Everyday Life and Experimental Fiction in France, 1957–1966: A Literary-Conceptual History
type: CreativeWork
description: This thesis argues that experiments with the novel in postwar France configured everyday life as a ground of human existence and a resource for ethical enquiry. If novelistic innovation in the 1950s and 1960s has been typically associated with a turn away from lived experience and history, I argue that experimental novels by Michel Butor, Georges Perec, Nathalie Sarraute, and Marguerite Duras open the everyday lifeworld as a site where ethical questioning encounters the historical process. Each chapter pursues a close reading of a novel in relation to developments in twentieth-century history and contemporaneous theorizations of everydayness. Michel Butor’s *La Modification* (1957) presents a train journey as a figure through which to relate higher moments of experience to the run of everyday repetition: a diurnalization of the Sartrean *projet* that works as a supplement to Henri Lefebvre’s theory of *moments*. The protagonists of Georges Perec’s *Les Choses* (1965) experience a slide out of everyday practice caused by a surfeit of mimesis under conditions of aesthetic capitalism. While this movement illustrates Maurice Blanchot’s insistence on the escapism of the everyday, the text holds out, *contra* Blanchot, a potential alliance between mimesis and practice, which, in turn, reworks the valorization of asceticism implied by the text’s ironic presentation of consumer culture. If Butor and Perec thus relate everyday life to an *art de vivre*, inviting the reader to appropriate the texts in a process of self-fashioning, Nathalie Sarraute’s *Le Planétarium* (1959) and Marguerite Duras’s *Le Vice-Consul* (1966) instead approach the everyday from the fact of suffering and in the thick of coexistence. The negative tenor of *Le Planétarium* speaks to Stanley Cavell’s insistence that any vision of human betterment must start from the harms that are dealt in ordinary situations. However, the text insistently contests Cavell’s concept of human separateness, bringing his no…
abstract: This thesis argues that experiments with the novel in postwar France configured everyday life as a ground of human existence and a resource for ethical enquiry. If novelistic innovation in the 1950s and 1960s has been typically associated with a turn away from lived experience and history, I argue that experimental novels by Michel Butor, Georges Perec, Nathalie Sarraute, and Marguerite Duras open the everyday lifeworld as a site where ethical questioning encounters the historical process. Each chapter pursues a close reading of a novel in relation to developments in twentieth-century history and contemporaneous theorizations of everydayness. Michel Butor’s *La Modification* (1957) presents a train journey as a figure through which to relate higher moments of experience to the run of everyday repetition: a diurnalization of the Sartrean *projet* that works as a supplement to Henri Lefebvre’s theory of *moments*. The protagonists of Georges Perec’s *Les Choses* (1965) experience a slide out of everyday practice caused by a surfeit of mimesis under conditions of aesthetic capitalism. While this movement illustrates Maurice Blanchot’s insistence on the escapism of the everyday, the text holds out, *contra* Blanchot, a potential alliance between mimesis and practice, which, in turn, reworks the valorization of asceticism implied by the text’s ironic presentation of consumer culture. If Butor and Perec thus relate everyday life to an *art de vivre*, inviting the reader to appropriate the texts in a process of self-fashioning, Nathalie Sarraute’s *Le Planétarium* (1959) and Marguerite Duras’s *Le Vice-Consul* (1966) instead approach the everyday from the fact of suffering and in the thick of coexistence. The negative tenor of *Le Planétarium* speaks to Stanley Cavell’s insistence that any vision of human betterment must start from the harms that are dealt in ordinary situations. However, the text insistently contests Cavell’s concept of human separateness, bringing his no…
author: Ewing, David
language: eng
keywords: conceptual history, ethics, everyday life, late modernism, literary phenomenology, Nouveau Roman, postwar France
license: https://apollo8-f-pro.lib.cam.ac.uk/bitstreams/598e6386-cddb-4140-9455-bde789283bd8/download
license: https://www.rioxx.net/licenses/all-rights-reserved/
date published: 2023-09-21
date modified: 2026-07-22T22:24:17Z
provider: Cambridge University
publisher: Networked Digital Library of Theses and Dissertations
type: WebPage
source organization: University of Cambridge

PropertyValue
property ID: DOI
value: 10.17863/CAM.110007