Nouveau Roman Research Articles

Making Known Again: The Rhetorical Function of Anagnorisis in Georges Perec's La disparition

Abstract This article proposes that the main trope of Georges Perec's novel, La disparition (1969), is anagnorisis, or a scene of literary recognition. Though Perec borrows a classical trope described by Aristotle, his novel stands out in that it is not a character that the reader must recognize but an unexpected and unannounced void, namely, the absence of the letter E from the entire text. Framing this exercise in literary constraint as a modernist mystery novel, Perec aligns the stakes of noticing, or not noticing, his missing letter with postwar debates about literature's capacity to help us understand existence. On the one hand, Perec decries the inability of traditional literature to capture the complexity of a post-Holocaust world. On the other hand, he deplores the literary nihilism he attributes to the nouveau roman movement. It is to escape this impasse that Perec embarks on his mission to renew anagnorisis and, more broadly, literary meaning-making. To do so, he sets in place new forms whose ultimate purpose is to help us begin to recognize the profound meaning of the absences left behind by the traumas of the twentieth century.

Living Arrangements: Mise-en-scène and the Nouveau Roman in the Fiction of Ann Quin

Abstract Why is postwar experimental fiction so concerned with measuring and marking out scene and setting? This article analyzes the fiction of the avant-garde British novelist Ann Quin, both her short stories and her debut novel Berg, focusing on her mise-en-scène, choreography, and tableaux. It argues for a fraught relationship between twentieth-century fiction and setting, from Henry James’s “house of fiction” and Woolf’s denunciation of naturalist interiors, from the self-sufficient psyches of early modernism to the fastidious mapping of scene and place in the theory of the nouveau roman, especially that of Natalie Sarraute and Alain Robbe-Grillet. The importance of Quin’s work for postwar fiction, the article argues, is that it suspends, periodically, the free indirect style of early modernism but also departs from the austere topography of the nouveau roman, so that her fiction furnishes an elastic, anxious, and unstable mise-en-scène.

Жорж Перек и «новый роман»: поля пересечений и расхождений с творчеством Алена Роб-Грийе

The article examines intertextual links between the works of the French writers Georges Perec and Alain Robbe-Grillet. Not only early texts by Perec but also further ones in form and content refer to the artistic discoveries and inventions of the representatives of Nouveau Roman. In the modern history of French literature, Perec usually appears as an antipode of the Nouveau Roman approach to writing; nevertheless, it is relevant to see and analyze the places of these discrepancies to understand better the specifics and creativity of Perec and the characteristics of the representatives of the Nouveau Roman. The study focuses on early texts (Les Choses, Un homme qui dort), which reveal direct links with the poetics of the nouveau roman, Alain Robbe-Grillet in particular, and on later ones (La Disparition). The article concludes with the significance of the typological links between Nouveau Roman and Perec’s early work, as well as their significant dissimilarity, which consists of subsequent authorial aspirations and attitudes towards style and writing ideas.

Sorin Titel and Danilo Kiš

The present study aims to explore the similarities between the novels Lunga călătorie a prizonierului (Prisoner’s Long Journey, 1971) by Sorin Titel and Grobnica za Borisa Davidoviča (A Tomb for Boris Davidovich, 1976) by Danilo Kiš. Both Central European writers, Titel (Romanian) and Kiš (a Serbian, born to a Jewish father and a Montenegrin mother) experienced the same traumas, stemming from their living through a nightmarish history and struggling to pursue their literary careers in countries under totalitarian regimes. Influenced by Samuel Beckett and Franz Kafka, while also learning from the contemporary French nouveau roman, Sorin Titel employs the well-known theme of travel in an allegorical novel apt to be made into a road movie – a journey with no beginning or end, enriched by means of myths and symbols, but offering neither revelation nor salvation to the traveler. Danilo Kiš takes a different approach: at first glance a collection of short stories, the stories included in A Tomb for Boris Davidovich enhance the information in the previous texts, adding new dimensions to the characters, accounting for their actions and impulses. At times, the omniscient narrator becomes an unreliable narrator, adding to the confusion, despite the exhaustive amassing of facts and data. Nevertheless, subtle affinities can be discovered in the common motifs of Titel’s and Kiš’s works: victims turned executioners and vice versa; imposture; desacralization; blood and slaughter. On the other hand, the most terrifying characters in A Tomb for Boris Davidovich are embodiments of a certain type of prisoners: trapped in amorality and in their own inability to evolve.

