Nouveau Roman Research Articles

Sincretimo "mágico": laberintos en los textos de Jorge Luis Borges y de la "nueva novela" francesa

La prosa latinoamericana postmoderna recrea de alguna manera las ideas de la “nueva novela” francesa. El llamado “realismo mágico”, con su ficcionalidad tendente a lo fantástico, a menudo enriquece las características irracionales-aporéticas de la narrativa de la “nueva novela” con ciertos procedimientos como la hibridación y el sincretismo estilístico-cultural. En este estudio se propone a examinar según los aspectos anteriormente mencionados a dos relatos muy discutidos de Jorge Luis Borges (“El jardín de los senderos que se bifurcan” y “Abenjacán el Bojarí, muerto en su laberinto”), ambos vinculados con uno de los tropos maestros del œuvre borgeano: el motivo del laberinto. Se puede observar en ellos dos formas antagónicas del sincretismo: el primer cuento se fundamenta en la naturaleza significativa —significativa porque deviene mensaje (lenguaje comprensible, información)— del diálogo de elementos desemejantes, mientras que el segundo pone en escena la variación infinita de signos despojados de significado, de irreconocibles referencias “sin rostro” que, impeliéndose, negándose y apartándose, llegan a formar una suerte de vorágine. Las dos novelas de Alain Robbe-Grillet que se pretenden comparar con los cuentos borgeanos de manera esquemática serán En el Laberinto y La doble muerte del profesor Dupont.

Sans oublier Malraux. Par Jean-Claude Larrat; préface d’Henri Godard.

As the title implies, woven into this extensive collection of Jean-Claude Larrat’s articles on André Malraux’s life and work is a thread of anxiety about his place in the world of French letters. While francophone (and even anglophone) critics and commentators like to embellish their reflections on the human condition with references to, or quotations from Malraux, it is open to question whether many of them have ever acquainted themselves with his writings in a sustained manner. This is even more true of a younger generation of readers whose cultural attitudes would find little in common with his archetype of 1930s commitment. Larrat’s articles, which were published over the last two decades, therefore bridge the divide between the significance of the intellectual cross-fertilization among Malraux and his contemporaries (this he analyses with particular lucidity with regard to André Gide and Michel Leiris), and the fascination Malraux exercised for a later generation of major intellectual figures (for example, Jean-François Lyotard). The four areas covered by the articles deal broadly with: the relationship between biography, autobiography, and fiction; the representation of history and the challenges this engenders; the reflection on art and the dynamics of its creation; and Malraux’s ceaseless interrogation on the nature of literary creation. The pursuit of an ‘antidestin’ — as seen in a large array of Malraux’s fictional characters, who gamble, sometimes literally, on their ability to negate the fatal ravages of time — is expressed in different ways across the volume’s four focuses, but is most apparent in the relationship between the individual and the unfolding of history. But this power of negation evokes a wider and encompassing possibility of metamorphosis, which allows the individual and the work of art to challenge fixed boundaries and re-imagine their origins. Ultimately, what Larrat endeavours to do is to identify, in a way that can be appreciated by a contemporary readership, the ‘voice’ that is the key to the understanding of the essential being. Larrat, as critic, is faithful to the objective fixed by Malraux the novelist, most notably in La Condition humaine, where he evokes the voice in the individual that is not apprehended via the ears but via the throat, and which is the manifestation of the inner life that escapes temporal boundaries. Larrat’s well-organized volume is informative and largely persuasive, representing a methodical and conscientious endeavour to re-assert the relevance of Malraux. It appears almost half a century after Roland Barthes’s dismissal of Malraux’s status as ‘un grand écrivain’ in an interview in Le Figaro, 27 July 1974. Barthes’s comment was made in an era when the frontiers explored by the nouveau roman seemed to have turned Malraux’s prose into the poste restante of a pedestrian literary past. Larrat makes a vigorous case for the enduring value of Malraux’s work, and of his life-long obsessions, for our postmodern times.

