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

Reading: Alain Robbe-Grillet

In this audiovisual recording from Monday, March 22, 1982, as part of the 13th Annual UND Writers Conference: “International Writers,” Alain Robbe-Grillet reads from Djinn. Interpreted by Virgil Benoit. Introduced by Paul Schwartz