Nouveau Roman

Nouveau Roman (“New Novel”), genre, also known as the anti-novel, produced by a group of post-World War II French writers who were reacting against the traditional novel and searching for new subject matter and new literary techniques. Prominent authors of the noveau roman include Claude Simon, Robert Pinget, Alain Robbe-Grillet, and Michel Butor. Their literary paths were marked out before the war by writers such as Samuel Beckett and Nathalie Sarraute, in whose works aspects of the conventional novel, such as characterization and chronological narrative, or the concept of transcendence, were absent, and the idea of literature as a moral or political force was under critical scrutiny.

The nouveau roman has been called objective literature: beyond meaning, beyond the absurd. The world is, and the task of the writer is to describe the appearance of things. In an effort to overcome established literary habits, they deliberately confounded and challenged the readers' expectations, avoiding any expression of the author's personality, values, or judgements. This is the best way, according to Robbe-Grillet, to serve the cause of freedom. The narrator stops being a deus ex machina, and becomes instead a kind of servant who conveys a universe by means of “a certain constant manner of utterance”, as Michel Foucault once defined the style.