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Nathalie Sarraute (1900-99) 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 2000 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.
List of contents
Acknowledgements; List of abbreviations; Introduction; Part I. Difference and Human Relations: 1. Difference and dissension; 2. Subjectivity and indistinction; 3. Abjection into art; Part II. The Body and Sexual Difference: 4. Minds, bodies and the new unanimism; 5. Sexual indifference; Part III. Genre and Difference: 6. Criticism and 'the terrible desire to establish contact'; 7. Same difference: reprise and variation; Conclusion: death and the impossible difference; Notes; Bibliography; Index.
Summary
This 2000 book on Nathalie Sarraute (1900–99), one of France's most distinguished twentieth-century novelists, was the first major study in English to appear since her death. Ann Jefferson offers a new perspective on Sarraute's entire oeuvre - her fiction, her outstanding autobiography Enfance and her influential critical writings.
