Literary terrors: genealogies of twentieth-century French literary history
Maurice Blanchot Jean Paulhan Antonin Artaud Albert Camus Jean-Jacques Pauvert Alain Robbe-Grillet
Mouvements info, Aurore Turbiau, 26 novembre 2023
Review of: Perrine Coudurier, La Terreur dans la France litteraire des annees 1950 (1945-1962), Paris, Classiques Garnier, "Etudes de litterature des XXe et XXIe siecles" series, 2021, 786 p.
In La Terreur dans la France litteraire des annees 1950 - a work derived from her doctoral thesis defended in 2014 - Perrine Coudurier proposes an opening onto 20th-century literary history centered on the thematic and metaphysical question of evil and, as its corollary in literary theory, on the notion of terror.
Perrine Coudurier builds the ideological, formal, and thematic dialogue between the question of "evil" and that of "terror" as a structuring axis of literary theories that emerged throughout the 20th century. Her aim is to rethink what is sometimes too quickly called the "postwar novel," insofar as "literary history allows us to inscribe in the continuity of historical and literary crises the discontinuity of the major rupture of the Second World War" (p. 26): this project passes through a cross-portrait of different generations grappling with the same questions and writing at the same time.
Coudurier's study focuses mainly on the postwar period, from camp literature to the first Nouveau Roman: the period she covers runs from 1945 to 1962. In reality, however, the study takes root in the first decades of the century: it examines what forms "terror" after the Second World War by contrast with the "horror" of the first (pp. 10-11); it traces the careers of writers of the "1910 generation" - that is, born before the Great War - who became some of the "major names" of 1950s literature (p. 57); and it grounds the genealogy of the notion of terror, forged throughout the book, notably in Jean Paulhan's texts published in the late 1930s. The path retraced in La Terreur dans la France litteraire, articulated around the notion of "terror in letters" and its reverse, "rhetoric," thus runs from Stephane Mallarme and Arthur Rimbaud to Alain Robbe-Grillet and Nathalie Sarraute, by way of Georges Bataille, Franz Kafka, Jean Paulhan, Antonin Artaud, Maurice Blanchot, Roland Barthes, and Gerard Genette. This trajectory includes works by Jean-Paul Sartre, Alfred Camus, Simone de Beauvoir; it involves structuralist readings of the Nouveau Roman; but it places these moments of French literary history within the thread of an original inquiry, a genealogy parallel to those best known and most taught. More than a literary and ideological portrait of a literary moment, then, La Terreur dans la France litteraire des annees 1950 reads as a genealogical route, a rereading of 20th-century literary history through the prism of terror; open-ended, it invites extending the study beyond the limits to which it had to restrict itself.
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