Dissertation

The Nouveau Roman in America

Libman, Benjamin

2025

Overview

This dissertation examines the transatlantic reception and adaptation of the Nouveau Roman in the American literary field, tracing the mechanisms by which its theoretical and aesthetic principles were misunderstood, transformed, and ultimately integrated into American literary culture. It introduces the concept of structural misunderstanding to account for the ways in which literary ideas, when transferred across national and cultural contexts, are necessarily reshaped by the positions available in the receiving field. With an emphasis on the years between 1950 and the end of the 1970s—a period marked by widespread debates about the \"death of the novel\" in the United States—this study explores how American critics, novelists, and publishers engaged with nouveaux romanciers, including Alain Robbe-Grillet, Nathalie Sarraute, and Michel Butor. It argues that figures such as Susan Sontag and Gore Vidal played key roles in framing the movement within the American literary discourse, either championing or resisting its experimental formalism. Through a comparative analysis of Samuel Beckett and Paul Auster, the dissertation further demonstrates how nouveau romanesque techniques were absorbed into the American postmodern detective novel, particularly in relation to self-reflexivity, structural play, and the destabilization of narrative authority. Additionally, this study highlights the role of publishing institutions, particularly Grove Press, in mediating the introduction of the Nouveau Roman to the American readership. It contends that the countercultural climate of the 1960s facilitated the movement's reception, as American intellectuals sought literary models that could offer an alternative to both traditional realism and the emergent mass culture of the paperback boom. By analyzing the intersection of literary theory, publishing practices, and critical discourse, this dissertation provides a new framework for understanding the cross-cultural mobility of avant-garde literary movements and their impact on the evolution of the novel in the United States. At a high level, this project claims that American literature may never have been organically \"postmodern,\" and that it may, instead, have imported and remixed an existing strain of modernism from France in order to reinvigorate its domestic, literary experimentalism.

• Publisher: ProQuest Dissertations & Theses
• Subject: American literature / Beckett, Samuel (1906-1989) / Bourdieu, Pierre (1930-2002) / Novels / Political science / Politics / Robbe-Grillet, Alain (1922-2008) / Sontag, Susan (1933-2004) / Vidal, Gore (1925-2012)
• ISBN: 9798265428431