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Abstract
During the last quarter of a century, an innovative group of writers has staked out a distinct yet varied territory for itself in the field of French literature. In this new landscape, Jean-Philippe Toussaint has distinguished himself as a pioneering and an enduring figure. His first novel, La Salle de bain (1985), was a commercial and critical success, selling 80,000 copies during its first year of publication and provoking critics to speak of a nouvelle école de Minuit and a nouveau ‘nouveau roman.’ Since this auspicious debut, Toussaint has remained one of the most critically acclaimed contemporary novelists published in France. He is also an accomplished cinematographer and photographer.
While scholars have paid considerable attention to Toussaint's writing, no manuscript has been published in either French or English that provides a sustained examination of his production. “Novel Intimacies” aims to fill this lacuna, taking as its point of departure Toussaint's conceptualization of literature as “an intimate exchange between two human beings” (“You Are Leaving the American Sector” 323) and asking how Toussaint's own production resonates with this characterization. The dissertation examines how Toussaint renews the French novel by engaging the problematic of intimacy in novel ways. Toussaint's narratives position fictional worlds in which intimacy is limited and problematic against formal practices that ask the reader to engage intimately with the texts. In so doing, they make a compelling argument for the viability of the novel as cultural form, suggesting that its power today lies in its potential not only to illuminate but also to mitigate the contemporary paradox that connecting intimately with others remains elusive in an age of hyper-mobility and hyper-connectivity.
Intimacy has long played a key role in literature, speaking to one of our most basic needs as human beings. Toussaint's production not only sheds light on a few of the complexities and ambiguities of intimacy, it also insists that art itself is an “intimate exchange,” an idea that Toussaint mobilizes in his renewal of the novel as cultural form.
