This collection of essays celebrates the work of the French Nobel prize-winning novelist Claude Simon. Scholars reconsider the fifty years of Simon's fiction in the light of his large-scale autobiographical novel, 'Le Jardin des Plantes' (1997). From a variety of perspectives - postmodernist, psychoanalytic, aesthetic - chapters reflect on the central paradox of Simon's work: his writing and rewriting of an experience of war so disruptive and traumatic that words can never be adequate to communicate it.

Since his international breakthrough with 1960's La Route des Flandres, Claude Simon has captivated readers worldwide with his relentless examination of interior life - in particular his own. Breaking from realistic narrative, obsessed with the power (and betrayals) of memory, The Jardin des Plantes is nothing less than an inquiry into what creates each of us. While admitting that there are defining moments in one's life - eight days of battle during World War II was Simon's unforgettable experience - The Jardin des Plantes rings with his refusal to be defined by any single event. His thoughts show the complexity, the fabulous chaos, that makes up the experience of life for Simon and, he insists, for all thinking human beings. These memories - whether everyday minutiae or passages from novels or the staggering experiences of war and death - unreel like films, constantly replaying or stopping and starting according to the whimsical or terrifying nature of his experiences. The juxtapositions may hold meaning, or be nothing more a than a trick of the mind. What is important is that each memory has a place in his mind and each has an effect on his self and the way he projects that self

This book introduces novels by the Nobel Prize for Literature author, Claude Simon, giving emphasis to peaks in his literary achievement.

Claude Simon: Fashioning the Past by Writing the Present considers the aesthetic, cultural, and philosophical facets of a temporal paradox in the works of French novelist Claude Simon (1913-2005), and its broader implications for the study of narrative, and for cultural and post-modern theory. This paradox emerges from the problematic representation of the past through an aesthetic rooted in an exclusive valorization of the present. In his 1985 Nobel speech, as well as on other numerous occasions, Simon expressed a fascination with simultaneity through the provocative claim that he never wrote about the past, but attempted to capture only what was happening during the writing process, that is, in the “present of writing,” as he put it. Simon’s seemingly unambiguous claim raises significant issues and contradictions that become extensively apparent when the statement is considered in the light of his fictional works, since these must be construed, for the most part, as explorations of the past. In this study Alina Cherry propose to look at the tensions that arise from this paradox, and examine the present of writing holistically—that is both as a stylistic device and within the thematic context of Simon’s works—in order to assess its capacity for becoming an instrument of ontological and epistemological inquiry that can also intervene powerfully in the decisive philosophical and socio-political debates that have animated the cultural landscape of post-World War II France. Simon’s vivid portrayals of suffering and devastation open new ways of understanding the impact of some of the most traumatic historical events of the twentieth century: the two World Wars and the Spanish Civil War. This impact is necessarily connected with a need to tell these events, and to tell them in highly innovative ways, namely by creating a distinctive style that revolutionizes the outworn narrative traditions of a world whose very foundations have been shattered by the chaos of war and effectively undermines various institutions and dominant socio-cultural structures, revealing implicitly and explicitly, a strong ethical vein.

This annual French XX Bibliography provides the most complete listing available of books, articles, and book reviews concerned with French literature since 1885. Unique in its scope, thoroughness, and reliability of information, it has become an essential reference source in the study of modern French literature and culture. The bibliography is divided into three major divisions: general studies, author subjects (arranged alphabetically), and cinema. Number 59 in the series contains 12,703 entries. William J. Thompson is Associate Professor of French and Undergraduate and Interdisciplinary Programs in the College of Arts and Sciences at the University of Memphis.

Provides the most complete listing available of books, articles, and book reviews concerned with French literature since 1885. The bibliography is divided into three major divisions: general studies, author subjects (arranged alphabetically), and cinema. This book is for the study of French literature and culture.

Thresholds of Meaning examines contemporary French narrative and explores two related issues: the centrality within recent French fiction and autofiction of the themes of passage, ritual and liminality; and the thematic continuity which links this work with its literary ancestors of the 1960s and 1970s. Through the close analysis of novels and récits by Pierre Bergounioux, François Bon, Marie Darrieussecq, Hélène Lenoir, Laurent Mauvignier and Jean Rouaud, Duffy demonstrates the ways in which contemporary narrative, while capitalising on the formal lessons of the nouveau roman and drawing upon a shared repertoire of motifs and themes, engages with the complex processes by which meaning is produced in the referential world and, in particular, with the rituals and codes that social man brings into play in order to negotiate the various stages of the human life-cycle. By the application of concepts and models derived from ritual theory and from visual analysis, Thresholds of Meaning situates itself at the intersection of the developing field of literature and anthropology studies and research into word and image.

This book is about the ambition, in a set of paradigmatic writers of the twentieth century, to simultaneously enlist and break the spell of the real—their fascination with the spectacle of violence and suffering—and the difficulties involved in capturing this kind of excess by aesthetic means. The works at the center of this study—by Franz Kafka, Georges Bataille, Claude Simon, Peter Weiss, and Heiner Müller—zero in on scenes of agony, destruction, and death with an astonishing degree of precision and detail. The strange and troubling nature of the appeal engendered by these sights is the subject of The Pathos of the Real. Robert Buch shows that the spectacles of suffering conjured up in these texts are deeply ambivalent, available neither to cathartic relief nor to the sentiment of compassion. What prevails instead is a peculiar coincidence of opposites: exaltation and resignation; disfiguration and transfiguration; agitation and paralysis. Featuring the experiences of violent excess in strongly visual and often in expressly pictorial terms, the works expose the nexus between violence and the image in twentieth-century aesthetics. Buch explores this tension between visual and verbal representation by drawing on the rhetorical notion of pathos as both insurmountable suffering and codified affect and the psychoanalytic notion of the real, that is, the disruption of the symbolic order. In dialogue with a diverse group of thinkers, from Erich Auerbach and Aby Warburg to Alain Badiou and Jacques Lacan, The Pathos of the Real advances an innovative new framework for rethinking the aesthetics of violence in the twentieth century.

This book offers a new critical perspective on the perpetual problem of literature's relationship to reality and in particular on the sustained tension between literature and historiography. The scholarly and literary works of W.G. Sebald (1944–2001) serve as striking examples for this discussion, for the way in which they demonstrate the emergence of a new hybrid discourse of literature as historiography. This book critically reconsiders the claims and aims of historiography by re-evaluating core questions of the literary discourse and by assessing the ethical imperative of literature in the 20th and 21st centuries. Guided by an inherently interdisciplinary framework, this book elucidates the interplay of epistemological, aesthetic, and ethical concerns that define Sebald's criticism and fiction. Appropriate to the way in which Sebald's works challenge us to rethink the boundaries between discourses, genres, disciplines, and media, this work proceeds in a methodologically non-dogmatic way, drawing on hermeneutics, semiotics, narratology, and discourse theory. In addition to contextualizing Sebald within postwar literature in German, the book is the first English-language study to consider Sebald's œuvre as a whole. Of interest for Sebald experts and enthusiasts, literary scholars and historians concerned with the problematic of representing the past.