New Novel, New Wave, New Politics: Fiction and the Representation of History in Postwar France

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Overview

Until now, writings on the celebrated movements in literature and film that emerged in France in the mid-1950s—the New Novel and New Wave—have concentrated on their formal innovations, not on their engagement with history or politics. New Novel, New Wave, New Politics overturns this traditional approach. Lynn A. Higgins argues that the New Novelists (e.g., Alain Robbe-Grillet, Claude Simon, Marguerite Duras) and New Wave filmmakers (e.g., Francois Truffaut, Jean-Luc Godard, Alain Resnais) “engage in a kind ...
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Overview

Until now, writings on the celebrated movements in literature and film that emerged in France in the mid-1950s—the New Novel and New Wave—have concentrated on their formal innovations, not on their engagement with history or politics. New Novel, New Wave, New Politics overturns this traditional approach. Lynn A. Higgins argues that the New Novelists (e.g., Alain Robbe-Grillet, Claude Simon, Marguerite Duras) and New Wave filmmakers (e.g., Francois Truffaut, Jean-Luc Godard, Alain Resnais) “engage in a kind of historiography. . . . They enact the conflicts, the double binds of postwar history and representation.” Higgins claims that what art historian Serge Guilbaut has said of American Abstract Expressionism is equally true of the New Novel and New Wave—that its aesthetic innovations “provided a way for avant-garde artists to preserve their sense of social ‘commitment’ . . . while eschewing the art of propaganda and illustration. It was in a sense a political apoliticism.” This lively account dramatically revises our view of a generation of important, influential artists.
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Product Details

  • ISBN-13: 9780803273092
  • Publisher: University of Nebraska Press
  • Publication date: 3/28/1998
  • Series: Stages Series
  • Edition description: Reprint
  • Pages: 260
  • Product dimensions: 5.90 (w) x 8.80 (h) x 0.50 (d)

Meet the Author

Lynn A. Higgins is a professor of French literature and chair of the Department of French and Italian at Dartmouth College. She is the author of Parables of Theory: Jean Ricardou’s Metafiction and coeditor of Rape and Representation.
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Table of Contents

Illustrations
Preface
Introduction: The Politics of Style 1
Pt. 1 1959-1964
1 Myths of Textual Autonomy: From Psychoanalysis to Historiography in Hiroshima mon amour 19
2 Problems of Plotting: La Route des Flandres 55
3 Figuring Out: L'Annee derniere a Marienbad 83
Pt. 2 After 1968
4 Signs of the Times: Fictions of May 1968 115
Pt. 3 Primal Scenes: The Occupation Viewed from the Eighties
5 Truffaut's Otohistoriography 143
6 Durasian (Pre)Occupations 169
7 Looks That Kill: Louis Malle's Portraits of Collaboration 186
Conclusion: The New Novel, the New Wave, and National Identity 207
Notes 219
Index 251
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