Claude Simon: Writing the Visible (Cambridge Studies in French)

This is a major study of the Nobel prize-winning French novelist Claude Simon. Simon is a complex figure: for all that he writes in a distinctively modern fictional tradition (exemplified by Proust, Joyce, Beckett and Robbe-Grillet), his novels contain strong elements of visual representation alongside a very different king of free-floating, anti-realist writing. This combination and tension between vivd representation of experience and the free play of language is a focus of Dr Britton's book. She exposes the limitations of literary theory in dealing with Simon's novels and reveals how concepts from psychoanalysis can illuminate this problematic juxtaposition of vision and text.