Changing perspectives: France's post-war laureates and the Nobel Prize for Literature. (November 2017)

• Record Type: Journal Article
• Authors: Weston-Evans, Phoebe; Nettelbeck, Colin
• Is Part Of: French cultural studies. Volume 28:Number 4(2017)
• Page Start: 399
• Page End: 414
• Publication Date: 2017-11
• Subjects: French Nobel Literature laureates -- literary prizes -- national/international/transnational tensions -- Nobel Prize for Literature -- post-World War II literary history; France -- Civilization -- 1945- -- Periodicals; 306.094405
• DOI: 10.1177/0957155817721679
• Languages: English
• ISSNs: 0957-1558

Abstract

This article identifies and examines the largely overlooked corpus of the introductory and acceptance speeches relating to the French Nobel Literature Prize laureates in the post-World War II period. Following a broadly chronological development, it illuminates the tensions between the national and the international perspectives inherent in the process, analysing how individual laureates negotiate their creative trajectories within a longer-term historical shift towards a transnational literary paradigm. Within that context of a changing ethos, the war experience itself is shown to be of pervasive and persistent importance, informing both the writers' construction of their imaginary worlds, and the reception/perception of those worlds within the Nobel framework. Such special problems as Sartre's attempted refusal of the prize and Beckett's ambiguous national identity are used to propose a different viewpoint on France's recent literary history, from the era of Gide and Mauriac to the more contemporary one of Simon, Le Clézio and Modiano.