nouveau roman

views updated May 18 2018

nouveau roman (Fr. ‘new novel’) Experimental fictional form. Pioneered by Alain Robbe-Grillet, Samuel Beckett, and Nathalie Sarraute during the 1950s, it drew on the writings of Franz Kafka and James Joyce, and the techniques of film-making. It is characterized by meticulously detailed description, the avoidance of value judgments, and a consciousness of the artificiality of time sequences.

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