Alain Robbe-Grillet's Les Gommes, Michel Butor's L'Emploi du temps as well as Claude Simon's La Bataille de Pharsale are all New Novels in which Greek and Latin "mythemes" play various roles in the reception of the text by its reader. These roles represent our object of study. As a result of the possibilities and, more specifically, the many difficulties involved in reconstructing the original mythological plot, the reader realizes that the mythemes form a sort of "secondary plot" which both reflects the "first plot" (the novel's narrative) and determines its complexity. In this way, the mythemes guarantee a certain balance in the reader's level of understanding. However, they still bring out important problems: for example, they contribute to the redefining of certain familiar classical concepts and to the production of manifold interpretative choices. It follows that the mythemes are instrumental in making the reader the privileged spectator of the reconstruction of the horizon of expectations.

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