Abstract
When Dans le labyrinthe appeared in 1959, the French cultural world was engaged in an intense debate on the nature and future of the novelistic genre. Robbe-Grillet was considered to be the leading figure and spokesman of a new literary school, the nouveau roman, which vigorously attacked the assumption that in the novel someone narrates someone’s story and provides a narrative interpretation of the world. In our times, he declared, ‘to tell a story has become strictly impossible’; allegedly, the nouveau roman replaces individual characters with ‘a banal he, anonymous and transparent, the simple subject of the action expressed by the verb’ (FNN: 27, 33). In this chapter I shall unearth this antinarrative aesthetics — a poetics that emphasizes textual construction, the exploration of new literary forms and the reader’s critical engagement with the assumptions underlying the view of the novel as a mode of storytelling.
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© 2014 Hanna Meretoja
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Meretoja, H. (2014). Textual Labyrinths: Robbe-Grillet’s Antinarrative Aesthetics. In: The Narrative Turn in Fiction and Theory. Palgrave Studies in Modern European Literature. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137401069_2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137401069_2
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, London
Print ISBN: 978-1-349-48628-1
Online ISBN: 978-1-137-40106-9
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