Antinovel

? Are anti-novel and Nouveau roman the same thing? Merge or create?

An antinovel is any experimental work of fiction that avoids the familiar conventions of the novel. The term was coined by the French philosopher and critic Jean-Paul Sartre.

The antinovel usually fragments and distorts the experience of its characters, forcing the reader to construct the reality of the story from a disordered narrative.

New References/Starting points to fact check...: About Nathalie Sarraute's novels: "Sometimes termed antinovels, they are stripped of the traditional elements of plot, characterization, and chronology and instead focus upon psychological preoccupations, giving subconscious impulses surrealistic and analytic treatment." Columbia Electronic Encyclopedia, 6th Edition; 10/1/2009, p1-1, 1p.

The term anti-novel came into vogue in the late fifties to describe those works which oppose, parody, or in some way attempt to transcend the form and content of the novel. According to M.H. Abrams, an anti-novel is: [A] work which is deliberately constructed in a negative fashion relying for its effects on omitting or annihilating traditional elements of the novel, and on playing against the expectations established in the reader by the novelistic methods and conventions of the past. (122)The term is usually associated with examples of the new novel, the modern novel, and the postmodern novel. http://elab.eserver.org/hfl0167.html

a work of prose fiction in which such characteristics of the traditional novel as character development, the realistic description of society, and, esp., a clearly developed narrative are deliberately de-emphasized or rejected. Etymology: transl. of Fr antiroman, term coined by Jean-Paul Sartre. http://www.yourdictionary.com/antinovel

Date: 1958 : a work of fiction that lacks most or all of the traditional features of the novel. http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/antinovel

BLOG: French novelist, essayist, and screenplay writer, Alain Robbe-Grillet (1922-2008) is regarded as the father of the 1950s antinovel, a genre in which time, place, and point of view are generally disregarded in an attempt to capture a more basic reality than that expressed through conventional fictional techniques. For Robbe-Grillet the essential fact of experience was the way the mind fastens onto particular scenes and objects, an obsessiveness that he conveys through minute attention to visual details. In his novels he presents a view of the world as if the narrator were a filmmaker simply capturing images.

The anti-novel, you say, is known as the "new novel"/Robbe-Grillet. But the anti-novel, in terms of time distortion, existed long before Robbe Grillet. It began with Sterne's Tristram Shandy. Robbe Grillet, at best, offers a variety of the anti-novel (i.e. the novel that advances via a linear time narrative and follows Aristotle's concept of the 3 unities). He isn't the anti-novel. Also, Marechera wrote novels with simple time schemes, but his work is way outside the normal definition of "novel". The anti-novel, if it exists, a rare beast, is not defined by multiple perspectives as in Robbe Grillet.

Many years ago, the critic Frank Kermode wrote a fascinating book on time in the novel. He saw how some novels precede with linear time, others have distorted narratives in which time spirals. These novels, as I remember, sought epiphanies, moments when time made sense and brought revelation. Golding's "Free Fall" is a magnificent version of this idea. Time shifts continually,as the narrator, Samuel Mountjoy, searches for the moment when he lost his freedom in life, when he experienced his own (biblical) Fall. The novel is a distorting mirror, bending reality, so here is one anti-novel, in my view. I'm glad I gave you food for thought

-) You are always great to debate with.

anti‐novel, a form of experimental fiction that dispenses with certain traditional elements of novel‐writing like the analysis of characters' states of mind or the unfolding of a sequential plot. The term is usually associated with the French nouveau roman of Alain Robbe‐Grillet, Nathalie Sarraute, and Michel Butor in the 1950s, but has since been extended to include other kinds of fictional experiment that disrupt conventional narrative expectations, as in some works in English by Flann O'Brien, Vladimir Nabokov, B. S. Johnson, and Christine Brooke‐Rose. Antecedents of the anti‐novel can be found in the blank pages and comically self‐defeating digressions of Sterne's Tristram Shandy (1759–67) and in some of the innovations of modernism, like the absence of narration in Virginia Woolf's The Waves (1931). http://www.answers.com/topic/anti-novel

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Antinovel

See also