Robbe-Grillet in America: The Nouveau Roman Meets the Language Textbook

In this talk, Sara Kippur, associate professor of French and chair of the Department of Language & Culture Studies at Trinity College in Hartford, Conn., examines how American college students of intermediate French could have been the catalysts for works of avant-garde French literature. She will take a close look at Le rendez-vous, an intermediate French-language textbook that paired a novel written by the French New Novelist Alain Robbe-Grillet with grammatical exercises written by Yvone Lenard, a prominent textbook author and instructor of French in the United States.

Focusing on previously unexamined archives of this publication in the US and France, the talk considers an unknown literary history of transnational collaboration and exchange and places new emphasis on Robbe-Grillet’s formative involvement with American higher education during his literary career. How did the dynamics of global publishing in the postwar period, along with shifting trends in language pedagogy, align to condition the production of what would become Robbe-Grillet’s most commercially successful novel?