A Nouveau Roman de la route : Marc Séguin’s La foi du braconnier and the Challenge of Rewriting

Mais cette superposition de l'atlas et d'une biographiene va pas ici sans risque.- Jean Ricardou1When thinking of quintessential literary genres of the late twentieth century, arguably none is more typically than the Nouveau Roman, which proved nothing short of revolutionary in terms of redefining literary narrative. The generic counterpart (or at least one of them) in the American sphere of influence at this time, the road novel, typified by Jack Kerouac's On the Road, showcased rebelliousness and the escape from strictures, not so much in its form as through its characters and storylines.2 Both genres are iconic, but they are also distinct, as distant from one another as France is from the sprawling expanses of the American heartland that are traversed by ribbons of asphalt.To read Sal Paradise, one of On the Road's protagonists, as the auto-biographical embodiment of Kerouac's outsider ethnicity as a French Canadian in America nonetheless justifies the place of the road novel in a French-speaking literary imaginary.3 From the tales of the coureurs des bois, adventurers who took to the road (or more accurately the inland waterways that formed the fur trader's highway), to twentieth- and twenty-first-century imitations of Kerouac's own work, most famously Jacques Poulain's Volkswagen Blues, the open expanses of the North American space and a means to travel have beckoned adventurers and authors alike to the escapist possibilities of the road.4 Although written in French, French-Canadian and Quebecois road novels typically owe a great deal to their American counterparts given the impact of similar geography and commonalities in settlement patterns. Moreover, the crossover is indicative of the permeation of many things fashionably American into the larger cultural ethos of Quebec.In Marc Seguin's La foi du braconnier, a road novel that owes much to both On the Road and Volkswagen Blues, there is something distinctly - and generically - French about what is ostensibly an American (in the continental sense of the term) road novel.5 Insofar as it breaks with the conventions of the typical road novel, which aims to chronicle a purposeful journey, often pushing westward across the continent, Seguin's discontinuous narrative of seemingly erratic zigzagging recalls the breaks with novelistic convention initiated by the Nouveau Roman. As a Nouveau Roman de la route, perhaps one inspired as much by On the Road as by Michel Butor's Mobile, it is a hybrid genre befitting a society that often, in a slightly abbreviated version of Marcel's Rioux's iconic formulation, sums itself up using the mathematically derived equation of americanite + francite = quebecite.6Getting one's bearingsSeguin's debut novel is the story of Marc S. Morris, a young man of mixed white and Mohawk heritage. Despite the linguistic legacy of the Mohawk nation's former British alliances, Morris seems equally at home in his indigenous mother tongue as he is in French, but demonstrates a certain unease with the dominant language of the North American continent. His mixed percentage is a clear reference to the metissage that first took place centuries ago between European fur traders and the native peoples in North America, a fact that causes Morris to regard himself as une consequence de l'Amerique moderne.7 He, however, is more of an assembled character, harkening back to Deleuze and Guattari, than a metis or hybrid one.8 His multiplicity of personas, each of which makes for a fascinating story in its own right, combine to make him a particularly indecipherable character. He is a not-fully-trained chef (he completed only one year of culinary school) but is an accomplished cook with a talent for preparing game with technique-driven style. He is the single-handed thwarter of Al-Qaeda-inspired terrorist plots but shows little respect for the law, having been, as if playing to a blatantly racist stereotype, a smuggler of cigarettes. …

浅析《弗兰德公路》中的描述话语

在新小说派作家眼里，描述成了装饰体系的材料、文本生成动力和排除某些有害价值观念的工具。法国作家克洛德•西蒙(Claude Simon)在其作品《弗兰德公路》中，娴熟地运用描述技巧，对战争环境进行了多角度、全方位的描写，淡化故事情节，将人物溶解于背景之中，成功地为读者展现了一幅幅生动形象的立体画作，犹使读者身临其境。读者在获得感性认识之后，掩卷之余，不禁对战争有了更深层次的理性思考。 The New Novel (Nouveau Roman in French) considers the discourse of description materials of the decoration system, a driving force of text generation and tools to exclude disfavored values. The French writer Claude Simon has successfully adopted descriptive skills in La Route des Flandres and describes the war-environment from various perspectives. With the plot minimized and characters integrated into the background, he presents vivid and stereo pictures to readers. After obtaining perceptual knowledge, readers may have profound conceptual thinking about the war.

