Nouveau roman


The Nouveau Roman 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.

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 and character in fiction, as well as the omniscient narrator. The Nouveau Roman authors were open to influences from writers such as Dostoevsky, Joyce, Faulkner and Kafka, as well as the cinema.

Theory

The earliest theoretical writings about the Nouveau Roman were the four essays by Nathalie Sarraute compiled in 1956, L'Ère du soupçon. 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 and Essais sur le roman, 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.
The Nouveau Roman literary movement and the novels themselves were further theorized by Jean Ricardou, who in addition to his theoretical works also published nouveaux romans himself, such as ', ', and Les Lieux-dits. 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.

Nouveau Roman and 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. Their collaboration with director Alain Resnais resulted in critical successes such as Hiroshima mon amour and Last Year at Marienbad. 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, Michel Butor's La Modification, Nathalie Sarraute's Le Planetarium and Marguerite Duras' Moderato Cantabile.

List of central writers and later figures

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.

Parallel and later figures (1960s)

France

Canada

United Kingdom

Italy

Argentina

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.