In this course, we will study several francophone novelists' responses to the dominant political and scientific interpretations of "literature" during the postwar period. Those interpretations were associated with Sartre's call for politcal commitment (engagement) and structuralist theories of culture, more or less inspired by Lévi-Strauss. Each in its own way, these two interpretative systems subordinated literature to their own (political, scientific) ends. The debates sparked by Sartre and Lévi-Strauss would last for decades and extend beyond the borders of metropolitan France. Our course will ask: How did novelists navigate between the competing claims that politics and science laid on literature?

We will study a group of authors who took up this challenge by producing a "double corpus" composed of novels (or narratives) and essays. These texts belong to diverse movements that span a half-century and several continents: the Nouveau Roman, semiotic theory, and decolonial, postcolonial, and feminist literatures. At the same time, the writers and their work were linked to one another through a web of intertextual reference and collaborations.

One of these works' central preoccupations was the autonomy of literature as a discipline. The course proposes that their double corpus sought to "protect" the literary field from scientific and political incursions. As we read, we will ask: How did the mixture of novel and essay permit our authors to contest the epistemological claims of the sciences and to propose countermodels of knowledge? Did this mixture help them articulate a rejection of engagement or to rearticulate the latter in another form? Finally, how can we understand the relationship between a given writer's novels and essays? Is a general theory of the "double corpus" during the postwar period possible?

Authors: Nathalie Sarraute, Alain Robbe-Grillet, Roland Barthes, Hubert Aquin, Yambo Ouologuem, Monique Wittig, Nicole Brossard.

The course privileges close reading of essays and novels by our authors, but we will occasionally look at supplementary historiographic or critical work.

All readings in French, except those written in English. Discussions and work in French
or English, according to student interest.