Nathalie Sarraute (1900-1999) was one of the seminal figures in the emergence of France's "Nouveau Roman" ("New Novel") in the 1950s. Her work included not only novels but also plays and influential e...
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Nathalie Sarraute is one of contemporary France's most important writers. In autumn 1987, at the age of eighty-seven, she was in the process of finishing her eleventh novel. The first ten have been tr...
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In the following essay, Watson-Williams provides a brief summary of Sarraute's L'Usage de la parole, commenting on the consistency of her thought, especially Sarraute's emphasis o...
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In the following essay, Miller analyses Sarraute's plays in the context of her other prose writing, calling attention to the relationship she creates between language and imaginative constructi...
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In the following essay, Barbour acknowledges that although many critics have attempted to read Sarraute's Tropismes as a feminist text, the work is ultimately a non-gender-specific text that is...
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In the following essay, Ramsay proposes that Sarraute's autobiographical sequel to Enfance, titled Tu ne t'aimes pas, continues the discussion she initiated in the first work about the n...
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In the following essay, Orr uses Sarraute's Le Planétarium to examine the role of satire and its interrogative role in literature.
French literature abounds with examples of satire as a ...
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In the following essay, Minogue discusses the challenges associated with staging Sarraute's theatrical works, which, the critic notes, although recognizable as human experience, are clearly not...
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In the following essay, Gratton writes that although Sarraute's Enfance has most often been cited as an example of a text that implements the poetics of fragmentation, this reading limits the p...
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In the following essay, Bell considers the use of endings in Sarraute's Enfance, comparing their use by Sarraute to the rest of the text.
Beginnings and endings are crucial elements of structur...
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In the following essay, Rothenberg concentrates on the similarities between Sarraute's prose and theatrical works, first outlining the differences between the two genres and then comparing two ...
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In the following essay, Rothenberg details the use of surface action in Sarraute's plays as a means through which she conveys theatrical depth, using these devices as metaphors that convey seve...
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In the following essay, Rothenberg reviews varying critical opinions regarding Sarraute's stance about the non-importance gender has in her writing, theorizing that despite the author's ...
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In the following essay, Van Slyke evaluates Enfance as a remarkable study of the relationship between language and identity.
What better place to study the connections between language and childhood e...
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In the following essay, David analyses two of Sarraute's texts using Melanie Klein's psychoanalytical theories regarding the role of aggression and envy in the behavior of children to de...
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In the following essay, Lee contends that the deathbed scene is used repeatedly and with consistency across all of Sarraute's work, offering fertile ground for tropismic exploration.
Je compren...
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In the following essay, Jefferson notes that despite the critical commentary Sarraute has provided on her own work, interpretations of her text vary widely, and are deeply influenced by the reader him...
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In the following essay, Willging compares the work of Sarraute to that of Sartre and notes the similarities between them.
Nathalie Sarraute would not have appreciated this essay, because in it I propo...
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Critical Essay by Denise Goitein
Clearly, the two paramount problems recurring throughout Nathalie Sarraute's writings are those of communication and of truth. And it is no accident and no surp...
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Critical Essay by Valerie Minogue
Portrait d'un Inconnu is a novel concerned with its own composition. It draws on many fields of imagery—notably biological and zoological—but it ...
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Critical Essay by John Mellors
For over forty years Nathalie Sarraute has been writing about 'tropisms', the name she has given to what lies underneath the words, gestures and facial exp...
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Critical Essay by Anne Kostelanetz [later Anne K. Mellor]
[The essay from which this excerpt is taken originally appeared in The Massachusetts Review in Autumn, 1963.]
Not since Henry James have the a...
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Critical Essay by A. Otten
Like Tropisms, [L'usage de la parole] is a collection of prose pieces and reconfirms that the "primary subject of writing" has been the object of [Natha...
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Critical Essay by Valerie Minogue
A glance at a page of Nathalie Sarraute's, with its quotation-marks, dashes, trails of dots, broken sentences, clusters of groping quasi-synonyms, and incomple...
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Critical Essay by Roger Shattuck
Essentially Mme. Sarraute seeks out the first tender shoots of our mental life—more evolved than the undifferentiated static that fluctuates during every living...
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Critical Essay by Stephen Koch
Sarraute has survived. Among other things, she has survived becoming outmoded, ever since the absolute, irremediable, and final obliteration of the nouveau roman (a phen...
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Critical Essay by Erika Munk
The astonishing thing about Nathalie Sarraute's Childhood is that it takes a style which for 30 years has been associated with the dissolution of character and narr...
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Critical Essay by Victor Brombert
The figure of the writer seems to occupy the center of Nathalie Sarraute's latest novel. The opening paragraph projects the image of a man typing, tearing out ...
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Critical Essay by David J. Dwyer
[The central character of Nathalie Sarraute's Between Life and Death] is a writer and her central concern is the "mere complexities, the fury and the mir...
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Critical Essay by Madeleine Wright
[Nathalie Sarraute's intention] seems to be to rule out—not arbitrarily but necessarily—most of the technical props which traditionally helped b...
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Critical Essay by A. Otten
Finally [in Théâtre] all of Nathalie Sarraute's plays—even the most recent—are available in one volume…. Together they form a drama...
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Critical Essay by Gretchen Rous Besser
Although Nathalie Sarraute may have been a precursor of the New Novel in many of its aims and methods, she has always held herself aloof from identification with...
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Critical Essay by Gretchen Rous Besser
The gathering of Nathalie Sarraute's plays into a single volume [Théâtre] allows the reader to note the emergence of certain patterns and th...
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Critical Essay by John Sturrock
[L'Usage de la parole] is a delectably austere, beady-eyed book, short and with no word roman or récits on the cover to say that it is fiction. Roman it i...
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Critical Essay by Gretchen Rous Besser
Almost reminiscent of the format of Tropismes, the individual pieces composing L'Usage de la parole are more abstract and more profound, less anchored to ...
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Nathalie Tcherniak Sarraute
Nathalie Sarraute
