Nouveau Roman
Illustration — Alain Robbe-Grillet The Nouveau Roman (nuvo ʁɔmɑ̃, "new novel") is a type of French novel in the 1950s and 60s that diverged from traditional literary genres. Émile Henriot coined the term in an article in the popular French newspaper Le Monde on May 22, 1957 to describe certain writers who experimented with style in each novel, creating an essentially new style each time.
Also recorded as New novel
Nouveau Roman
Jose Lara · Flickr: Alain Robbe-Grillet · CC BY-SA 2.0
- Period
- 1956.
- Region
- France.
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Illustration — Alain Robbe-Grillet The Nouveau Roman (nuvo ʁɔmɑ̃, "new novel") is a type of French novel in the 1950s and 60s that diverged from traditional literary genres. Émile Henriot coined the term in an article in the popular French newspaper Le Monde on May 22, 1957 to describe certain writers who experimented with style in each novel, creating an essentially new style each time.
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Overview
Overview
A group of writers dubbed Nouveaux Romanciers, "new novelists", emerged in the mid-1950s. Vivian Mercier considered Michel Butor, Alain Robbe-Grillet and Nathalie Sarraute to be the core of the group, becoming known through their theoretical writings about their writing practices in addition to their novels. This group has commonly been expanded by critics to include other innovative writers who had published with Les Éditions de Minuit under Jérôme Lindon, such as Samuel Beckett, Marguerite Duras, Claude Ollier, Robert Pinget and Claude Simon. The style had different approaches but generally rejected the traditional use of chronology, plot, character, and the omniscient narrator in fiction. The Nouveau Roman authors were open to influences from writers such as Dostoevsky, Joyce, Faulkner, Proust, Woolf, Kafka, as well as the cinema.
Cinema
Cinema
The Nouveau Roman style also left its mark on the screen as writers Marguerite Duras and Alain Robbe-Grillet became involved with the Left Bank film movement (often labelled as part of the French New Wave). Their collaboration with director Alain Resnais resulted in critical successes such as Hiroshima mon amour (1958) and Last Year at Marienbad (1961). They would later go on to direct their own films. Influenced by these films, French courses in North America during the 1960s and 1970s often included works by Nouveau Roman authors such as Alain Robbe-Grillet's La Jalousie (1957), Michel Butor's La Modification (1957), Nathalie Sarraute's Le Planetarium (1957) and Marguerite Duras' Moderato Cantabile (1958).
France
France
• Jean-Marie Gustave Le Clézio: The Interrogation (1963) • Georges Perec: Things: A Story of the Sixties (1965) • Jean Ricardou: L'Observatoire de Cannes (1961), La Prise de Constantinople (1965), Place Names (1969) • Philippe Sollers: The Park (1961) • Monique Wittig: The Opoponax (1964)
Canada
Canada
• Hubert Aquin: Next Episode (1965) • Gérard Bessette: Incubation (1965) • Jacques Godbout: L'Aquarium (1962)
United Kingdom
United Kingdom
• Christine Brooke-Rose: Out (1964), Such (1966) • B. S. Johnson: Trawl (1966), The Unfortunates (1969) • Ann Quin: Berg (1964) • Muriel Spark: The Ballad of Peckham Rye (1960)
Italy
Italy
• Italo Calvino: Cosmicomics (1965)
Argentina
Argentina
• Julio Cortázar: Cronopios and Famas (1962), 62: A Model Kit (1968)
United States
United States
The critic Benjamin Libman has argued that the Nouveau Roman exerted a profound influence upon Susan Sontag and the development of postmodern fiction in the United States.
Course of the movement
Dated record
Course of the movement
Explore 1956
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1956
Nouveau Roman first recorded.
1956
Nouveau Roman is recorded from 1956.
1956
Nouveau Roman was established or created in 1956.
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France.
Country
Nouveau Roman is associated with France.
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Theory
The earliest theoretical writings about the Nouveau Roman were the four essays by Nathalie Sarraute compiled in 1956, L'Ère du soupçon (The Age of Suspicion). Alain Robbe-Grillet and Michel Butor also published essays on the nature and future of the novel which were collected in Pour un Nouveau Roman (1963) and Essais sur le roman (1969), respectively. Rejecting many of the established features of the novel to date, Robbe-Grillet regarded many earlier novelists as old-fashioned in their focus on plot, action, narrative, ideas, and character. Instead, he put forward a theory of the novel as focused on objects: the ideal nouveau roman would be an individual version and vision of things, subordinating plot and character to the details of the world rather than enlisting the world in their service. • Illustration — Seminar with Jean Ricardou and Claude Simon, Cerisy (France) • Illustration — Contemporary literature workshop with Marc Avelot, Philippe Binant, Bernard Magné, Claudette Oriol-Boyer, Jean Ricardou, Cerisy (France), 1980 The Nouveau Roman literary movement and the novels themselves were further theorized by Jean Ricardou, who in addition to his theoretical works (e.g., Problèmes du Nouveau Roman) also published nouveaux romans himself, such as L'Observatoire de Cannes (1961), La Prise de Constantinople (1965), and Les Lieux-dits (1969). He also organized, directed and published the proceedings of several conferences on the nouveau roman, including the 1971 conference and debate at Cerisy, published in two volumes: Nouveau roman: hier, aujourd’hui, which added to an understanding of the history of that period. Just before his death in 2016, he was working on a book of interviews with Amir Biglari, in which he provided an account of the Nouveau Roman movement.
