French New Novel Concept Of Time

With some remarkable names and brilliant works, the theme of time plays an important role in western literature in the 20th century. Numerous literary works show their authors' special concern on the question of time in different way. Among all the works the French novelist Marcel Proust's A la recherche du temps perdu is a representative one. Modern novels brought time which is the most basic life experience of human being to a highlight, so did the fields of art and philosophy. This trend shows the fundamental characteristics of modernity, and offers an important clue for us to understand modern novels at the same time.For the above-mentioned reasons, this paper will launch a study to the French new novel from the angle of time, and try to probe into these questions such as ideology, social significance and literary value of it from this unique angle. The new novel has brought a far-reaching impact to modern western literature by subverting the traditional realism novel from inside with innovation on structure, techniques and language. It hence brought forth to a lot of works with diversified styles and strong experimental taste. Through the observation of the new novel's concept of time we can see more clearly that it has fully shown the pluralism trend of the modern novel with its vanguardism and diversity.As one of important culture phenomena, the new novel ties together with the trend of modernism closely. The new novel with the time as itsfocus nearly concentrates all the most typical modern culture characteristics. Denying the spacial and objective time is the starting point of the new novel. The transition of the concept of time has brought us a completely different way of "viewing the world". In the name of truer one, the novelist puts forth effort to build up a kind of pure and subjective inner time, which integrates imagination, remembrance, illusions, dreams into an organic whole and mixes up the past, now and future together. The subversion of the order of time means the collapse of the rational order and the disintegration of necessary connection of causes and results between things. Life is full of innumerable contingency and possibility, so the world represents itself like a magic maze.Considering the particularity of the question of time, this paper will make a theoretical explanation to the new novel's concept of time on the base of contemporary philosophy through observing the philosophy of time of modern thinkers, such as Martin Heidegger, Jean-Francois Lyotard, etc. Some other modern works will be discussed while probing into the concrete problems like "time of discourse". If the research of time on the new novel is a successful one then this kind of research will make contribution to the study of time for western modern novels. That would be my original wish.