Nathalie Sarraute: Le pacte de lecture

Abstract

This study explores the various strategies used by the French writer Nathalie Sarraute, associated with the «Nouveaux Romanciers » in the middle of the twentieth century, in order to establish a contract between the author and her readers by systematically and explicitly inscribing the narrator and the narratee or the sender and the receiver in her text. One of the objectives of this contract is the enactment of a reading pedagogy whereby Sarraute leads her reader into the decoding of the text. The study examines 1) the two zones of «transaction » which inform the relationship between the author and the reader prior to the reading process: the paratext and the generic codes. 2) the narrative strategies that bind the narrator and the narratee in the text. 3) the demands made upon the reader in the process of reading and interpreting the text. This study uses a multidisciplinary approach which draws on key currents in the sociology of literature, such as Pierre Bourdieu's field theory and Alain Viala's sociopoetics, as well as in theories of narrative, i.e. narratology (Gérard Genette and Gerald Prince) and literary pragmatics (Dominique Maingueneau).