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A. Hodgson, The Post-War Experimental Novel: British and French Fiction, 1945-75 

A. Hodgson, The Post-War Experimental Novel: British and French Fiction, 1945-75

Publié le par Vincent Ferré (Source : Andrew Hodgson)

Hodgson, Andrew, The Post-War Experimental Novel: British and French Fiction, 1945-75 

London: Bloomsbury, 2019

224 p. — ISBN: 9781350076846

 

Delving into how the traumatic experience of the Second World War formed – or perhaps malformed – the post-war experimental novel, this book explores how the symbolic violence of post-war normalization warped societies' perception of reality. Andrew Hodgson explores how the novel was used by authors to attempt to communicate in such a climate, building a memorial space that has been omitted from literatures and societies of the post-war period. Hodgson investigates this space as it is portrayed in experimental modern British and French fiction, considering themes of amnesia, myopia, delusion and dementia. Such themes are constantly referred back to and posit in narrative a motive for the very broken forms these books often take – books in boxes; of spare pages to be shuffled at the reader's will; with holes in pages; missing whole sections of the alphabet; or books written and then entirely scrubbed out in smudged black ink. 

Covering the works of B. S. Johnson, Ann Quin, Georges Perec, Roland Topor, Raymond Queneau and others, Andrew Hodgson shows that there is method to the madness of experimental fiction and legitimizes the form as a prominent presence within a wider literary and historical movement in European and American avant-garde literatures.

 

Table of contents

Preface
Partition One – Motive: the sense something is missing
1.1 A critical moment - opening a space of discourse
Critical climate - historic
A wound in cultural history
Critical climate - current
Attempting to access a point in the past as a synchronic, 'lived-in' space
1.2 On the literature of this study
Nationality, experience and social relation
On the post-war experimental novel as an 'avant-garde realism'
Social engagement and the experimental novel
To plot this further in the post-war
1.3 Conflicts in cultural production
Contemporaneous cultural climate
Dominant literature as societal 'normaliser'
'Reactionary' Vrance
Case in point
The predicament of cultural refusal
1.4 Historical contexts
Writing out of the 1945 event
The new 'new'
1968 as performative re-adhesion
The old new veneer
Era as here presented
Partition Two – Diagnoses: the confused narrative of the post-war human
2.1 The sense something is missing
A mimesis of violent stupefaction
Impossible confrontations
The act of forgetting
Sorge and the continuity human
Cycling violence
2.2 Communal supplication, individual terraforming
Depictions of communal, quotidian life
Characterisation of an immersive object space
The peripherals assert themselves
The representative unstable self
To follow the thread of an insane norm
Partition Three – Treatment: breaking down within the horizon of the real
3.1 Creating space in text
Za - Um
Ergodic engagement
Spatial multiplicity
Open signifiers
3.2 Babel, babble, xenoglossia and private language
Glossolalia
Écrits bruts and the experimental novel
Qonestsans
Language as structural reality referent
Slang, idiom, argotique
Synchronicities in the published/unpublished work
3.3 Cut, shuffle, re-align, re-define
No lie junk
Liberating the page
Hysterical mimesis
The response-ible reader
Shuffle