Claude Simon : a retrospective / edited by Jean H. Duffy and Alastair Duncan.

Format:

Book

Contributor:

Duffy, Jean H.

Duncan, Alastair B.

Series:

Liverpool Science Fiction Texts

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

French literature.

Simon, Claude--Criticism and interpretation.

Simon, Claude.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (viii, 232 pages) : digital, PDF file(s).

Edition:

1st ed.

Place of Publication:

Liverpool : Liverpool University Press, 2002.

Language Note:

English

Summary:

This collection of essays celebrates the work of the French Nobel prize-winning novelist Claude Simon. Scholars from France, Germany, the United States and the United Kingdom reconsider the fifty years of Simon's fiction in the light of his large-scale autobiographical novel Le Jardin des Plantes (1997). From a variety of perspectives - postmodernist, psychoanalytic, aesthetic - contributors reflect on the central paradox of Simon's work: his writing and rewriting of an experience of war so disruptive and traumatic that words can never be adequate to communicate it. The layers of artifice in Le Jardin des Plantes and the nature of Simon's aesthetic are analysed in essays which explore intertextual resonances between Simon and Proust, Flaubert, Borges and Poussin. A complementary view of Simon's Photographies 1937-1970 shows that it too can be seen as form of indirect autobiography.

Contents:

Title Page; Contents; Acknowledgments; Message from Claude Simon to the Participants at the Conference held in May 1999; Introduction: The Critical Reception of Claude Simon since the 1960's; 1: Thinking History Otherwise: Fiction and the Sites of Memory in Claude Simon; 2: (In)Commensurabilities: The Childhood of Events and the Shock of Encounter in Claude Simon; 3: Instant Replays: The Reintegration of Traumatic Experience in Le Jardin des Plantes; 4: The Dynamics of Conflict in the Novels of Claude Simon; 5: Satire, Burlesque and Comedy in Claude Simon

6: The Garden of Forking Paths: Intertextuality and Le Jardin des Plantes7: A partir du Jardin des Plantes: Claude Simon's Recapitulations; 8: Supplementary Organs: Media and Machinery in the Late Novels of Claude Simon; 9: One Step Further: Claude Simon's Photographies 1937-1970; 10: Truth, Verbiage and Ecriture in Le Jardin des Plantes; Bibliography; Notes on Contributors

Notes:

Title from publisher's bibliographic system (viewed on 07 Jul 2017).

Includes bibliographical references (p. [205]-230).

ISBN:

1-78138-049-X

1-84631-285-X

1-4175-6810-0

OCLC:

437241513