From painting to novel: Claude Simon’s Triptych

ABSTRACT The concept of transposition from one artistic medium to another is situated at the intersection of several different disciplines such as adaptation studies, translation studies, intermedia studies, and comparative literature. An example of a less common transposition, painting-to-novel intermedia translation, is examined in Claude Simon’s novel Triptych. The role of intermedia translation in this Nouveau Roman novel is described through the hermeneutical and dialogical lenses, two approaches already fruitfully applied in translation studies. This article argues that, first, the transfer of painting to novel in Triptych is an example of intermedia translation and that it may be studied by using translation studies approaches; second, that only by recognizing the use of intermedia translation in Simon’s work one is able to fully understand his artistic practice; and third, that, in turn, translation studies can benefit from expanding its traditional scope by taking into account non-interlingual transfers such as intermedia translation.

Leonardo Reviews Online

February 01 2023 Leonardo Reviews Online Author and Article Information Online Issn: 1530-9282 Print Issn: 0024-094X ©2023 ISAST2023ISAST Leonardo (2023) 56 (1): 117. https://doi.org/10.1162/leon_r_02335 Cite Icon Cite Permissions Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Peer Review Search Site Citation Leonardo Reviews Online. Leonardo 2023; 56 (1): 117. doi: https://doi.org/10.1162/leon_r_02335 Download citation file: Ris (Zotero) Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search All ContentAll JournalsLeonardo Search Advanced Search Alain Robbe-Grillet: L’Aventure du Nouveau Roman by Benoît Peeters. Reviewed by Jan Baetens. Frederik Ruysch and His Thesaurus Anatomicus: A Morbid Guide, edited by Joanna Ebenstein. Reviewed by Robert Maddox-Harle. ’Pataphysics Unrolled, edited by Katie L. Price and Michael R. Taylor. Reviewed by Brian Reffin Smith. The Creative Lives of Animals by Carol Gigliotti. Reviewed by Gregory F. Tague. Extinct: A Compendium of Obsolete Objects, edited by Barbara Penner et al. Reviewed by Michael Punt. Modern Alchemy by Emmanuele Coccia (text) and Viviane Sassen (photographs). Reviewed by Jan Baetens. You do not currently have access to this content.

A Story with Characters and Action

A Story with Characters and Action

Catalan Narrative 1875–2015 ed. by Jordi Larios and Montserrat Lunati

Reviewed by: Catalan Narrative 1875–2015 ed. by Jordi Larios and Montserrat Lunati David George Catalan Narrative 1875–2015. Ed. by Jordi Larios and Montserrat Lunati. Cambridge: Legenda. 2020. xiii+278 pp. £75. ISBN 978–1–781887–10–3. This fascinating collection of articles on a wide variety of Catalan writers emerged from a two-day conference held at the University of St Andrews in 2015. Some are comparative studies. Enric Bou's, for instance, subtly and convincingly compares quite distinct writers from different eras. His highlighting of seemingly insignificant details in the chosen texts illuminates these in an original fashion. Josep Murgades offers an evaluation of noucentista prose writers and excoriates critics who have suggested that narrative is virtually absent from noucentisme. Montserrat Lunati examines the presence of Maria-Mercè Marçal and another female writer, Mercè Rodoreda, in the work of a third, Mercè Ibarz. Other contributors consider the work of single authors. Elisa Martí-Lopez demonstrates how Narcís Oller's La febre d'or exposes the emptiness of the unstable surface sheen produced by speculative money during the period of Barcelona's stock market boom of the early 1880s. Helena Buffery's article contains detailed and highly pertinent readings of primary archival sources in her analysis of Maria-Mercè Marçal. A number of studies set Catalan writers within a broader European cultural framework, be it literary or philosophical. Schopenhauer's pessimism is the basis of Jordi Larios's fresh interpretation of Caterina Albert's seminal novel Solitud. Dominic Keown probes such questions as the fraught and shifting relationship between colonizer and colonized, the complex role of literature in portraying sociopolitical issues, and the dialectic conducted by his chosen author, Albert Sánchez Piñol, with mainstream European writing. Using as his point of departure a 1938 essay by Albert Camus and drawing on philosophical texts from ancient Greece to Heidegger, Joan Ramon Resina analyses texts by five Catalan poets and prose writers. Sílvia Mas i Sañé sheds light on a complex novel by Avel·li Artís-Gener through an analysis of its links to existentialism and the nouveau roman. A second study of Artís-Gener by Rhiannon McGlade employs various aspects of humour theory, while making a strong case for the importance of the fiction of a figure who is best known for his writing and cartoons in the popular press. Approaches to history figure strongly in this volume. Kathryn Crameri explores how the family, on both a personal and, more specifically, a national level, emerges from novels about the 1714 defeat of the Catalans by the Bourbons. P. Louise John-son's intriguingly titled article ('Oedipus and the Spanish Crown') is a study of two [End Page 514] novels by Guillem Viladot about historical Castilian figures. Through a discussion of simultaneity and the fluidity of narrative time, Mario Santana examines how Jaume Cabré presents moral responsibility, guilt, redemption and the way in which 'the crimes of history cannot be written out of the record' (p. 252) in his novel Jo confesso. Language is the focus of two articles. Jordi Cornellà-Detrell's is a shrewd analysis of multilingualism in three novels, highlighting different motives for and results of heteroglossia, which he locates within the changing nature of sociolinguistics in Catalonia, both south and north of the Franco-Spanish border. Alan Yates explains how 'literary translation has been [. . .] the most satisfying if not the most remunerative facet of my professional activity, the ideal complement to linguistic and literary studies' (p. 261). This, he writes, is the context of his own translation of Raimon Casellas's Els sots feréstecs, a complex, ground-breaking novel that has fascinated him since he first read it more than half a century ago. Two attractive features of the volume are its richness and the way it brings to life the wide variety of works analysed. Critical theory figures strongly in a number of the articles, but it is employed carefully and sometimes subtly as a framework that enhances rather than obscures the narrative texts under discussion. Finally, the editors' succinct Introduction intelligently, clearly, and deftly ties together the diverse strands of the...

