Nathalie Sarraute, Fiction and Theory: Questions of Difference

by Ann Jefferson

• ISBN13: 9780521772112
• ISBN10: 0521772117
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2000-07-03
• Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Summary

Nathalie Sarraute (1900–1999) is regarded as one of the major French novelists of the twentieth century. Initially hailed as a leading theorist and exemplar of the nouveau roman, she has come to be regarded as an important author in her own right with her own distinctive concerns. In this major new study of Sarraute, the first in English since her death, Ann Jefferson offers a fresh perspective on Sarraute’s entire oeuvre - her novels, her outstanding autobiography Enfance and her influential critical writings - by focusing on the crucial issue of difference which emerges as one of her central preoccupations. Drawing on a variety of critical approaches, Jefferson explores Sarraute’s fundamental ambivalence to differences of various kinds including questions of gender and genre. She argues that difference is simultaneously asserted and denied in Sarraute’s work, and that the notion of difference, so often celebrated by other writers and thinkers, is shown in Sarraute’s work to the inseparable from ambiguity and anxiety.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgements	xi
List of abbreviations	xiii
Introduction	1	(16)
I DIFFERENCE AND HUMAN RELATIONS
Difference and dissension	17	(22)
`Differences' and `differends'	17	(10)
Difference denied	27	(7)
Beyond compare	34	(5)
Subjectivity and indistinction	39	(21)
Self and other	39	(13)
Differential systems	52	(8)
Abjection into art	60	(19)
Abjection	60	(2)
Words	62	(5)
Scenes of narration	67	(3)
Art	70	(9)
II THE BODY AND SEXUAL DIFFERENCE
Minds, Bodies and the new unanimism	79	(17)
Psychology	81	(6)
Representation	87	(4)
Writing	91	(5)
Sexual indifference	96	(23)
Women, human beings and writing	96	(5)
Gender and the gaze	101	(4)
Women writers	105	(4)
Identifications	109	(10)
III GENRE AND DIFFERENCE
Criticism and `the terrible desire to establish contact'	119	(26)
Generic differences	119	(5)
Authority, heresy and reading	124	(9)
Strategies for contact	133	(5)
Criticism and/as fiction	138	(7)
Same difference: reprise and variation	145	(38)
Fiction and autobiography	145	(11)
Variations: repetitions and difference	156	(7)
Internal breaches	163	(8)
IV CONCLUSION
Death and the impossible difference	171	(12)
Notes	183	(18)
Bibliography	201	(13)
Index	214