A Non-Euclidean Novel: Christine Brooke-Rose's <em>Such</em> and the Space-Age Sixties

Christine Brooke-Rose’s novel Such (1966) derives techniques from the nouveau roman, and combines them with theories of physics to produce an experimental text in line with contemporary scientific understanding. The term “experimental” used to describe the text is significant, considering the British post-war technocratic context. Brooke-Rose herself theorizes the nouveau roman in scientific terms when introducing it to her British audience. She combines the image of the spiral drawn from astrophysics and DNA with continental theories of subjectivity as her central structural metaphor for the interaction of individual consciousness and society. Her phantasmagorical imagery represents an attempt to subjectivize contemporary empirical understanding of physics and to make of it a heroic narrative journey.

Tenir tête aux dieux par by Mahmoud Hussein

Reviews 273 smile rather than to excoriate our illogical actions and incongruencies. Hervy’s criticism of muddle and incoherence is the bataille in the title, but the book’s tone is teasing rather than warlike. College of San Mateo (CA) Susan Petit Hussein, Mahmoud. Tenir tête aux dieux. Paris: Gallimard, 2016. ISBN 978-2-07017979 -4. Pp. 167. 17,50 a. This novel, recounted in the first person by its protagonist, is the story of a young freedom-fighter in Nasser’s Egypt. The action takes place in 1959, but the narrator intersperses flashbacks about the hero’s past while recounting events in the narrative present. The unnamed protagonist is an idealistic young medical student in Cairo who seeks to revive and advance the dignity of his nation and its people in reaction against its former colonial masters, especially Great Britain. Unfortunately for him, his democratic ideals, tinged with communism, have gotten him into trouble with the totalitarian authorities of the Nasser regime. When we meet him on the first page, he is already a prisoner in a camp for political dissidents. His description of the humiliations suffered by him and his fellow detainees is interrupted at regular intervals by reminiscences of his past. The reader learns progressively about his impoverished childhood and student years. We meet several of his friends, also young political idealists, with two of whom he is reunited in the course of his incarcerations. The guiding star of his life is a beautiful young woman, also a medical student, named Nadia. She aggressively takes the initiative of pursuing the affections of the shy young man. She loves him and wants to marry him. She also questions the need for and value of his Marxist political philosophy. Her doubts give him the opportunity to expound upon his principles in a series of ideological discussions with her. She and her father represent a majority of Egyptians who want the best for their country too but who passively accept the status quo despite its infringements on individual liberty. Nadia writes faithfully to the hero throughout his imprisonment, and he compares her fidelity to that of Penelope in the Odyssey. At the same time, he looks upon his own brave confrontation of his captors with the steadfast courage of Homer’s hero. Matters get increasingly worse for him, however. The narrator moves forward into the future as well as looking back into the past. He is sent to places of incarceration that are more and more hellish. We take leave of him at the last one where he is stripped and beaten but remains defiant in the face of tyranny. The last word of the text is the selfdescriptive adjective “inexpugnable” (167). The reader is left in suspense as to the hero’s ultimate fate. Curiously, the last page of text is followed by twenty-four blank pages. Perhaps we are being invited to fill them in with our own surmises. There are other interesting stylistic features. As in the Nouveau Roman, there are constant references to angles of vision and thoughts being revealed by looks rather than words. Also noteworthy is the narrator’s use of the classical style ternaire that goes back to the seventeenth century. Nouns, verbs, adjectives, and phrases almost always occur in groups of three. University of Denver James P. Gilroy Jouannais, Jean-Yves. La bibliothèque de Hans Reiter. Paris: Grasset, 2016. ISBN 9782 -246-85776-1. Pp. 160. 17 a. Commissionné par un bibliophile parisien pour acheter une collection de livres ayant appartenu à un dénommé Hans Reiter, le narrateur de ce récit acquiert deux cent-cinquante titres arrachés à un étrange rival lors d’une vente aux enchères. Il entreprend de comprendre ce qui relie les ouvrages de cette collection hétéroclite traitant de la guerre et se rend compte que la clef du mystère se trouve dans la page manquante de chaque livre. Naviguant dans l’univers kafkaïen d’un récit constellé d’anecdotes et de saynètes comiques, le lecteur percera le secret de l’enquête bien avant le narrateur. Ce dernier est pourtant mis sur la voie dès le d...

