Nathalie Sarraute, Fiction and Theory

Nathalie Sarraute, Fiction and Theory PDF Author: Ann Jefferson
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1139426796
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 234

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Book Description
Nathalie Sarraute (1900–99) is regarded as one of the major French novelists of the twentieth century. Initially hailed as a leading theorist and exemplar of the nouveau roman, she has come to be regarded as an important author in her own right with her own distinctive concerns. In this major 2000 study of Sarraute, the first in English since her death, Ann Jefferson offers a fresh perspective on Sarraute's entire oeuvre - her novels, her outstanding autobiography Enfance and her influential critical writings - by focusing on the crucial issue of difference which emerges as one of her central preoccupations. Drawing on a variety of critical approaches, Jefferson explores Sarraute's fundamental ambivalence to differences of various kinds including questions of gender and genre. She argues that difference is simultaneously asserted and denied in Sarraute's work, and that the notion of difference, so often celebrated by other writers and thinkers, is shown in Sarraute's work to the inseparable from ambiguity and anxiety.

Nathalie Sarraute, Fiction and Theory

Nathalie Sarraute, Fiction and Theory PDF Author: Ann Jefferson
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1139426796
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 234

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Book Description
Nathalie Sarraute (1900–99) is regarded as one of the major French novelists of the twentieth century. Initially hailed as a leading theorist and exemplar of the nouveau roman, she has come to be regarded as an important author in her own right with her own distinctive concerns. In this major 2000 study of Sarraute, the first in English since her death, Ann Jefferson offers a fresh perspective on Sarraute's entire oeuvre - her novels, her outstanding autobiography Enfance and her influential critical writings - by focusing on the crucial issue of difference which emerges as one of her central preoccupations. Drawing on a variety of critical approaches, Jefferson explores Sarraute's fundamental ambivalence to differences of various kinds including questions of gender and genre. She argues that difference is simultaneously asserted and denied in Sarraute's work, and that the notion of difference, so often celebrated by other writers and thinkers, is shown in Sarraute's work to the inseparable from ambiguity and anxiety.

Nathalie Sarraute and the Feminist Reader

Nathalie Sarraute and the Feminist Reader PDF Author: Sarah Barbour
Publisher: Bucknell University Press
ISBN: 9780838752357
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 316

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Book Description
Situated at an intersection of feminist critical practice in the United States and feminist cultural theory in France, Nathalie Sarraute and the Feminist Reader is an investigation of the way in which this French New Novelist's first eight works, in their increasing dramatization of the issue of reading, problematize certain feminist literary analyses, especially in relation to "l'ecriture feminine." After an exploration of the difficulty Sarraute's writing poses for the critical enterprise through a lengthy reading of Sarrautien criticism in the U.S. and France, Sarah Barbour shows how Sarraute's works eventually prohibit any fixed reading and open up instead a space in which we as readers are moved toward a more personal understanding of our use of narrative and of socio-sexual constructs in the continual, day-to-day constitution and reconstitution of subjectivity. Nathalie Sarraute conceives of the evolution of the novel as a movement through history and thus situates her work within a tradition of psychological realism at the same time that she proposes radical innovations of the tradition. Her novels do not discard or revise past works but rather internalize them in an effort to expand the notion of what is possible for psychological realism. This study takes as its model Sarraute's example of simultaneity, which invites an understanding of time both as a diachronic movement through "phases, ": from the psychological realism of Dostoyevski to that of Kafka to her own, and as a synchronic encounter that elicits simultaneous relationships to different "phases." Within the movement of feminist literary criticism scholars have often discerned what are also referred to as "phases;" that is, criticism in the United States has moved from its initial concern with images of women in fiction by male writers to a desire to establish a feminine tradition of women's writing. Nathalie Sarraute and the Feminist Reader is not an attempt to claim that Sarraute's work represents "ecriture feminine." Reading Sarraute's novels in their "evolution," Sarah Barbour has found that they forced her own reading and understanding of this term to "evolve." She therefore proposes that the novels open up a space that is beyond the frozen shells of gender, which continue to bind women and men personally and critically. The power of Sarraute's work lies in the solitary experience of our encounter with her presentation and perception of reality. In this encounter we are forced to experience the fluid nature of subjectivity; that is, to internalize and explore differences within personal and sexual identity that, by extension, affect the identity of larger political movements.

Between Life and Death

Between Life and Death PDF Author: Nathalie Sarraute
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780714501239
Category : Psychology
Languages : en
Pages : 196

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Book Description


Tropisms

Tropisms PDF Author: Nathalie Sarraute
Publisher: New Directions Publishing
ISBN: 0811222772
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 96

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Book Description
Nathalie Sarraute's stunning debut—vignettes of "inner movements"—foreshadowed the rise of the nouveau roman. Hailed as a masterpiece by Jean Genet, Marguerite Duras, and Jean-Paul Sartre, Tropisms is considered one of the defining texts of the nouveau roman movement. Nathalie Sarraute has defined her work as the “movements that are hidden under the commonplace, harmless instances of our everyday lives.” Like figures in a grainy photograph, Sarraute’s characters are blurred and shadowy, while her narrative never develops beyond a stressed moment. Instead, Sarraute brilliantly finds and elaborates subtle details—when a relationship changes, when we fall slightly deeper into love, or when something innocent tilts to the smallest degree toward suspicion.

