Experimental literary form produced in the 1950s by French novelists including Alain Robbe-Grillet and Nathalie Sarraute. In various ways, these writers seek to eliminate character, plot, and authorial subjectivity in order to present the world as a pure, solid thing in itself.
Robbe-Grillet's
Le Voyeur 1955 and Sarraute's
Le Planetarium 1959 are critically successful examples. Michel Butor, Claude Ollier, and Marguerite Duras also contributed to this form, which is sometimes labelled the anti-novel because of its subversion of traditional methods.
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