Central writers and works
The following is based on the list from Les nouveaux romanciers: étude critique as well as La littérature française du XXe siècle. • Samuel Beckett: Molloy (1951), Malone Dies (1951), The Unnamable (1953) • Maurice Blanchot: Thomas the Obscure (1941; revised 1950) • Michel Butor: Passing Time (1956), Changing Track (1957) • Jean Cayrol: Foreign Bodies (1959) • Marguerite Duras: Moderato Cantabile (1958), The Ravishing of Lol Stein (1964) • Louis-René des Forêts: The Bavard (1946) • Claude Mauriac: The Dinner Party (1959), The Marquise Went Out at Five (1961) • Claude Ollier: The Mise-en-Scène (1958), Law and Order (1961) • Robert Pinget: Graal Flibuste (1956), Monsieur Levert (1959), The Inquisitory (1962) • Alain Robbe-Grillet: The Erasers (1953), The Voyeur (1955), Jealousy (1957) • Nathalie Sarraute: Martereau (1953), The Planetarium (1959), The Golden Fruits (1963) • Claude Simon: The Wind (1957), The Grass (1958), The Flanders Road (1960)
Primary material
Documents and archives
reference work
- “Nouveau roman”, English Wikipedia, consulted as further reading
Reputable secondary · Wikipedia
authority record
- Wikidata, structured authority record Q570341: Nouveau Roman
Unverified · Wikidata
Notes from the source article
Cited by Wikipedia
Notes from the source article
These works are cited by the source article, in its own numbering. They are recorded as its citations, not as sources VALÉORINE has verified.
- 1.Oxford University Press. The Oxford Dictionary of Literary Terms. 2015. 9780191783234.
- 2.Henriot, Émile. La Jalousie, d'Alain Robbe-Grillet Tropismes, de Nathalie Sarraute. Le Monde. May 1957.
- 3.Mercier, Vivian. The new novel from Queneau to Pinget. Farrar, Straus and Giroux. 3–42. 1971.
- 4.Unwin, Timothy. The Cambridge Companion to the French Novel: From 1800 to the Present. Cambridge University Press. 243. 1997-10-28. 978-0-521-49914-9.
- 5.French literature – Toward the nouveau roman Encyclopedia Britannica
- 6.Yanoshevsky, Galia. Les discours du Nouveau Roman : Essais, entretiens, débats. Presses universitaires du Septentrion. 41–72. 2006. 978-2-7574-2261-8.
- 7.Robbe-Grillet, Alain. For a New Novel: Essays on Fiction. Grove Press, Inc. 21–24. 1965.
- 8.Actes du colloque Nouveau Roman : hier, aujourd'hui de 1971. www.ccic-cerisy.asso.fr.
- 9.Erica. Un aventurier de l'écriture - Entretiens avec Jean Ricardou. Le site du Fonds Jean Ricardou. 2018-05-20.
- 10.Clouzot, Claire, Le cinéma français depuis la nouvelle vague, Fernand Nathan/Alliance Française, 1972
- 11.Thoraval, Jean. Les nouveaux romanciers : etude critique, avec de nombreux extraits : pour les etudiants des universites et pour les eleves des classes preparatoires aux grandes ecoles. Bordas. 1976. 978-2-04-009649-6.
- 12.Mitterand, Henri. La littérature française du XXe siècle. Nathan. 67. 1996. 978-2-09-190488-7.
- 13.Macé, Suzanne. Littératures: mélanges littéraires. Hurtubise. 227–233. 1971.
- 14.Harger, Virginia Ann. Alienation and the search for self in the "nouveau roman" of France and of Quebec. University of British Columbia. 1973.
- 15.Ferris, Natalie. 'I think I preferred it abstract': Christine Brooke-Rose and visuality in the new novel. Textual Practice. 32. 2. 225–244. 2018-02-07. 0950-236X.
- 16.Darlington, Joseph. A Non-Euclidean Novel: Christine Brooke-Rose's Such and the Space-Age Sixties. Journal of Modern Literature. 40. 2. 147–164. 2017. 0022-281X.
- 17.Adam, Guy. The nouveau roman and Writing in Britain After Modernism. OUP Academic. 2019-12-05. 10.1093/o.
- 18.Guy, Adam. B. S. Johnson and Post-War Literature: Possibilities of the Avant-Garde. Palgrave Macmillan UK. 35–53. 2014. 978-1-137-34955-2.
- 19.Bailey, James. Muriel Spark's Early Fiction. Edinburgh University Press. 103–141. 2021-03-16. 978-1-4744-7596-9.
- 20.Duran, Jèssica Pujol. Volume 1 The Languages of World Literature. De Gruyter. 579–590. 2024-03-04. 978-3-11-064503-3.
- 21.Libman, Ben. Susan Sontag and the Americanization of the Nouveau Roman. Post45 Journal. 2022-08-29. 2168-8206.
Bibliography printed in the source article · 4
- Oxford University Press. The Oxford Dictionary of Literary Terms. 2015. 9780191783234.
- Luscans, Bernard (2008). La représentation des objets dans le nouveau nouveau roman, Chapel Hill, Université de Caroline du Nord.
- Pivato, Joseph. 'Nouveau Roman Canadien', Canadian Literature 58 (Autumn 1973) 51–60.
- Pivato, Joseph. 'Nancy Huston Meets le Nouveau Roman', Athabasca University Canadian Writers Site.
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