Robbe-Grillet and Modernity: Science, Sexuality, and Subversion

by Raylene L. Ramsay

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Featuring two first-person interviews with the major contemporary French man of letters, this work investigates the relationships between Alain Robbe-Grillet's experimental writing (novels, picto-novels, auto-fictions, films, and essays) and developments in a number of fields of contemporary inquiry - new sciences (quantum mechanics, chaos theory, and contemporary biology, among others), poststructuralism, psychoanalysis, and feminism. Bringing together ""the ghosts in the apparently contradictory pair of science and sexuality"", Ramsay suggests a connection between concepts of the world as ""complementary"" and ""chaotic"" and the sado-erotic character of Robbe-Grillet's work. At this intersection, she argues, the analogy sheds light on both the obsessive nature of Robbe-Grillet's metaphors and on the troubling presence of sexual violence in postmodern texts. Ready-made language and myth imprison all writers (and readers), she says, insisting that Robbe-Grillet is the conscious prisoner of his fantasies. She describes his creative work as a perilous personal adventure through ""the turbulent zones of the unknown and the aleatory, an unblinking look at the unseen ""chaos"" in the world and the blind monsters in the self"". At the least, she says, his journey through history, human time, and desire is the text of his own life.
  • ISBN10 0813020204
  • ISBN13 9780813020204
  • Publish Date 14 May 2014 (first published 20 October 1992)
  • Publish Status Active
  • Publish Country US
  • Imprint University Press of Florida
  • Format eBook
  • Pages 311
  • Language English