„Hiszen már nincs is idő”

This paper deals with the question of Miklós Mészöly’s and Iván Mándy’s attitude to objects and objectivity. My contention is that the two authors represent two approaches: while Mészöly creates a poetics of sight, Mándy creates a poetics of sound. Hence their fundamentally different ways of writing: Mészöly’s desanthropomorphisation, his depersonalized narrative, the timelessness of his descriptions, Mándy’s anthropomorphisation, his narrative approaching live speech, his techniques of evoking the past. Behind Mészöly’s objectivity and impersonality lies an epistemological pessimism, influenced by French existentialism, absurdist literature and the nouveau roman. This raises two related questions: on the one hand, what is the relationship of Mándy’s works to the material world they evoke; on the other, what kind of world literary trend this approach fits into.

"A dream, dictating its own course": On Ralph Gibson’s Photobook Trilogy, 1970–1974

This paper scrutinizes American photographer Ralph Gibson’s photobook trilogy published by his own company Lustrum Press: The Somnambulist (1970), Déjà-vu (1973), and Days at Sea (1974). The success of the trilogy verified a sizable market for highly personal photobooks, which would become a defining trend in contemporary art photography. Focusing on the structure of visual signification in each volume, the paper performs for the first time a close analysis of Gibson’s sequencing method materialized in the book form. The inner logic of each publication is further elucidated in relation to the major sources of reference in 20th-century art, photography, and literature, such as the fictions of Jorge Luis Borges, the cloud photographs of Alfred Stieglitz, and the Nouveau Roman of Marguerite Duras and Alain Robbe-Grillet. The paper argues that sequencing was an epistemological strategy for Gibson to prioritize arbitrary relations between two neighboring pictures, without impairing each photograph’s truth claim to the perceptible reality. This was the photographer’s tactic to reconcile the purported objectivity of the camera image and the subjective propensity for narrative and imagination in his photobooks. Gibson’s avoidance of heavy-handed manipulation and shocking subject matter led his work to the “surrealism of the perception,” which can be situated in the tradition of Surrealist photography advocated by André Bazin and Brassaï.

Estrada, Jorge. Experiencing Ethics with Sterne and Musil: A Relentless Character Construction.

Estrada, Jorge. <i>Experiencing Ethics with Sterne and Musil: A Relentless Character Construction</i>.

‘It is, that’s all.’: J. M. Coetzee’s Life & Times of Michael K (1983) and the cinema of Alain Robbe-Grillet

ABSTRACT The notebooks that accompany J. M. Coetzee’s early drafts of The Life & Times of Michael K (1983) reveal the importance of cinematic modes of representation for Coetzee’s conception of the eponymous Michael K. With reference to early drafts of the novel, this paper argues that Michael K’s characterisation is particularly influenced by Alain Robbe-Grillet’s filmmaking practices. Specifically, this article illustrates the importance of Robbe-Grillet’s treatment of subjectivity and objectivity for Coetzee’s experimentation with modernist modes of writing. Coetzee’s experiments with cinematic form during the drafting process illustrate the ways in which he navigates his fidelity to modernism’s formalist values in relation to the political and literary concerns that encircle him as an author in apartheid-era South Africa. By analysing the implicit and explicit influence of Robbe-Grillet’s aesthetic values as a filmmaker on Coetzee’s writing, this article illustrates the importance of acknowledging cinematic modes of representation in Coetzee’s fidelity to the nouveau roman, and his continuing investigation of modernism during this era.

