The Nouveau Roman was a French Modernist literary movement of the 1950s whose antecedents were Joyce, Beckett and Proust. A common theme among the works produced by those writers grouped as nouveax romanistes were "discontinuity, rupture, difference and revolution"¹, and they defined themselves against "a dominant culture in thrall to a staid and anachronistic concept … Continue reading The “Nouveau Roman”: where to start?
Alma continue their attractive re-packaging of the Calder backlist1 with The Garden Square, one of the lesser-known gems by Marguerite Duras, best known for The Lover (l'Amant) and the screenplay for Alain Resnais's Hiroshima Mon Amour. Although grouped with the 1950s French nouveau roman, her work eschews the formal innovation of Butor or Alain Robbe-Grillet. … Continue reading Marguerite Duras
In this final part of my study of Robbe-Grillet's early fiction, with today being what would have been his 95th birthday, I'll look at the novel which, for me, sees him reach the high-point of the nouveau-roman; and a series of experimental (in the true sense of the word) short fictions. By the time of … Continue reading Alain Robbe-Grillet: early fiction (part 3)
Into the Gyre 