Post-War Experimental Novel

Andrew Hodgson is Postdoctoral Teaching and Research Fellow in British Literature, Université Paris Est, France and Associate Doctor in Comparative Literature at École Normale Supérieure de Lyon, France.

• PrefacePartition One – Motive: the sense something is missing1.1 A critical moment - opening a space of discourseCritical climate - historicA wound in cultural historyCritical climate - currentAttempting to access a point in the past as a synchronic, ‘lived-in’ space1.2 On the literature of this studyNationality, experience and social relationOn the post-war experimental novel as an ‘avant-garde realism’Social engagement and the experimental novelTo plot this further in the post-war1.3 Conflicts in cultural productionContemporaneous cultural climateDominant literature as societal ‘normaliser’‘Reactionary’ VranceCase in pointThe predicament of cultural refusal1.4 Historical contextsWriting out of the 1945 eventThe new ‘new’1968 as performative re-adhesionThe old new veneerEra as here presentedPartition Two – Diagnoses: the confused narrative of the post-war human2.1 The sense something is missingA mimesis of violent stupefactionImpossible confrontationsThe act of forgettingSorge and the continuity humanCycling violence2.2 Communal supplication, individual terraformingDepictions of communal, quotidian lifeCharacterisation of an immersive object spaceThe peripherals assert themselvesThe representative unstable selfTo follow the thread of an insane normPartition Three – Treatment: breaking down within the horizon of the real3.1 Creating space in textZa - UmErgodic engagementSpatial multiplicityOpen signifiers3.2 Babel, babble, xenoglossia and private languageGlossolaliaÉcrits bruts and the experimental novelQonestsansLanguage as structural reality referentSlang, idiom, argotiqueSynchronicities in the published/unpublished work3.3 Cut, shuffle, re-align, re-defineNo lie junkLiberating the pageHysterical mimesisThe response-ible readerShuffle

Andrew Hodgson’s The Post-War Experimental Novel brings much needed visibility to a body of work too often historicized as a literary dead zone between the monoliths of modernism and postmodernism.