| Ever since its emergence in the romantic period as a viable literary genre, the novel has prompted critical discussion of its nature and purpose. In this discussion, the writing process itself is at the center of an attempt by key French and German novelists since the 1950s to create a "new" novel which, instead of telling a story, tells about the process of telling. Its language challenges the conventions of the traditional novel. The creators of these new novels, calling themselves "writers" rather than "novelists", self-consciously imply that their subject is not the story but the act of writing itself.;This study examines the representative novels of two German and three French among these contemporary writers--Peter Handke, Uwe Johnson, J. M. G. Le Clezio, Alain Robbe-Grillet and Philippe Sollers--and explores the impact of their ideas about language on their fiction. Through an explication de texte, the study demonstrates that these writers destroy the traditional novel in order to offer a new future: a novel about how we see life by making novels.;The first section examines the use of sets of specific figures of speech by these writers. It shows how these figures of speech raise to visibility the gap between reality and language as the means of destroying the signature of the traditional novel, the mimetic illusion.;The second section examines the novels' range of possible meanings by investigating the interaction between their titles and their contents. It shows this interaction to establish a new relationship between reality and language without hiding language's inadequacy to express reality.;The study concludes that the five authors use the story as a search process aiming at giving language a new adequacy. In their attempt to create a "new" novel, they try to reach a new language, one founded neither on representation nor explanation, but on difference and disparity. |
