Here David Ellison explores the problems encountered by France's best experimental authors writing between 1956 and 1984, when faced with the question: "What should my writing be about?" These years are characterized by the rise of the "new novelists," who questioned the representational function of writing as they created works of imagination that turned in upon themselves and away from exterior reality. It became fashionable at one point to affirm that literature was no longer about the world but uniquely about the words on a page, the signifying surface of the text. Ellison tests this assumption, showing that even in the most seemingly self-referential fictions the words point to the world from which they can never completely separate themselves. Through close readings Ellison examines the novels and theoretical writings of authors whose works are fundamental to our perception of contemporary French writing and thought: Camus, Robbe-Grillet, Simon, Duras, Sarraute, Blanchot, and Beckett. The result is a new understanding of the link between the referential function of literary language and the problematic of the ethics of fiction.

With this collection of subversive essays, Jacques Derrida exploded onto the scene of post-modern philosophy in Europe and the US though he didn't have a doctorate or teaching position at the time. In it, he demonstrates for the first time his conception of `deconstruction,' an apparently inexplicable concept which enables the analysis of `inter-textuality' and `binary-oppositions,' to be revealed. `Writing and Difference,' is of course a difficult text, and analytic philosophers don't even bother with it, though that may be their greatest mistake, for Derrida attempts (and not without success) to demonstrate that the notion of purely objective, enlightened truth seeking is an impossibility. That the essence of thought always operates within a given schema, a given facticity. "Differance," the famous phrase of Derrida, indicates that writing is necessarily primary to speech, we can see the `differ a nce' in text, not phonetically.

Foster Hirsch is Associate Professor of English and Film at Brooklyn College. He has written numerous articles for the New York Times, the Nation, The New Republic and many other publications. He is also the author of several books on film and literature, including studies of Edward Albee, George Kelly, Laureuce Olivier, and the Epic Film.

This volume strives to cover those works most often found in high-school and undergraduate literature courses. Entries fall into one of four categories: biographical articles on novelists; plot synopses for selected novels; literary terms and genres (e.g., Feminism, Surrealism); and historical events (e.g., French Revolution) that influenced novelists writing in French. The first two categories account for the overwhelming majority of entries. Although well-known authors such as Balzac, Flaubert, and Proust are here, so, too, are contemporary novelists such as Raphael Confiant, Assia Djebar, and Antonine Maillet, hailing from Martinique, Algeria, and Canada, respectively.