"Nathalie Sarraute, Fiction and Theory: Questions of Difference" by Ann Jefferson

Nathalie Sarraute, who died in 1999, is now regarded as one of the major French novelists of the twentieth century. In this major new study of Sarraute, Ann Jefferson offers a fresh perspective on Sarraute’s oeuvre – her novels, her outstanding autobiography Enfance and her influential critical writings – by focusing on the crucial issue of difference which emerges as one of her central preoccupations.


Drawing on a variety of critical approaches, Jefferson explores Sarraute’s fundamental ambivalence towards differences of various kinds including questions of gender and genre. She argues that difference is simultaneously asserted and denied in Sarraute’s work, and that the notion of difference, so often celebrated by other writers and thinkers, is shown in Sarraute’s work to be inseparable from ambiguity and anxiety.

Contents
Acknowledgements
List of abbreviations
Introduction
I. DIFFERENCE AND HUMAN RELATIONS
1 Difference and dissension
‘Differences’ and ‘différends’
Difference denied
Beyond compare
2 Subjectivity and indistinction
Self and other
Differential systems
3 Abjection into art
Abjection
Words
Scenes of narration
Art
II. THE BODY AND SEXUAL DIFFERENCE
4 Minds, bodies and the new unanimism
Psychology
Representation
Writing
5 Sexual indifference
Women, human beings and writing
Gender and the gaze
Women writers
Identification
6 Criticism and ‘the terrible desire to establish contact’
Generic differences
Authority, heresy and reading
Strategies for contact
Criticism and/ as fiction
7 Same difference: reprise and variation
Fiction and autobiography
Variations: repetitions and difference
Internal breaches
IV CONCLUSION
Death and the impossible difference
Notes
Bibliography
Index