M.A. / This study started off as a search for the factors that turn the French New Novel into unreadable, unenjoyable, difficult literature. The most obvious keyword that sprang to mind was “doubt”. This was the effect that we as a reader felt when reading the novels mentioned above. There is doubt in two areas: Firstly we doubt our own ability to comprehend, being fully aware that the French New Novel is enjoyed primarily by academics. Secondly we doubt the novelists’ ability to produce what we would call a conventional novel like those developed by novelists such as Balzac, Flaubert, Stendhal and Zola in the 19th century. The search for “doubt” in the New Novel was very fruitful. Although some critics are of the opinion that the novels of Robbe-Grillet are to a certain extent understandable, they all agree that the novels of both Sarraute and Robbe-Grillet are in essence difficult to read and inadequately develop the four basic ingredients of the conventional novel, which are: character, plot, setting and time. These four elements should, in the case of a realistic novel, reflect the reader’s reality in order to create the illusion of being real. Our study has shown that Robbe-Grillet’s development of character and description of setting do not convince the reader that they could be real. They are in fact so inadequate and incoherent that the reader struggles to reconstruct a realistic character from the bits of information provided. Robbe-Grillet further breaks all conventional rules of time and space and leaves the reader disoriented. Sarraute appears to have abandoned convention totally as she has completely done away with character and setting in her novel Ici. It requires a great effort from the reader to reconstruct the fleeting abstract conversations that make up her novel. Both Sarraute and Robbe-Grillet have provided works of criticism on their own ideas of the novel in which they clearly state that they broke away deliberately from the form and content of the 19th century novel in a quest for a new authentic novel. This study was further able to point out certain mechanisms that the authors use to create instability in their novels. The many incoherent pieces that make up these novels allow the reader to play at reassembling them and often this leads to interesting new discoveries. One of these discoveries is the simultaneous presence of two or three levels of text. Where the surface text normally contains the story line, here the surface is broken, allowing the reader to penetrate into a second level of text. Here we find the metatext where the text comments on itself. We show that the metatext in both these novels often talks about doubt and about the incoherent nature of their own text. We may thus also say that “doubt” is an important leitmotiv in these novels. We might say that the only real characters in Robbe-Grillet’s and Sarraute’s novels are the reader and the author between whom there is an active interplay, although it is a delayed interplay. The novel becomes a game much like a board game – an interactive playing field that differs with every reading. This is especially true for Sarraute whose reactions to the reader’s initial reactions to the text have been pre-programmed into the novel. The real setting is then this abstract intellectual playing field. However, the reader never reaches the point where he can say that he has successfully unlocked the mysteries of these novels. Any interpretation remains partial and is surrounded by doubt.

Yasmina Reza, auteur de théâtre français, reconnue dans le monde entier, a reçu les prix les plus prestigieux : trois Molières (FR), un Laurence Olivier Award (GB), deux Tony Award (USA), le Die Welt (All), pour ne citer qu’eux. En France, elle est encore souvent considérée comme un auteur à succès, n’offrant au public qu’une forme de théâtre de boulevard contemporain. L’étude précise des textes dramatiques de Yasmina Reza, de sa langue, de ses personnages et des structures de ses pièces, laisse apparaître sous le masque de la comédie une richesse et une complexité plus profondes. Elle met en scène des personnages bourgeois dont la vie se caractérise par une certaine facilité, tout en levant le voile sur des préoccupations métaphysiques universelles. Il s’agit toujours de la confrontation de l’homme avec le monde ou avec ses semblables. Cette pensée de l’individu inquiet s’accompagne dans la forme d’une réflexion sur le pouvoir de l’art dramatique. La caractérisation bourgeoise de son théâtre est autant un miroir tendu au public qu’un masque qui voile une interrogation permanente sur le sens de la vie et de l’art, dans la continuité du travail de l’avant-garde du milieu du XXe siècle dont elle se révèle être une relève inattendue. / The Famous French playwright Yasmina Reza received some of the most prestigious prices in the world : three Molières (FR), a Laurence Olivier Award (UK), two Tony Award (USA), a Die Welt (DE). Nevertheless, in France she is still considered as merely a successful author, with some kind of new farce to offer. A specific study of Yasmina Reza’s drama, including her language, her characters and the architecture of her plays, brings out other meaningful and complex colors from under the mask of comedy. She stages middle-class characters whose life is quite easy; in the meantime she reveals universal metaphysical issues. It is always about a clash between a person and the world or a person and his kind. This reflection about the anxious being goes on stage with a reconsideration of the power of theater. The middle-class characterization is a mirror for the audience as well as it is a mask that covers a constant questioning about the meaning of life and art, continuing the work of the avant-garde of the middle of the 20th century, of which she appears to be an unexpected new recruit.

In this study the theoretical notion of ekphrasis is analyzed in three novels by Nathalie Sarraute (1900-1999). Tropismes from 1939 is studied in the light of Ruth Webb’s analysis of ekphrasis as a rhetorical device used to persuade an audience in Antiquity. The study reveals several equivalents with the ancient notions of the rhetorical ekphrasis. In Entre la vie et la mort from 1968, we have found an expression of the tension described by Murray Krieger as fundamental to ekphrasis and consisting of the two opposing incentives of exhilaration and exasperation. Sarraute creates a constant textual oscillation between the two oppositional beliefs, and she leaves the question open were Krieger claims the incapacity of language. A tension continues to underlie the text in Ici from 1995. Audet and Marcotte (2012) define a tension between the one and the multiple expressed through the combination of narrative and poetic discourse. We have found an equivalent to this perspective in the theoretical framework elaborated by Tamar Yacobi, adding the concepts of narrative ekphrasis, the pictorial model and the generalized reference. The motivations and mechanisms of the generalized reference are compared to the discussion in Sarraute’s text. We find that Sarraute’s text adds several observations to the theory of Yacobi. Our conclusion is that the theoretical field of ekphrasis seems to be able to add a new dimension of observations when studying the work of Sarraute, but that more studies need to be done in order to find intersubjective affirmation considering the interpretative foundations of our method.