Material Ecstasy: cultural alienation and the influence of the nouveau roman in the work of Nakahira Takuma and J.M.G. Le Clézio

This article analyses some of the important early work (ca. late 1960s-early 1970s) of the Japanese photographer Nakahira Takuma (1938–2015) in terms of the themes of materiality and cultural alienation, focusing on Nakahira’s links with radical European art and writing of the period. In particular, it explores the relationship with the work of the French writer J.M.G Le Clézio in early writings such as Le Procès-Verbal (1963), L’Extase matérielle (1967) and La Guerre (1970). Le Clézio includes a selection of his own photos as an appendix to La Guerre and the article also embraces an analysis of that imagery and its role in relation to the author’s association with the nouveau roman during this early, experimental phase of his career.

“Kneweth one who makes these notes . . .”: Personality, individual differences, and liking of nouveau roman and existentialist literature and film.

Previous studies suggest that personality and individual difference traits are associated with aesthetic preferences, but have infrequently examined associations within specific genres or across media domains. We examined associations between the Big Five personality traits with preferences (i.e., liking) for two non-conventional genres of film and literature, namely nouveau roman and existentialism, in samples of 548 non-experts and 95 genre experts from Austria. Path analyses indicated that Openness to Experience (positively) and Conscientiousness (negatively) were significantly associated with greater liking of stimuli across genres and media domains, after considering the effects of additional, relevant variables (aesthetic expertise and behaviours, social status, and the motive for sensory pleasure). Path models were stable across non-experts and experts, although the strength of the relationships between Openness and liking was stronger for nouveau roman stimuli. Additional analyses indicated that experts had significantly greater liking for stimuli across both genres than non-experts. These results may have implications for the promotion of non-conventional artworks to wider audiences.

Аргентинская литература по обе стороны океана: Х. Кортасар и М. Пуиг

The article analyzes and compares two Argentine novels of the mid-twentieth century, Rayuela (Hopscotch), 1963, by Julio Cortázar and Traición de Rita Hayworth (Betrayed by Rita Hayworth), 1968, by Manuel Puig. The writers are similar in their innovativeness, a thirst for experimentation. Both of them mainly worked outside Argentina, which also influenced the poetics of the novels. The parallelism between the creative searches and the life situations provides a basis for comparing these Latin American authors. We show that that J. Cortázar creates a complex intellectual work. Together with the heroes, the author reflects on the future of the novel as a genre and the possibility of creating an antinovel, while at the same time embodying some of the ideas of the Nouveau Roman writers (N. Sarrott, A. Robbe-Grillet, etc.) in practice: he destroys the usual forms of narration and involves the reader in the process of the novel-creation. M. Puig turns to pop art and mass culture. Following the Nouveau Roman writers, he discards the plot and the main character. On the pages of the novel, Puig captures the image of a typical provincial town with the precision of a movie camera; remaining ‘behind the lens’, he ‘disappears’ from the narrative and allows the characters to tell the story themselves. The article concludes that both novels are complex postmodern works in which the influence of deconstructivism and poststructuralism is obvious. J. Cortázar and M. Puig adhere to different approaches to the novel, but both strive to find new forms of narration, to take a different look at the novel as a genre, which indicates a certain unity of Argentine literature created outside Argentina.

Muriel Spark's Early Fiction: Literary Subversion and Experiments with Form by James Bailey

