Robbe-Grillet and Modernity : Science, Sexuality, and Subversion

Featuring two first-person interviews with the major contemporary French man of letters, this work investigates the relationships between Alain Robbe-Grillet’s experimental writing (novels, picto-novels, auto-fictions, films, and essays) and developments in a number of fields of contemporary inquiry – new sciences (quantum mechanics, chaos theory, and contemporary biology, among others), poststructuralism, psychoanalysis, and feminism. Bringing together the ghosts in the apparently contradictory pair of science and sexuality, Ramsay suggests a connection between concepts of the world as complementary and chaotic and the sado-erotic character of Robbe-Grillet’s work. At this intersection, she argues, the analogy sheds light on both the obsessive nature of Robbe-Grillet’s metaphors and on the troubling presence of sexual violence in postmodern texts.