L’essai Mind the Gap porte sur les questions de la distance et de l’absence dans la narration de récits à la deuxième personne. Au coeur de ma réflexion se trouve L’absence, de Pierre Vadeboncoeur, un texte hybride, à la fois essai philosophique et lettre d’amour. La lecture de L’absence permet de mettre en lumière la relation qui apparaît entre Je et Tu dans deux oeuvres de statut et de forme bien différents, soit les récits Et tu n’es pas revenu par Marceline Loridan- Ivens et Enfance par Nathalie Sarraute. Dialogue à sens unique d’une part et dédoublement narratif d’autre part, les deux oeuvres mettent à l’épreuve certaines notions développées par Vadeboncoeur pour expliquer la dynamique particulière en jeu quand une narration est dirigée vers Tu, des notions inédites telles que l’être augmenté, l’empreinte et l’Ailleurs de l’écriture. S’adresser à l’autre en l’absence de, c’est transcender cette absence pour en faire une distance, pour se mettre en marche, pour s’engager à franchir le gap. L’enjeu de mon essai est de documenter ce dispositif de l’écart (entre narrateur et narrataire) et de son franchissement à la fois impossible et essentiel. Le bon chien est le récit fragmenté d’une narratrice qui s’adresse à celle qu’elle était bien des années plus tôt pour se remémorer leur passé commun dont elle croit s’être affranchie. C’est l’histoire d’une enfant sage et studieuse, d’une ballerine appliquée et travaillante, d’une amoureuse effacée, c’est l’histoire d’un bon chien. / Mind the Gap examines the issues of distance and absence in second person fiction. The analysis focuses on Pierre Vadeboncoeur’s L’absence, a hybrid text that is both a philosophical essay and a love letter. L’absence is used as a starting point to highlight the relationship between I and You in two works of fiction that are very different in form and status: Marceline Loridan- Ivens’s Et tu n’es pas revenu and Nathalie Sarraute’s Enfance. Part one-way dialogue, part split narrative, the two works challenge a set of novel concepts such as l’être augmenté (the enhanced being), l’empreinte (the imprint) and l’Ailleurs de l’écriture (the elsewhere of writing), developed by Vadeboncoeur to explain the unique dynamics of second person narratives. To address the other in the other's absence is to transcend that absence in order to create a distance instead and make a commitment to bridge the divide. This paper looks to explain how the distance between narrator and narratee is achieved and how closing that gap is both impossible and essential. Le bon chien is the fragmented story of a narrator who reminisces with her earlier self of many years back about a shared past that she believes she has freed herself from. It is the story of a well-behaved studious child, a dedicated hard-working ballerina, a faded lover—it is the story of a good dog.

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Cette recherche a pour titre Fonctionnement du triangle de la subjectivité intériorisée dans le roman moderne. Elle a pour but d’étudier la parole et les pensées intérieures du sujet de l’énonciation dans des œuvres romanesques souvent marquées par le décrochage et le "brouillage" des pistes énonciatives. Les trois procédés discursifs et narratifs ciblés sont le monologue intérieur (MI), le discours indirect libre (DIL) et le point de vue (PDV). L’examen des trois piliers du langage intérieur prend appuie sur les apports de la linguistique de l’énonciation, de la polyphonie et de la pragmatique. Cette recherche cible neuf œuvres romanesques que nous plaçons sous l’étiquette de "roman moderne". Ces romans appartiennent à trois auteurs français qui ont développé des récits dont la source locutrice et énonciatrice pose problème. La difficulté de traiter de l’énonciation romanesque dans un corpus choisi en l’occurrence est due essentiellement à l’effacement des frontières entre discours citant et discours cité. Marcel Proust, Claude Simon et Nathalie Sarraute n’appartiennent certes pas aux mêmes courants esthétiques et idéologiques, mais ils ont ceci de commun qu’ils offrent une configuration romanesque qui conduit à s’interroger sur le statut du locuteur et de l’énonciateur dans une forme d’expression qui n’est pas toujours verbalisée. / This research is entitled Functioning of the Triangle of Internalized Subjectivity in the Modern Novel. It aims at studying the speech and the inner thoughts of the subject of enunciation in fiction often marked by the "interference" in enunciation tracks. The three targeted discursive and narrative processes are internal monologue (MI), free indirect speech ( DIL) and the point of view (PDV) . The examination of the three pillars of the inner language relies on the contributions of linguistics of enunciation, of polyphony and pragmatic. This research targets nine novels that we can classify as belonging to the "modern novel" category. These novels belong to three French authors who have developed narratives in which the source of speaker and enunciator is a cause of ambiguity. The difficulty of dealing with the novelistic enunciation in a textual corpus chosen in this case is mainly due to the blurring of boundaries between reporting speech and reported speech. Marcel Proust, Claude Simon and Nathalie Sarraute do not belong to the same aesthetic and ideological trends, but what they have in common is that they all offer a novel configuration that makes us raise questions about the status of the speaker and the enunciator in a form of expression that is not always verbalized.