La vie est faite de ces toutes petites choses by Christine Montalbetti

participante active à cette recherche ne concerne pas seulement le quartier et ses habitants, et au-delà la France d’après-guerre; elle forme aussi un parcours personnel, celui d’une jeune Écossaise que rien ne prédestinait à devenir professeur de littérature française et résidente de la capitale, et encore moins sans doute à écrire une œuvre en français. Ce récit forme donc aussi la trame d’une transformation intérieure qui, en raison de sa générosité et de son abnégation, permet à sa narratrice—comme à ses lecteurs—de “renouer avec une sensation plus vive que [soi]-même” (165). Metropolitan State University of Denver Jean-François Duclos Montalbetti, Christine. La vie est faite de ces toutes petites choses. Paris: P.O.L, 2016. ISBN 978-2-8180-3993-9. Pp. 333. 17,50 a. From its first pages to its last, this is a book where the author goes to exceptional lengths to make the reader feel right at home, wagering upon a variety of gestures intended to foster a sense of narrative hospitality. Those effects are all the more welcome in view of the fact that the events that Montalbetti deals with take place in a world that very few of us have experienced. Her subject is STS-135, the final mission of NASA’s space shuttle program. It is an astonishing choice, considering her previous writings; and it’s a bold one, too, for it requires that she negotiate a new set of representational problems. Most of the latter devolve upon the real and the constraints that it imposes, for in this book Montalbetti seeks to engage the real as directly as she can, and to render an account of that engagement with a minimum of compromise. One of the techniques she relies upon as she chronicles this space mission, from its launch on 8 July 2011 to its return twelve days later, involves an accretion of detail, an “avalanche de détails” (269) in carefully constructed passages of description whose most concentrated moments recall certain exercises in hyperrealism. Having appropriated a staggering amount of archival material, Montalbetti turns it to her purpose in single-minded fashion. “Je m’appliquerais,” she remarks, “à ce que tout soit vertigineusement exact” (269). Another technique is an unrelenting focus upon the “small things” that her title invokes, whether those things be the bacteria that are annihilated when a packaged meal is prepared, or the fruit flies which serve as experimental subjects on the mission, or the tears that an astronaut sheds and quickly wipes away, lest they escape to float unattended in the weightless atmosphere of the cabin. For it is the small things that make a space mission possible, Montalbetti suggests—and it is also those small things that enable some kinds of literary communication . I have avoided the word“novel”until now, but the term roman is emblazoned on the cover of Montalbetti’s book, and she is unconditional in claiming that term for her own, stating that in this instance she has chosen to write “un roman sur une aventure réelle”(264).What gradually becomes clear is that the tension between truth 280 FRENCH REVIEW 90.4 Reviews 281 and fiction, between the real and the invented, continually poses the questions of what the novel is, and what it can become. Moreover, we may be persuaded that those categories are less inconsonant than we might have deemed them—especially when a novelist can sit down to chat with her principal character, and when a reader, with a couple of clicks of a mouse, can learn the title of that character’s doctoral dissertation. Yet another salient consideration is that the real must be imagined if we are ever to grasp it, most conspicuously in the case of events as extraordinary as the ones put on offer here. University of Colorado Warren Motte Nathan, Tobie. Ce pays qui te ressemble. Paris: Stock, 2015. ISBN 978-2-234-078222 . Pp. 540. 22,50 a. L’Égypte, pays d’origine du psychologue Nathan, est au cœur de ce nouveau roman. Le récit commence en 1925 dans Haret el Yahoud, le ghetto...