Nathalie Sarraute

Nathalie Sarraute PDF Author: Ann Jefferson
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 0691210241
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 448

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Book Description
The definitive biography of a leading twentieth-century French writer A leading exponent of the nouveau roman, Nathalie Sarraute (1900–1999) was also one of France's most cosmopolitan literary figures, and her life was bound up with the intellectual and political ferment of twentieth-century Europe. Ann Jefferson's Nathalie Sarraute: A Life Between is the authoritative biography of this major writer. Sarraute's life spanned a century and a continent. Born in tsarist Russia to Jewish parents, she was soon uprooted and brought to the city that became her lifelong home, Paris. This dislocation presaged a life marked by ambiguity and ambivalence. A stepchild in two families, a Russian émigré in Paris, a Jew in bourgeois French society, and a woman in a man’s literary world, Sarraute was educated at Oxford, Berlin, and the Sorbonne. She embarked on a career in law that was ended by the Nazi occupation of France, and she spent much of the war in hiding, under constant threat of exposure. Rising to literary eminence after the Liberation, she was initially associated with the existentialist circle of Beauvoir and Sartre, before becoming the principal theorist and practitioner of the avant-garde French novel of the 1950s and 1960s. Her tireless exploration of the deepest parts of our inner psychological life produced an oeuvre that remains daringly modern and resolutely unclassifiable. Nathalie Sarraute: A Life Between explores Sarraute's work and the intellectual, social, and political context from which it emerged. Drawing on newly available archival material and Sarraute's letters, this deeply researched biography is the definitive account of a life lived between countries, families, languages, literary movements, and more.

The Use of Speech

The Use of Speech PDF Author: Nathalie Sarraute
Publisher: Counterpath Press
ISBN: 1933996188
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 161

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Book Description
Fiction. Translated from the French by Barbara Wright. In this classic later work from French novelist Nathalie Sarraute, one finds a "delectably austere, beady-eyed book.... Phrases that give rise to the scenes or episodes are ordinary enough until Sarraute imagines for them a context which turns them from bland civilities into weapons of psychological warfare. Friends meet and converse, in a cafe or in the street, and are all sociability; except underneath, where the best of friends can be the most savage of opponents. Sarraute resorts sardonically to metaphor to indicate what words will not capture: the shameful and ineffable animosities that...imperil our urbanity" (The Times Literary Supplement).

The Facts on File Companion to the French Novel

The Facts on File Companion to the French Novel PDF Author: Karen L. Taylor
Publisher: Infobase Publishing
ISBN: 0816074992
Category : Electronic books
Languages : en
Pages : 497

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Book Description
French novels such as "Madame Bovary" and "The Stranger" are staples of high school and college literature courses. This work provides coverage of the French novel since its origins in the 16th century, with an emphasis on novels most commonly studied in high school and college courses in world literature and in French culture and civilization.

Echo's Voice

Echo's Voice PDF Author: Mary Noonan
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1351568930
Category : Foreign Language Study
Languages : en
Pages : 165

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Book Description
Helene Cixous (1937-), distinguished not least as a playwright herself, told Le Monde in 1977 that she no longer went to the theatre: it presented women only as reflections of men, used for their visual effect. The theatre she wanted would stress the auditory, giving voice to ways of being that had previously been silenced. She was by no means alone in this. Cixous's plays, along with those of Nathalie Sarraute (1900-99), Marguerite Duras (1914-96), and Noelle Renaude (1949-), among others, have proved potent in drawing participants into a dynamic 'space of the voice'. If, as psychoanalysis suggests, voice represents a transitional condition between body and language, such plays may draw their audiences in to understandings previously never spoken. In this ground-breaking study, Noonan explores the rich possibilities of this new audio-vocal form of theatre, and what it can reveal of the auditory self.

Conventional and Original Metaphors in French Autobiography

Conventional and Original Metaphors in French Autobiography PDF Author: Madalina Akli
Publisher: Peter Lang
ISBN: 9781433103247
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 288

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Book Description
This book studies three autobiographies, each of which is at least partially devoid of chronological structure: Sartre's The Words, Perec's W or The Memory of Childhood, and Sarraute's Childhood. Calendar-based order, traditionally associated with autobiography, fails to provide the coherence the readers expect. Hence, readers must create a sense of coherence at another level by using their conceptual resources. Conventional and Original Metaphors in French Autobiography reveals that in these literary texts coherence is maintained based on the exploitation of conventional metaphors taken from everyday language, which the autobiographers transform in a creative yet familiar manner. These common metaphors offer guidance to readers and establish coherence between the shared life experiences of reader and autobiographer. In the course of reading, the autobiographers' and the readers' life experiences overlap through familiar metaphors, which serve as organizational devices in writing and as guiding principles in reading.

Historical Dictionary of French Literature

Historical Dictionary of French Literature PDF Author: John Flower
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN: 1538168588
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 659

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Book Description
With the possible exception of Great Britain, France can justifiably lay claim to possess the richest literary history of any country in Western Europe. This book covers the authors and their works, literary movements, and philosophical and social developments that have had a direct impact on style or content, and major historical events such as the two world wars, the Franco-Prussian War, the Algerian War, or the events of May 1968 that are directly reflected in a substantial body of imaginative writing. Historical Dictionary of French Literature, Second Edition contains a chronology, an introduction, and an extensive bibliography. The dictionary section has more than 500 cross-referenced entries on individual writers and key texts, significant movements, groups, associations, and periodicals, and on the literary reactions to major national and international events such as revolutions and wars. This book is an excellent resource for students, researchers, and anyone wanting to know more about French literature.