Title: New novel, new wave, new politics : fiction and the representation of history in postwar France /
Authors: Higgins, Lynn A.
Publisher: University of Nebraska Press,
Year: 1996
Subjects: Motion pictures and literature France.; Film adaptations; French fiction History and criticism.; Experimental fiction History and criticism.; Film adaptations History and criticism; New wave films France.; France Politics and government
Abstract: 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., Claude Chabrol, 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 Wavethat 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." Higgins shows how the New Novel and New Wave are related developments. "While their individual styles and themes remain distinctive," she writes, "they share an ecriture that can be described as alternately, or interconnectedly, filmic and novelistic." New Wave filmmakers borrowed novelistic devices and made frequent literary allusions, while the "vision of the novelists is distinctly cinematic.".
Contents: Introduction: the politics of style -- Myths of textual autonomy: from psychoanalysis to historiography in Hiroshima mon amour -- Problems of plotting: La Route des Flandres -- Figuring out: L'Annee derniere a Marienbad -- Signs of the times: fictions of May 1968 -- Truffaut's otohistoriography -- Durasian (pre)occupations -- Looks that kill : Louis Malle's portraits of collaboration.