Nuovi realismi o il “sospetto della coerenza” nella Francia di oggi

In France, the turn of the 21st-century has given rise to a welter of considerations on the condition of literature. The present article aims to present the various sides of the debate about contemporary literature, showing what connects it to the 50s Nouveau Roman and to the following postmodern wave. It goes without saying that there is no question of going back to traditional realism while stressing, on all sides, the need for a new realism. Instances can be found in various quarters: from the supporters of a world literature in French (Litterature-monde) to new versions of life-writing, to genres’ hybridisation. The common ground is an attempt to represent the subject in the context of its own unstable identities and within the undetermined realm between fiction and reality.

The Narrative Turn in Fiction and Theory: The Crisis and Return of Storytelling from Robbe-Grillet to Tournier

The Narrative Turn in Fiction and Theory: The Crisis and Return of Storytelling from Robbe-Grillet to Tournier

Giorgio Bassani. Per una lettura interpretativa dell’Airone, dagli scritti sull’arte al "Nouveau Roman"

Nonostante il rapporto di Giorgio Bassani con le arti visive sia stato spesso discusso dalla critica bassaniana, permane la convinzione che le preferenze artistiche dello scrittore siano state irreversibilmente condizionate dai maestri di gioventù e, per quanto concerne la pittura, da Roberto Longhi e da Giorgio Morandi in particolare. Pur riconoscendo l’impatto della lezione di quei maestri sulla formazione dell’immaginario bassaniano, quest’articolo si propone di guardare all’evoluzione delle preferenze estetiche dell’autore, concentrandosi sull’Airone quale momento cerniera. È infatti nell’ultimo grande romanzo di Bassani che è possibile cogliere pienamente l’allontanamento dello scrittore da quell’universo culturale che anima i suoi scritti precedenti. Ispirato dal discorso estetico portato avanti dal movimento pittorico del Realismo Esistenziale e dagli esperimenti narrativi del Nouveau Roman, Bassani costruisce in questo testo una versione rovesciata della Ferrara dei suoi primi racconti.

“The Full Horror of Plumbing”: Psychoanalysis, Existentialism, and the British Postwar Weird

William Sansom belongs to a loose category of British novelists working around World War II and in the wake of prewar modernism who produced fictions recapitulating neither high modernism's assertive experimentation nor the 1930s retreat into social realism. While this writing failed to precisely resemble late modernist minimalism or the nouveau roman (new novel), it resonated with such approaches. Despite the alleged parochialism of postwar British writing, key late modernist concerns—exhaustion, silence, a withdrawing phenomenological world—are frequently present. While most of his fictional output depicts bourgeois disconcertedness, Sansom also wrote horror stories, sometimes sharing clear affinities with the Lovecraftian weird. This article considers the weirdness of his more apparently conventional fiction, specifically The Body (1949). Here one finds an apparently straightforward tale of domestic anxiety, a farce of jealous subterfuge. Nevertheless, the writing deals in intensities that disrupt the quotidian frame, particularly in scenes attending to the inanimate stuff of the middle-class lifeworld. Most Sansom criticism reads this paraphernalia according to first-wave Freudianism. Sex—or its repression—manifests in unlikely places until the libidinally trussed narrator finds everything horrific. However, this interpretative key cannot dispel an overwhelming strangeness. The novel's dread is not just psychological but phenomenological. Reading this effect via Graham Harman's imagining of a Lovecraftian Martin Heidegger for whom dasein is “no longer the biggest star in the theatre,” I argue that The Body mediates, as both a late modernist and a weird text, between competing psychoanalytic and existential accounts of the uncanny.

