ABSTRACT

This article explores the importance of the French thinker and writer Georges Bataille by the New Narrative movement. By situating New Narrative readings of Bataille within the broader US reception of the French author, the article shows how important New Narrative was in popularising his work. But the New Narrative reading is paradoxical in many ways. As an apparently Catholic and gendered theory, it had to be both contradicted and furthered; as a theory of eroticism, it allowed New Narrative writers to contest dominant ideas about sexuality and the self, and provided a model of how to embrace theory while remaining non-theoretical. The essay considers Bataille’s influence in two New Narrative novels, Robert Glück’s Jack the Modernist and Dodie Bellamy’s The Letters of Mina Harker, and argues that their engagement with Bataille went beyond mere palimpsest, instead offering a poetics of dissolution into what Bataille calls ‘the continuous’.

摘要

本文通过新叙事运动探讨了法国思想家和作家乔治·巴塔耶 (Georges Bataille) 的重要性。通过将巴塔耶的“新叙事”解读置于这位法国作家在美国更广泛的接受范围内，这篇文章展示了“新叙事”在普及他的作品方面的重要性。但新叙事阅读在很多方面都是自相矛盾的。作为一个明显的天主教和性别理论，它必须既矛盾又进一步。作为一种色情理论，它允许新叙事作家对关于性和自我的主导思想进行质疑，并提供了一个如何在保持非理论性的同时接受理论的模型。这篇文章考虑了巴塔耶在两部新叙事小说中的影响，罗伯特格吕克的现代主义者杰克和多迪贝拉米的米娜哈克的书信，并认为他们与巴塔耶的接触不仅仅是翻版，而是提供了一种分解成巴塔耶所说的“连续”的诗意。