The nouveau roman and Writing in Britain After Modernism

Author(s):  
Adam Guy

This book shows the centrality of the nouveau roman to the literary culture of postwar Britain. Emerging in the mid–late 1950s in France, the nouveau roman grouped together a range of writers committed to innovation in the novel, such as Michel Butor, Marguerite Duras, Robert Pinget, Alain Robbe-Grillet, Nathalie Sarraute, and Claude Simon. Transferred to a different national context, the nouveau roman became a focal point for debates in Britain about realism, modernism, and the end of empire. The nouveau roman and the Novel in Britain After Modernism draws on extensive research into archival and periodical sources in order to tell the story of the nouveau roman’s dissemination and reception in Britain. It also looks at postwar writers working in Britain so as to gauge the impact of the nouveau roman in novels of the 1960s and 1970s. Whether in translations of Nathalie Sarraute’s writing by Maria Jolas (one of the founders of the interwar little magazine transition), or in the conservative critiques of the nouveau roman levelled by the circle around C. P. Snow, the question of the legacies of European high modernism is always in view. But equally, for writers like Brian W. Aldiss, Christine Brooke-Rose, Eva Figes, B. S. Johnson, Alan Sheridan, Muriel Spark, and Denis Williams, the nouveau roman also provided the source of aesthetic innovations that could exceed the modernist account of the new. This book uncovers a neglected history of the postwar British literary field, with continuing relevance for contemporary innovative writing.

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.


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

The chapter opens by considering the contested definitions of realism that often characterize discussions of the novel in the postwar British literary field. The Snow Circle—C. P. Snow, Pamela Hansford Johnson, and William Cooper—is then introduced. Hansford Johnson’s and Cooper’s attacks on the nouveau roman are shown to rehearse the Snovian critique of modernism, as well as to replicate its elisions regarding its own valuation of an opposing realism. Then novels by Rayner Heppenstall (The Connecting Door, and The Woodshed (both 1962)) and Muriel Spark (The Mandelbaum Gate (1965)) are contrasted. Both writers explicitly engage with the nouveau roman in their novels, and value it positively as a form of realism. However, Heppenstall is shown to remain within the frame of reference set down by European high modernism, while Spark sees the nouveau roman as exemplifying something new. The chapter concludes by showing how Spark’s understanding of the nouveau roman’s realism is echoed in the critical statements of a number of other writers, most revealingly B. S. Johnson.


Author(s):  
Jan Baetens ◽  
Christopher Langlois

The ‘Nouveau Roman’ or ‘New Novel’ is used to refer to a literary and critical movement in France during the 1950s and early 1960s. Later, more experimental developments in the late 1960s and early 1970s will be labeled the ‘New New Novel’. Although the Nouveau Roman quickly became associated with the work of Alain Robbe-Grillet, Marguerite Duras, Nathalie Sarraute, Michel Butor, Claude Simon, and Robert Pinget, to name only the most notable, it never crystallized into so dogmatic an ideology of literature and art as had the Surrealism of André Breton during the 1920s and 1930s.


Author(s):  
Laura Stevenson

À une époque où les habiletés de communication font partie des compétences de base du XXIe siècle, on se rend compte que l’obsession avec le langage dans les théories littéraires des années 50 et 60 est justifiée. La communication reste le rôle principal du langage, mais le contenu de cette communication a beaucoup changé. Presque chaque romancier appartenant au mouvement du nouveau roman utilise le langage de façon très différente de celle dont nous avons l’habitude en expérimentant avec le langage, en l’étirant de tous les côtés afin de lui donner une nouvelle dimension. Il ne s’agit plus de communiquer des idées et des sentiments, mais plutôt de se pencher sur le langage lui-même, de se réinventer pour que l’écrivain puisse mettre sur papier ce qu’il ressente : des sensations, des perceptions, des soupçons.Nathalie Sarraute, par exemple, perçoit le langage dans le sens mallarméen du terme, c’est-à-dire, « essentiel », complexe et qui produit du sens. En dehors du langage elle affirme l’existence d’une substance non-verbale qu’elle appelle « l’innommé » ou le « non-nommé » et le langage sert justement de médiateur entre les sensations que l’écrivain veut exprimer et son lecteur.Avec Robbe-Grillet, Claude Simon et Michel Butor, le langage dans le roman joue un rôle important car il force le lecteur à changer sa façon de lire afin de comprendre le roman. Les jeux de mots et l’insistance sur les descriptions des objets font penser le lecteur qu’il doit absolument trouver la clé afin de comprendre l’incompréhensible.


