Nathalie Sarraute, Fiction and Theory
Questions of Difference

A major study of one of France's most distinguished twentieth-century novelists and theorists, first published in 2000.

Ann Jefferson (Author)

9780521772112, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 3 July 2000

232 pages
23.6 x 16 x 1.9 cm, 0.455 kg

'… innumerable insights and illuminations offered by this important book which no Sarraute scholar will want to be without.' Modern Language Review

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.

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.

Subject Areas: Literary studies: from c 1900 - [DSBH]