Telling Anxiety: Anxious Narration in the Works of Marguerite Duras, Annie Ernaux, Nathalie Sarraute, and Anne Hébert

2008 ◽  
Vol 103 (4) ◽  
pp. 1134
Author(s):  
Catherine Rodgers ◽  
Jennifer Willging
Signs ◽  
1993 ◽  
Vol 18 (2) ◽  
pp. 392-407 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sidonie Smith

2011 ◽  
pp. 59-72
Author(s):  
Czesław Grzesiak

The French nouveau roman is characterised by lack of numerous elements typical of the traditional, commonly called Balzacian, novel. This lack involves the rejection of plot, omniscient narrator, psychological, moral and ideological factors, social and political engagement, the decomposition of character, the indeterminacy and gradual implosion of time and space as well as the text generation based on some lack or void. The aim of the article is to present these missing elements of the represented world and to discuss their functions in the works of leading practitioners of the nouveau roman, such as Samuel Beckett (predecessor), Michel Butor, Marguerite Duras, Robert Pinget, Alain Robbe-Grillet, Nathalie Sarraute and Claude Simon.


Author(s):  
Adam Guy

This chapter surveys the early dissemination of the nouveau roman in Britain, beginning around 1957. First, the nouveau roman’s main British publisher, Calder & Boyars, is introduced, with consideration of that publisher’s broader activities and ideals; particular attention is paid to its transnational contexts. There is mention too of the nouveau roman’s other British publishers, including Faber and Jonathan Cape. Then the different publishing formats used by Calder & Boyars for the nouveau roman are discussed, with analysis of visual presentation. The chapter then turns to the ways in which Calder & Boyars mediated the nouveau roman in promotional copy and in the search for new audiences; reference here is made to modernism, Existentialism, the notion of the literary ‘classic’, detective fiction, pulp fiction, cinema, theatre, television, and radio. The chapter concludes with two case studies that typify the nouveau roman’s complex status for British readers, first looking at Samuel Beckett’s relation to the nouveau roman, and then narrating Calder & Boyars’s ‘French Week’, in which the publisher organized a British speaking tour for Marguerite Duras, Alain Robbe-Grillet, and Nathalie Sarraute.


1998 ◽  
Vol 23 (3) ◽  
pp. 261-266
Author(s):  
Alexandre Terneuil

In their plays, Yourcenar, Sarraute and Duras repeatedly portray women who oppose men, sometimes violently. Drawing on several examples, this paper aims to define a typology of female characters by analysing the double theme of violence and revolt. Some women find themselves imprisoned both by men and by their epoch; all they can do is to submit to the system put in place by society, against which they struggle in vain for freedom. After an initial submission to the rules of society, they are impelled towards a more or less successful revolt and this allows them to find fulfilment through rebellion. In the case of Yourcenar, woman resists as best she can; despite everything, her happiness is found in revolt and especially, perhaps, in revenge. In the case of Sarraute, the emergence and development of the Sarrautian ‘tropism’ becomes both an act of affirmation for the female character and an act of struggle against the other, the male. Woman, for Duras, is hi a position of quasi-imprisonment by two psychic spaces which occupy her totally: both violence and revolt are expressed through the body, its behaviour and its sexual pleasure. But there is also a contained violence, already filtered by an attempt, sometimes vain, to express it through words. However, many of the lines spoken by these women demonstrate a clear self-awareness through violence which is either contained or which can explode in a bid for freedom.


Signs ◽  
1993 ◽  
Vol 18 (2) ◽  
pp. 408-425 ◽  
Author(s):  
Camilla Stivers

Author(s):  
Adam Guy

The Introduction begins by detailing the emergence of the nouveau roman in its own place and time, looking at the political and cultural history of postwar France. The publisher Les Éditions de Minuit—the main sponsor of the nouveau roman—is introduced, and the earliest articulations of the nouveau roman are presented. Then, the works and signature styles of six writers are briefly surveyed, namely Michel Butor, Marguerite Duras, Robert Pinget, Alain Robbe-Grillet, Nathalie Sarraute, and Claude Simon. The ends of the nouveau roman and the rise of Tel Quel are considered. Then the particular force of the nouveau roman in the British literary field is introduced, with modernism and the end of empire as key determinants. Finally, each of the book’s chapters is summarized.


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