2012 ◽  
Vol 51 (3) ◽  
pp. 298-313
Author(s):  
Gavin Parkinson

Meant to signal in its parodic title both the causal, deductive conventions of academic art history and those of the detective story, this essay looks at the work of the Belgian artist Paul Delvaux (1897–1994), and discusses the uses to which that œuvre has been put by several of the pioneers of the twentieth-century novel, such as Michel Butor, Alain Robbe-Grillet, Claude Simon, Julio Cortázar, and J.G. Ballard. It goes on to speculate as to why so many French novelists from the 1950s who interrogated specifically narrative form, together with those inspired by their example, responded to Delvaux's work in their writing. Asking whether any gain can be made in art history's knowledge and understanding of art by viewing it back through the fiction or poetry generated by it, the essay suggests that fiction and poetry might inflect academic art history at the level of style, asking what the genre implications of such writing might be for a discipline in which writing and style have had such well-defined boundaries and limitations.


2020 ◽  
Vol 92 (3) ◽  
pp. 30901
Author(s):  
Suvanjan Bhattacharyya ◽  
Debraj Sarkar ◽  
Ulavathi Shettar Mahabaleshwar ◽  
Manoj K. Soni ◽  
M. Mohanraj

The current study experimentally investigates the heat transfer augmentation on the novel axial corrugated heat exchanger tube in which the spring tape is introduced. Air (Pr = 0.707) is used as a working fluid. In order to augment the thermohydraulic performance, a corrugated tube with inserts is offered. The experimental study is further extended by varying the important parameters like spring ratio (y = 1.5, 2.0, 2.5) and Reynolds number (Re = 10 000–52 000). The angular pitch between the two neighboring corrugations and the angle of the corrugation is kept constant through the experiments at β = 1200 and α = 600 respectively, while two different corrugations heights (h) are analyzed. While increasing the corrugation height and decreasing the spring ratio, the impact of the swirling effect improves the thermal performance of the system. The maximum thermal performance is obtained when the corrugation height is h = 0.2 and spring ratio y = 1.5. Eventually, correlations for predicting friction factor (f) and Nusselt number (Nu) are developed.


Author(s):  
O. Bondar

<p><em>In this study, I have collected and summarized the functional aspects of a literary prize, contest, and rating, which indicate their affiliation with the marketing complex of the publishing house for the first time. For this purpose, I have analyzed and summarized the common concepts of the functioning of literary prizes and contests as advertising tools for publishing activity. Because the previous studies are only focused on the fact of the impact of the prize on the promotion of editions but do not explain it, these aspects have been considered and introduced by me from the book production’s point of view. I investigated that the prizes and the contests in the literary field are effective marketing tools, which meet many publisher’s needs at the same time and can be considered a non-profit form of capital. I have reviewed the works of other authors, who accept that the economic success of the book is rising if the author is a winner of the literary prize or contest. I have found out that the book prize activates the demand for the book, and the literary contest is a tool to track the reader’s reaction to a future publication. In this way, literary prizes and contests can be considered as a way of conducting a marketing dialogue with the target audience. I have focused on the information support of literary national and international prizes and contests by the media, which attracts attention to the book and forms the reader’s interest. The literary prizes and contests are also considered as a way of exploring trends and their changes, familiarization the popular genres among the target audience and fixation the current choice of modern readers. Literary prizes and contests motivate the authors to improve their literary excellence, are the source of new authors and works, and assist in increasing sales of books. However, further research is recommended.</em></p><strong><em>Key words:</em></strong><em> book prize, book rating, literary contest, literary prize, functions of the literary prizes.</em>


