Claude Simon
Writing the Visible

This is a major study of the Nobel prize-winning French novelist Claude Simon.

Celia Britton (Author)

9780521114578, Cambridge University Press

Paperback, published 25 June 2009

244 pages
21.6 x 14 x 1.4 cm, 0.31 kg

This is a major study of the Nobel prize-winning French novelist Claude Simon. Simon is a complex figure: for all that he writes in a distinctively modern fictional tradition (exemplified by Proust, Joyce, Beckett and Robbe-Grillet), his novels contain strong elements of visual representation alongside a very different king of free-floating, anti-realist writing. This combination and tension between vivd representation of experience and the free play of language is a focus of Dr Britton's book. She exposes the limitations of literary theory in dealing with Simon's novels and reveals how concepts from psychoanalysis can illuminate this problematic juxtaposition of vision and text.

Acknowledgements
Introduction
1. The theoretical context
2. Vision and textuality
3. The mirror and the letter: modalities of the subject
4. Words and pictures: the text and its other
5. The unseen and the unsaid
6. The invisibility of history
7. Fiction word by word
Notes
Bibliography
Index.

Subject Areas: Literary studies: fiction, novelists & prose writers [DSK]