Experimentalism and literary dissent: the nouveau roman’s avantgardist engagement
Abstract
The use of the definition «nouveau roman» closely links to the activity of the French neo-avantgardist group of the école du regard. The group’s members draw their inspiration from a critical reflection on literature and its meaning, in opposition to tradition. The idea, which reunites as different writers as Alain Robbe-Grillet and Michel Butor, is the reliance on the novel as a form of critical elaboration of reality. The main objects of this collective experimentation are in the forms and the structures of the novel.
The present article focuses on the issue of the engagement as presented in Robbe-Grillet and Butor’s essays: the result of a retrospective consideration on their novels, combined to their ideas about literature and its possibilities, whose outcome is the opposition to «sclerotized» structures of traditional realism.
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