Jean Echenoz – ein ‚jeune auteur‘ zwischen Nouveau Roman und Neuem Realismus

Critics agree that there are close structural similarities between Jean Echenoz’s narrative techniques and those of the nouveau roman. To date, however, none has explicitly identified and subjected these similarities to the closer scrutiny they undoubtedly deserve. This article seeks to redress this imbalance by examining Echenoz’s remarkable use of the narrator, present-tense narration and free indirect discourse. Only by analysing these key narrative techniques across his entire oeuvre, it argues, may we situate his works in the context of literary history. It illustrates how Echenoz’s works have developed over the decades; how the author makes innovative use of the aforementioned textual devices to enable new interpretations of his writings; and how, in so doing, the author not only moves on from the nouveau roman, but challenges the very boundaries of French postmodernism.

Juan Benet and the French Nouveau Roman: A Contentious Connection Revisited

The uniqueness of Juan Benet’s fiction has long been a truism in critical discussions on the Spanish author’s work. This article seeks to challenge the notion that Benet’s admittedly idiosyncratic style is without parallel by reevaluating the writer’s relationship with the French nouveau roman. The article begins by diagnosing in Benet’s theoretical work and in that of his French precursors a shared skepticism of humanist positivism and of the epistemological function of the written word before examining how this skepticism is manifested in Volveras a Region.

Le Nouveau roman algérien: une réinscription de la thèse de Khatibi

ABSTRACTThe Algerian nouveau roman can be represented by Mourad Djebel's oeuvre. I argue that rather than being primarily concerned with political questions, Djebel favors the exploration of a writerly aesthetic that acknowledges and seeks to go beyond the writing of other Algerian writers of the last decade. My approach seeks to free this writer from sociological readings that link his work to the Algerian War of Independence or the Black Decade of the 1990s, and instead to situate him in terms of avant-garde production, a form of the novel to come.

Repression and Black Holes in Laurent Mauvignier Novel about Algerian War

XXth century history obliged narrators to clash with events that was literally inexpressible, measuring the potential and the lack of literary means. Laurent Mauvignier made this confrontarion the centre of his poetics: from minimal, private tragedies to great, historical dramas, passing through the media mystification of absurd fait divers, his novels face the Evil problem and its representation in words.With Des hommes (2009), Mauvignier addresses his question to one of the most problematic repression object in historical French memory: Algerian War. Building a polyphonic novel, he deals with an event deeply characterized by silence (the veteran silence studied by Benjamin Stora and Andrea Brazzoduro) and that has been manipulated by the institutional and mediatic vulgata. Infact, the narration shows how the amnesty of collective faults is based on the order to say nothing (overturning Foucault), first of all caused by the social load of an history that nobody wants.This paper aims at showing how Mauvignier's work, inspired by modernist novel and nouveau roman (Duras, Simon), resorts to literary experimentalism to defamiliariser this historical event using the tools of a fiction claiming the value of a secondary experience to redeem a piece of history refused by the public discourse.

The Art of the Nouveau Roman in The Driver’s Seat

This article focuses on Muriel Spark’s art of the nouveau roman in The Driver’s Seat . It probes into the nature of the nouveau roman, the major concerns of its advocates, and the relation between the nouveau roman and postmodernism. Then it tackles with the presentation of the protagonist, the descriptions of the places, monotonous behaviour of the characters and the purposeful design of the lack of syntactical variety. Finally, it discusses the disruption of the sequential plot. With the impersonal narration and the rejection of the sequential plot, Spark’s The Driver’s Seat shows the typical features of the nouveau roman as well as the postmodernist fiction and turns out to be a brilliant success.

La part du romanesque dans l’hétéro-autobiographie de Robbe-Grillet

In the light of the recent, lively critical debate on the “Romanesque”, I have considered the ideas Robbe-Grillet has expressed in his criticism and fiction in order to clarify the meaning it has for him and the role it plays in his Romanesques. I have examined Pour un nouveau roman, Le Voyageur, his latest collection, and the Correspondance, following the development of an idea which, subsequently, I compared to the Romanesques. I found out that for Robbe-Grillet the romanesque adds an essential ingredient to the strength of passion, in both life and fiction: simulation. Only a disproportionate representation, which is obviously false, can approach the intensity of the “fantasme” understood in the Freudian sense. Fictionalizing his autobiography allowed him, also, to represent himself in the act of writing, in his specific function of inventor of stories, thus abstracting his work from the problem of reality and fiction which autobiography inevitably implies.

