This book gathers French writer Michel Butor's essays on his travels in the Mediterranean. Included are pieces on Cordova, Istanbul, Salonica, Delphi, Mallia in Crete, and Ferrara and Mantua in northern Italy. There is an extended essay on Egypt, where, when Butor was twenty-four, he spent a year teaching French in a secondary school in a provincial city. Far from the bland comments on the landscapes by an enchanted walker, inspired by memories, Butor digresses on the history and the literature of the places that he visits. He raises what he calls "geographical criticism" to the rank of art, never forgetting that cities are not miracles of nature but the masterpieces of men. Emperors built palaces where conquerors had previously destroyed them. Sculptors erected statues and writers wrote books. Michel Butor registers these as a part of the memory of place. Butor went on to become one of the leading exponents of the avant-garde writing that emerged in France in the 1950s.

A rambling novel of dreams and reflection inspired by a library in a German castle full of books and maps. The narrator is a young Frenchman who works for the owner. The author is a leading practitioner of the French nouveau roman. He wrote Mobile.

Elizabeth A. Kaye specializes in communications as part of her coaching and consulting practice. She has edited Requirements for Certification since the 2000-01 edition.

Middle-aged man reflects on his life and loves as he travels by train from Paris to Rome--from his wife to his beloved.

"But Vernier finds that the core of what he actually knows is useless unless he can spin around it a concentric web of larger suppositions, endowed with varying "degrees" of truth. Relying on his nephew's information, he writes Part Two of his manuscript as if it were being written by his nephew. Finally, in Part Three, the raw material of life overwhelms his delicate literary structure, thus exposing the impossibility of his obsession and the damaging effect this obsession has on both himself and those who surround him."--BOOK JACKET.

This volume explores the influence of the avant-garde French novel form known as Nouveau Roman on experimental prose fiction and post-war literary culture in Britain.

Michel Butor, one of the earliest exponents of the French New Novel, is known for experimenting with narrative voice (the second-person narration in La Modification), focalization (the changes in narrative perspective in Degrés), and the treatment of genres (L'Emploi du temps). L'Emploi du temps (1956) is a quintessential nouveau roman for it is about a novel within a novel. In Critical Essays on Michel Butor's L'Emploi du temps, Sudarsan Rangarajan examines the different aspects of the novel from a postmodern perspective. Engaging contemporary theorists - Sartre, Foucault, de Man, and Prince among others - the essays encompass diverse areas: narratology, rhetoric, genre studies, existentialism, and postcolonialism. From the analysis of the beginnings and the function of narratees to the study of rhetoric, the journalistic discourse, the hybridization of the detective and the Gothic genres, the figure of the flâneur, and postcolonialist concepts (the elite and the subaltern), the essays provide new insights into one of the greatest twentieth-century novels.

A posthumously published collection of thirty-six essays offering Italo Calvino's invigorating and illuminating analysis of his most treasured literary classics.