Reviewed by: Muriel Spark's Early Fiction: Literary Subversion and Experiments with Form by James Bailey Marilyn Reizbaum BAILEY, JAMES. Muriel Spark's Early Fiction: Literary Subversion and Experiments with Form. Edinburgh: University of Edinburgh Press, 2021. 211 pp. $88.30 hardcover. I have been an avid reader of James Bailey's scholarly work on Muriel Spark and was very happy to see that work collected and expanded in this new book—Muriel Spark's Early Fiction: Literary Subversion and Experiments with Form. I particularly appreciate Bailey's attention to Spark's formal interests, which are characterized by multifariousness—a mélange of genres, and stylistic innovations. And yet, as I have argued, and Bailey does here, Spark has a distinctive style, something readers and critics of Spark struggle to articulate. Bailey's overview of Spark criticism in the introduction does a good job of locating and illustrating the challenge. And the book does a good job of meeting it. As Bailey explains, "Muriel Spark's Early Fiction has been written in the conviction that the form and function of Spark's 'abiding doubleness' remain inadequately explored." He glosses this characterization (coined by Bryan Cheyette) at length, summing it up as "the author's development of a mode of fiction that unites a degree of postmodern narrative 'play' with a realist approach to character construction and a serious moralpolitical vision" (5). Bailey seeks to divest readers of the prevailing view that Spark's style is best understood through her Catholicism, contending that her "developments in style…are restlessly concerned instead with exploring the possibilities of literary form to produce an agile kind of social critique" (6). Beyond the critical overview, the introduction is further dedicated to tracing the refinement of Spark's authorial intent, by examining her first, prize-winning short story, "The Seraph and the Zambesi," and by explaining how his study will bring into play Spark's extensive archive, with which Bailey spent much profitable time. He also sets up what will be one of his greatest contributions to the field of Spark criticism—a substantive discussion of the influence of the nouveau roman on Spark's thinking and writing, particularly as it pertains to the abiding question of narrative authority in Spark's fiction. Chapter Three is where this discussion happens, using The Ballad of Peckham Rye, The Mandelbaum Gate, and The Driver's Seat "as valuable snapshots of Spark's evolving engagement with the forms, theories and functions of the nouveau roman's particular 'drama of exact observation'" (108). The book is organized thematically. Chapter One considers the idea of "textual haunting" in Spark's first novel, The Comforters (1957), and the 1961 short story, "Bang, Bang You're Dead," with its flashbacks to what is still very much a colonial South Africa. Bailey draws on Gérard Genette's theory of metalepsis to make a case for [End Page 306] ontological and formal border crossings. Chapter Two admirably pushes back against the commonplace notion of Spark's "authorial cruelty"—"especially evident in her (mis)treatment of female characters"—in a rather idiosyncratic way (66). Through the lens of performativity, Bailey notably analyzes Doctors of Philosophy, The Public Image, Do Not Disturb, and "A Dangerous Situation on the Stairs," a short story Bailey discovered in the author's archive at the McFarlin Library in Tulsa, "to enable a valuable reconsideration of Spark's experimental fiction and its inventive approach to matters of gender, identity and free will" (67). My personal favorite is Chapter Four, which provides a trenchant reading of The Driver's Seat, "shift[ing] focus away from what is told to the manner of its telling. That is, it examines the destabilizing effects of Lise's action upon the narrative itself" (142). Readers must struggle with the main character Lise, with her seeming eccentricity, her death wish, and the rape scene before her murder. Turning in the most focused way to the issue of omniscience, Bailey makes a case for Lise's inscrutability as "effecting a crisis in storytelling," and this returns us strategically to many of the recurring questions regarding Spark's work that Bailey has examined. When, for example, Thomas Mallon, in...

L’Approche de la « distance » dans les écrits littéraires de Michel Foucault, ou comment inscrire l’événement dans la structure

Depuis la publication des Dits et écrits, la place de la littérature dans l’oeuvre de Michel Foucault a une position bien assignée dans les recherches académiques, où l’on souligne surtout l’approche nietzschéenne de la lecture qu’a proposé le philosophe. Prenant appui sur des nouvelles publications et sur des manuscrits inédits, notre texte envisage ce thème sous un autre prisme, à partir du structuralisme de l’analyse littéraire et de l’enjeu philosophique de la revue Tel Quel dans son rapport avec le Nouveau Roman. En repérant l’importance du concept de « distance » dans ses écrits sur la littérature, nous discuterons comment plusieurs des notions créées par Foucault se trouvent en dialogue avec cette constellation théorique plus large. Nous y établirons ainsi le rapport entre la structure et l’événement, la paire conceptuelle au centre des débats philosophiques des années 1960, qui nous guidera dans la compréhension des tensions et des adhésions de la méthodologie foucaldienne à l’égard de l’analyse structurale.&#x0D; A abordagem da « distância » nos escritos literários de Michel Foucault, ou como inscrever o acontecimento na estrutura&#x0D; Desde a publicação dos Ditos e Escritos, o lugar da literatura na obra de Michel Foucault possui uma posição bem definida nas pesquisas acadêmicas, nas quais se ressalta sobretudo a abordagem nietzscheana da leitura proposta pelo filósofo. Recorrendo a novas publicações e aos manuscritos inéditos do Fonds Foucault-BnF, este texto enfocará o tema da literatura sob um outro prisma, à partir do estruturalismo da análise literária e do contexto filosófico da revista Tel Quel em sua relação com o Nouveau Roman. Enfatizando a importância do conceito de “distância” em seus escritos sobre a literatura, discutir-se-á como várias das noções criadas por Foucault se encontram em diálogo com esta constelação teórica mais ampla. A relação entre a estrutura e o acontecimento, enquanto par conceitual que se encontrava no centro dos debates filosóficos nos anos 1960, nos guiará na compreensão das tensões e das adesões da metodologia foucaltiana no que tange à análise estrutural.Palavras-chave: Análise literária. Estruturalismo. Distância. Acontecimento. Tel Quel; BnF Inéditos.

