"Outside, it is snowing": Experience and finitude in the nonrepresentational landscapes of Alain Robbe-Grillet

Copyright © 2008 PionRomanillos J L, 2008. The definitive, peer-reviewed and edited version of this article is published in Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 26(5) 795 – 822 DOI: 10.1068/d6207This paper presents and explicates the anonymous and impersonal spatialities tentatively mapped in the novels of Alain Robbe-Grillet. Emerging from the kinds of landscapes and visualities articulated, these spatialities are at odds with the kind of anthropocentrism characteristic of phenomenological narratives of spatial experience that would start from an apparently stable human-subject position. It is argued that his body of literature dismantles the anthropocentric narratives and biographies that would produce in both the space of the world and the ‘phenomenological subject’ an unwarranted depth and naturalism. Importantly, and reflecting the theoretical turn towards the being of language, Robbe-Grillet questions the legitimacy of linguistic subjects to capture the spaces of the visible. As such, it is argued that his literature reflects an experience of the critiques of phenomenology. Importantly, this ‘critique’ goes hand in hand with the kinds of spatialities and landscapes that are rendered in the novels—the indefinite perspectives they open up, the paradoxical visualities they sustain or deny, and the disorientation they inject into the heart of spatial experience. These literary effects produce a nonanthropocentric and nonpersonal spatiality which, although contributing to an erasure of the ‘subject’, at the same time expose and open up a sociospatiality based on singularities, intensities, and finitude

The Evolution of Notational Innovations from the Mobile Score to the Screen Score

This article examines the evolution of music notational practices from avant-garde-era experiments in ‘mobility’ to the advent of the digital ‘screen score’. It considers the varied goals of the composers who initiated these developments and the dissonance between these goals and the practical possibilities actually afforded by the paper score. The advent of graphical computing is charted along with the consequent expansion of possibilities afforded by screening the score from a platform that also provides the potential for performer coordination, sound synthesis and transformation. The performative, interactive and formal implications of these possibilities are considered

Table ronde. Le Nouveau Roman : passé, présent, futur

Les absents ont toujours tort et Jean Ricardou a dû en faire la douloureuse expérience à la suite de ce colloque-bilan intitulé « Three Decades of the French New Novel » qu’organise Tom Bishop avec Lois Oppenheim à l’université de New York du 30 septembre au 2 octobre 1982. Quoique physiquement absent, Ricardou se trouve pourtant au cœur de maints échanges pendant l’une des deux tables rondes de clôture qui réunit les romanciers Robert Pinget, Alain Robbe-Grillet, Nathalie Sarraute, Monique W..

Pleasure in Understanding, Pleasure in Not Understanding

This paper looks at Alain Resnais’ Last Year in Marienbad (1961) and Chris Marker’s La Jetée (1962). It rests on a premise of film as a constructed, ordered world that answers only to itself. Both films address particular questions about time: what happens to our anticipation of the future if we move back and forth in time reinventing our past and present? (Marienbad) or, can we escape our ruined present by moving into the future? (La Jetée). From Jacques Lacan, it borrows the concepts of the mirror stage by which we recognise ourselves, and of the objet petit a, the looking for which (both in terms of ‘search’ and ‘seeing’) is that from which we derive our pleasure. From Jean-Luc Nancy it adopts descriptions of how film touches us, and the careful orchestration of the pleasure that is jouissance in being within this moment, not knowing where we are going

The Influence of Manga on the Graphic Novel

This material has been published in The Cambridge History of the Graphic Novel edited by Jan Baetens, Hugo Frey, Stephen E. Tabachnick. This version is free to view and download for personal use only. Not for re-distribution, re-sale or use in derivative works. © Cambridge University PressProviding a range of cogent examples, this chapter describes the influences of the Manga genre of comics strip on the Graphic Novel genre, over the last 35 years, considering the functions of domestication, foreignisation and transmedia on readers, markets and forms