Claude Simon: A Retrospective
Jean H. Duffy and Alastair Duncan
Abstract
This book 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 — chapters 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 Plan ... More
This book 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 — chapters 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 analyzed in chapters 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.
Keywords:
Claude Simon,
Le Jardin des Plantes,
Photographies 1937–1970,
postmodernism,
psychoanalysis,
aesthetic,
intertextual resonances,
war
Bibliographic Information
| Print publication date: 2002 |
Print ISBN-13: 9780853238577 |
| Published to Liverpool Scholarship Online: May 2015 |
DOI:10.5949/liverpool/9780853238577.001.0001 |