L’amour et la révolte dans Le couteau sur la table, roman de Jacques Godbout

The novel depicts the relationship of a young couple living in Montreal. The poetics of the text not only provides the reader with an unusual aesthetic experience but also reveals interesting details about life in Canada in the 1960s. We will introduce the main characters of the novel and focus on some of its aspects, especially those moments where the political situation, whether historically distant or recent, is reflected in the life of modern society. The sixties of the twentieth century were imbued with a desire to resist authority which was lived collectively and also as an individual issue. In the novel, the theme of revolt is portrayed on both these levels, but it shows that it is not always easy to realize one’s ideas in practice.The structure of the novel which refers to the influence of nouveau roman is composed of fragmentary narrative, repetitive allusions and unfinished sentences. Using all these techniques Jacques Godbout has created a captivating text, fascinating especially by its disquieting dynamics.

Jean Echenoz and Georges Perec: Negotiating Occupied Territory

Abstract Jean Echenoz’s first four novels (1979–89) exhibit the development of a literary apprenticeship across different fictional genres and acknowledge important precursors. Among the latter, the influence on Echenoz’s work of Georges Perec has not received the same attention as that of the nouveau roman, Raymond Queneau, or crime fiction writers such as Jean-Patrick Manchette. Yet the presence of Perec the narrative jigsaw-maker is unmistakeable in Echenoz’s first novel, Le Méridien de Greenwich. By the end of Echenoz’s decade-long apprenticeship, however, it is less Perec the game-player than the critic of consumerism and above all the observer of urban life who is privileged in Lac’s allusions to the older writer’s work on the infra-ordinary and on place. A previous short novella L’Occupation des sols not only dramatizes Echenoz’s navigation of an urban and socio-critical territory already occupied by Perec; it also prepares his subsequent commemoration in Lac of both Perec’s ludism and the personal loss informing his work. Taken together, L’Occupation des sols and Lac demonstrate how a grant-aided transposition to suburbia allows Echenoz to embrace his Perecquian inheritance of everyday observation, while articulating the subjection of writers too to commercial forces Perec identified, a theme the younger writer has continued to explore.

Trois scènes de bal dans le roman français (« La Princesse de Clèves », « Madame Bovary », « Le Ravissement de Lol V Stein »)

"Three Ball Scenes in the French Novel (“La Princesse de Clèves”, “Madame Bovary”, “Le Ravissement de Lol V Stein”). This article aims to analyze – in a comparative manner – three ball scenes from novels belonging to leading authors of French literature (Madame de Lafayette, Gustave Flaubert and Marguerite Duras), highlighting a series of dramatic mechanisms used by novelists in the construction of such a diegetic plot. If La Princesse de Clèves describes a ball that takes place in the royal court, with all the typical scenes of the time (embodied in a real mixture of intrigue and gallantry specific to the living environment of the actors, which make the topos of the novel itself become a collective character), Madame Bovary describes, instead, a ball animated by the high society of the nineteenth century, with all the specifics of the realistic episteme (the ball becomes here an opportunity to evoke the painful contrast between different living environments, which the heroine cannot access and which causes her, consequently, to take refuge in an imaginary universe). Much closer to the spirit of contemporaneity, Le Ravissement de Lol V Stein, the famous “nouveau roman”, relies on an image of the harmful and destructive ball, paying particular attention to the psyche of the characters. These novels lean – starting from this narrative pretext of the ball – on some love stories built through specific strategies of the theatre, which is, in essence, the central object of our analysis. Keywords: ball scenes, French Novel, dramatic mechanisms, narrative pretext, love stories."