Changing perspectives: France’s post-war laureates and the Nobel Prize for Literature

Abstract

This article identifies and examines the largely overlooked corpus of the introductory and acceptance speeches relating to the French Nobel Literature Prize laureates in the post-World War II period. Following a broadly chronological development, it illuminates the tensions between the national and the international perspectives inherent in the process, analysing how individual laureates negotiate their creative trajectories within a longer-term historical shift towards a transnational literary paradigm. Within that context of a changing ethos, the war experience itself is shown to be of pervasive and persistent importance, informing both the writers’ construction of their imaginary worlds, and the reception/perception of those worlds within the Nobel framework. Such special problems as Sartre’s attempted refusal of the prize and Beckett’s ambiguous national identity are used to propose a different viewpoint on France’s recent literary history, from the era of Gide and Mauriac to the more contemporary one of Simon, Le Clézio and Modiano.