written without the letter “e.” Perec was also a keen observer of everyday life, for example, Things: A Story of the Six- ties (1965), and Life, A User’s Manual (1978)—a 600-page novel about the lives and reminiscences of the residents of the same Paris apartment building, grasped in a single instant of time. Oulipo cofounder Raymond Queneau (1903–1976) produced the cult classic Zazie in the Metro (1959), a linguistically inventive, slang-filled account of an impudent preteen’s escapades in Paris. A significant development in the 1950s, 60s, and 70s was the opening of French literature to the voices of authors who were not native French, white, male, or straight. Of special importance were the authors from France’s former colonies in the Maghreb (i.e., Morocco, Algeria, and Tunisia) and sub-Saharan Africa, many of whom lived in France or had their works published there.
eBook - PDF- Guido Mazzoni, Zakiya Hanafi(Authors)
- 2017(Publication Date)
- Harvard University Press(Publisher)
It was also practiced by the authors of novels who, starting from the 1830s, would be called “realistic”: from Balzac and Flaubert to Maupassant and Henry James. As heir to the premodern romance, the new unreal literature no longer sought legitimacy by claiming to describe the world according to the poetic order of the idea, namely, according to a public exemplarity given as an a priori, but rather as a creation of the subjective imagination. On the other hand, it also took up some of the descriptive traits that the eighteenth-and nineteenth-century novel had developed to create a reality effect. In this way it revived the conception of the supernatural by rooting fantastic tales in the concreteness of the sensible and the everyday. 85. Hegel, Aesthetics , vol. 1, p. 533. T H E B I R T H O F T H E M O D E R N N O V E L 215 2. During the same years, a new type of autobiographical narrative devel-oped that at the beginning of the twentieth century Joachim Merlant would call the roman personnel. 86 It brought together the autobiographical tradi-tion descending from Rousseau’s Confessions with the novel-diary that arose out of the transformations that The New Heloise and The Sorrows of Young Werther introduced into the epistolary genre. 87 This is the group of texts best corresponding to Schlegel’s idea that many novels are actually, more or less covertly, confessions of the author. 88 Moreover, the roman per-sonnel expanded during the same period that Schlegel was writing his theory of the novel: Foscolo’s The Last Letters of Jacopo Ortis (1798–1817), Cha-teaubriand’s Atala (1801) and René (1802), Madame de Staël’s Delphine (1802) and Corinne (1807), Senancour’s Obermann (1804), Madame de Krüdener’s Valérie (1804), and Constant’s Adolphe (1816) came out only a few years earlier or later than the Dialogue on Poetry and the Athenaeum Fragments.
- Elke D'hoker, Gunther Martens, Elke D'hoker, Gunther Martens(Authors)
- 2008(Publication Date)
- De Gruyter(Publisher)
The importance thus accorded to the relationship between the literary text and experience can be related to the impact of rhetoric on French cul-ture, which came under scrutiny at the beginning of the twentieth century 304 Els Jongeneel due to the widening gap between art and society. Authors such as Gide re-flect in their works on the relationship between text and modern life, seek-ing to adapt the literary form to a contemporary society obsessed by tech-nology and money. Given its preoccupation with reality, the New Novel is not an ‘art for art’s sake’ movement, quite the contrary. Some authors (Simon, and, to a lesser degree, Butor) quite purposefully embed their narratives in a his-torical context, at a time when the traditional, coherent world view of the pre-war generations has collapsed. Nevertheless, history in these novels is considered an opaque, hostile force. The central theme of the New Novel is indeed the estrangement of the individual from himself, from society and from history. However, for the New Novelists the inaccessibility of the outside world is not an invincible a priori but a negotiable obstacle. They have a moderately optimistic view on the possibility of investigating the unknowable by means of the text. In their novels the text is often used therapeutically, as a compass or thread of Ariadne in the labyrinth of real-ity. Even though the subversive character of the New Novel makes it an avant-gardist movement, the New Novel remains firmly wedded to the representation of reality. After 1965, however, a postmodern ‘ontological doubt’ about the status and the representation of extra-textual reality per-vades the textual experiments of the New Novelists. In what is called the ‘New New Novel’, deconstructionism takes over, and the adventure of the text (‘the play with the signifiers’) supersedes the text of the adventure (of life).
- E. Vanborre(Author)
- 2012(Publication Date)
- Palgrave Macmillan(Publisher)
19. “une réintegration de la bonne vieille conscience d’autrefois”; Ibid., 222. 20. “un moment fondamental de l’histoire de la littérature”; Ibid., 224. 21. “Ayant écrit un livre aussi fondamental que L’Etranger, Camus [a] aussitôt amorcé un mouvement de régression, de repli”; Ibid., 222. 22. “la personne elle-même se trouve fragmentée, c’est le texte qui se parle”; Ibid., 500. 23. Robbe-Grillet, Le Miroir qui revient, 165. 24. “on sent bien les métaphores humanisantes qui guettent la voix narratrice blanche”; Ibid., 164. 25. “Chaque fois que j’en reprends la lecture . . . son pouvoir intact opère à nouveau”; Ibid., 167. 26. “Le lecteur de L’Etranger comme le lecteur de toute la littérature de la seconde moitié du XXe siècle, va être constamment dans l’embarras face au monde”; Robbe- Grillet, Préface à une vie d’écrivain, 23. 27. “écrivains en train de construire un monde nouveau”; Ibid., 37. 28. L’écrivain “construit un monde, et il le fait dans une perpétuelle mouvance: car le monde . . . sera toujours à reconstruire, à refaire”; Ibid. 29. See Jean Ricardou, Problèmes du Nouveau Roman (Paris: Seuil, 1967); and Jean Ricardou, Le Nouveau Roman (Paris: Seuil, 1978). 30. For an account of the major criteria of postmodern fiction, see Linda Hutcheon, Narcissistic Narrative (London: Methuen, 1980); Brian McHale, Postmodernist Fic- tion (London: Methuen, 1987); and for an account of the relationship between the Nouveau Roman and postmodernism, see Edmund Smyth, ed., Postmodernism and Contemporary Fiction (London: Batsford, 1991), 54–74. Camus, the Nouveau Roman, and the Postmodern ● 17 31. “Une nouvelle phrase [naît] chez Camus, très différente de celle de L’Etranger ou de La Chute, assez proche de celle de Samuel Beckett ou de Claude Simon, longue, tâtonnante, trébuchante, souvent illuminante”; Jacques Lecarme and Eliane Lecarme, L’Autobiographie (Paris: Armand Colin, 1997), 234–35.
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