Écrire le réel par le détail : La question de la figure chez Nathalie Sarraute et Robert Bresson
Writing the real through detail: The question of the figura in Nathalie Sarraute’s and Robert Bresson’s work

Summary/Abstract: Although Robert Bresson’s cinematic work and Nathalie Sarraute’s literary work seem irreconcilable in thematic and material terms, it is precisely through a negative approach that they come together. In other words, they share what they reject –“the surplus”, “what is not yet assimilated” nor “directly figurable”. This essay will explore the various declensions of the term figura, in order to approach the theoretical writings of Bresson and Sarraute, as well as their artistic work. Thus, figura becomes the physical material for modelling – corporeal and gestural– but also the stylistic material – whose form can be textual-discursive and filmic. In this way, the aesthetics of the fragment and the attention paid to details of Bresson and Sarraute’s tableaux –made up of pieces of gesture, bodies and discourse – denarrativizestories and images, while steering narration towards the filmic and textual hors-champ, the space of the Real that brings possibility to the surface.

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