2016 ◽  
Vol 25 (3) ◽  
pp. 294-316 ◽  
Author(s):  
Chik Collins ◽  
Ian Levitt

This article reports findings of research into the far-reaching plan to ‘modernise’ the Scottish economy, which emerged from the mid-late 1950s and was formally adopted by government in the early 1960s. It shows the growing awareness amongst policy-makers from the mid-1960s as to the profoundly deleterious effects the implementation of the plan was having on Glasgow. By 1971 these effects were understood to be substantial with likely severe consequences for the future. Nonetheless, there was no proportionate adjustment to the regional policy which was creating these understood ‘unwanted’ outcomes, even when such was proposed by the Secretary of State for Scotland. After presenting these findings, the paper offers some consideration as to their relevance to the task of accounting for Glasgow's ‘excess mortality’. It is suggested that regional policy can be seen to have contributed to the accumulation of ‘vulnerabilities’, particularly in Glasgow but also more widely in Scotland, during the 1960s and 1970s, and that the impact of the post-1979 UK government policy agenda on these vulnerabilities is likely to have been salient in the increase in ‘excess mortality’ evident in subsequent years.


Metahumaniora ◽  
2017 ◽  
Vol 7 (3) ◽  
pp. 411
Author(s):  
Abu Bakar Ramadhan Muhamad

AbstrakHegemoni kolonialisme dalam budaya poskolonial merupakan alasan penelitian inikemudian mengkaji wacana kolonial dalam novel Max Havellar (MH) khususnya dampakditimbulkannya. Dampak dimaksud adalah posisi keberpihakan pemikiran tersirat darikarya tersebut. Hasil pembahasan menunjukkan, secara temporal maupun permanen MHmenyuarakan ketidakadilan dalam kondisi-kondisi kolonial menyangkut penindasan sangpenjajah terhadap terjajah. Hanya saja, upaya mengatasnamakan atau mewakili suarakaum terjajah terbukti mengimplikasikan ciri ideologis statis kerangka kolonialisme(orientalisme); yakni cara pandang Eropasentris, di mana “Barat” sebagai self adalah superior,dan “Timur” sebagai other adalah inferior. Dalam konteks poskolonialisme, MH dengan sifatkritisnya yang berupaya “menyuarakan” nasib pribumi terjajah, justru menampilkan stigmapenguatan kolonialitas itu sendiri secara hegemonik. Artinya, “menyuarakan” nasib pribumidimaknai sebagai keberpihankan kolonial yang kontradiktif, di mana stigma penguatankolonialitas justru lebih terasa, ujung-ujungnya melanggengkan hegemoni kolonial. Tidakmembela yang terjajah, tetapi memperhalus cara kerja mesin kolonial.AbstractThe hegemony of colonialism in the culture of postcolonial society is the reason this studythen examines the colonial discourse in the novel Max Havellar (MH) in particular the impactit brings. The impact in question is the implied position of thought in the work. The resultsof the discussion show that, temporarily or permanently, MH voiced injustice in the colonialconditions regarding the oppression of the colonist against the colonized. However, the effort toname or represent the voice of the colonized has proven to imply a static ideological characterin the framework of colonialism (orientalism); ie Eropacentric point of view, in which “West” asself is superior, and “East” as the other is the inferior. In the context of postcolonialism, MH withits critical nature that seeks to “voice” the fate of the colonized natives, actually presents thestigma of strengthening coloniality itself hegemonicly. That is, “voicing” the fate of the pribumiis interpreted as a contradictory colonial flare, where the stigma of strengthening colonialityis more pronounced, which ultimately perpetuates the hegemony of colonialism. No longerdefending the colonized, but refining the workings of the colonial machinery.


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