Les Irréguliers, un autre après-guerre: Gary, Guilloux, Malaquais …

The virtue of this volume is to go beyond merely doubting whether the Standard Version of French literary history in the post-war period is true (from engagement to the nouveau roman and the defeat of the Hussards) by showing just how much it leaves out. Admirable figures with little in common save their determination to be themselves and not part of anything else — Marc Bernard, Jean Malaquais, Jean Meckert, Louis Guilloux, and, centrally, Roman Gary (to which set I would add Elie Wiesel and André Schwartz-Bart, not discussed in this volume) — produced a whole library of serious literary fiction that, despite winning a dozen Goncourt, Renaudot, and other prizes, was consistently marginalized by the rigidly politicized literary institutions of Paris and continues even now to be held at arm's length by the academy. Roumette introduces these still largely hidden treasures with a thoughtful and sensitive essay on the damage wrought by an over-ideological era. Roger Grenier, Jacques Cantier, Geneviève Nakach, and Pierre Masson make the personalities and novels of Bernard, Guilloux, and especially Malaquais seem irresistibly interesting. Kerwin Spire provides an extremely well documented and persuasive account of Romain Gary's relations with Gaullism, Maxime Decout unravels the battle he fought with ‘ideology’, and Hélène Baty-Delalande offers a welcome salvage-and-rescue service for the literary project of Frère Océan, centred on a generous reading of Gary's long essay on the picaresque, Pour Sganarelle. Roumette also contributes a fine essay setting Gary's White Dog in parallel to Guilloux's OK, Joe! — the only two of the novels under consideration to exist in English translation — and Cyril Piroux explores the double career of Jean Meckert who was also the Série noire author Jean Amila. The term ‘irrégulier’, chosen to characterize these highly individual writers who share a common resistance to labels and brigades, is borrowed from Gary, who used it to identify himself in a newspaper column he published as the Journal d'un irrégulier, and is entirely apt, for the moral thrust of all these novelists is not ‘disengagement’, but engagement in the great issues of the day from a position not compatible with that of any established political party or group — like ‘irregular soldiers’ fighting when it suits, and not when it doesn't. A volume of essays of such high quality ought to prompt more widespread interest in the some of the best writing that France produced in the 1940s and 1950s. (A planned screen version of OK Joe!, if it materializes, may do even more.) At the least, it pulls another plank from under the rickety political structure still maintained in much academic discourse about the shape and meaning of the post-war French novel.

Cinematographic novel: French new novel and film

The paper analyzes the relationship between Danilo Kiš's novels 'Garden, Ashes', and 'Hourglass' and poetics of the French new novel (Alain Robbe-Grillet, Michel Butor, Robert Pinget, Nathalie Sarraute) in the context which examines the influence that film had on the prose of the twentieth century. We are able to follow the Flaubertian thread through labyrinths of the historical avant-garde to be wrapped up with Danilo Kiš and Nouveau roman. As a result, it can be seen how film provoked modifications of narrative techniques at the dawn of postmodernism.

Phenomenology from Robbe-Grillet to Julio Cortázar: An Essay on the Poetics of Presence

This article provides a comparative analysis of the works of Alain Robbe-Grillet (1922-2008) and Julio Cortazar (1914-1984) setting phenomenology as a common ground and comparative basis. The authors' works are regarded in relation to the philosophies of Edmund Husserl (1859-1938) and Martin Heidegger (1889-1976). An extensive analysis of Husserl’s phenomenological method of description is provided in order to set the philosopher’s text in relation to Robbe-Grillet’s techniques of the nouveau roman. The development from Husserlian phenomenology to Heideggerian existential phenomenology is fully taken account of to demonstrate that while Robbe-Grillet’s literary phenomenology follows closely the tenets of Husserlian epistemology, Cortazar’s text adopts a Heideggerian approach to his rendering of truth in terms of existential content.