Nathalie Sarraute, Entre la vie et la mort, Paris, Gallimard (Blanche), 1968, 256 p.

« Errant seul de nouveau dans ces étendues sans fin où il lui semble que personne avant lui n’a été tenté de s’aventurer… Aucune trace nulle part. Aucun jalon ici ni point de repère qui permette de conserver le sens des proportions. La plus inoffensive bestiole alerte toute l’attention, paraît aussi effrayante qu’un tigre… Tâtonnant, cherchant, mais quoi ? Il n’en sait trop rien. Cela ne porte aucun nom…»
Là où une œuvre littéraire prend naissance, grandit, ou meurt… »
(Quatrième de couverture)

NEGRETE, Fernanda, « ‘A Vital, Unliveable Force’: Rhythm through Nathalie Sarraute and Schizoanalysis », dans Mosaic: A Journal for the Interdisciplinary Study of Literature, vol. 48, n° 2 (juin 2015), p. 83-98. +++ Article de revue

### Abstract
Nathalie Sarraute, Gilles Deleuze, and Félix Guattari, particularly in Entre la vie et la mort and A Thousand Plateaux, present an idea of rhythm that attunes us to a non-signifying dimension of language. The force of rhythm at once sustains creation and reveals the common lifedeath matter from which both words and bodies (the writer’s, the reader’s) are made.

Negrete, 2015, PDF###

WILLGING, Jennifer, Telling Anxiety: Anxious Narration in the Work of Marguerite Duras, Annie Ernaux, Nathalie Sarraute, and Anne Hébert, Toronto, University of Toronto Press, 2007, 261 p. +++ Monographie

### Summary
From two world wars to rapid industrialization and population shifts, events of the twentieth century engendered cultural anxieties to an extent hitherto unseen, particularly in Europe. In Telling Anxiety, Jennifer Willging examines manifestations of such anxieties in the selected narratives of four women writing in French - Marguerite Duras, Nathalie Sarraute, Annie Ernaux, and Anne Hébert. Willging demonstrates that the anxieties inherent in these women’s works (whether attributed to characters, narrators, or implied authors) are multiple in nature and relate to a general post-Second World War scepticism about the power of language to express non-linguistic phenomena such as the destruction and loss of life that a large portion of Europe endured during that period.

Willging maintains that while these women writers are profoundly wary of language and its artificiality, they eschew the radical linguistic scepticism of many post-war male writers and theorists. Rather, she argues, the anxiety that these four writers express stems less from a loss of faith in language’s referential function than from a culturally ingrained doubt about their own ability as women to make language reflect certain realities. Ultimately, Telling Anxiety shows the crippling obstacles of literary agency for women in the twentieth century from the perspective of those who fully understood the significant responsibility of their work.

Voir plus spécifiquement le chapitre 3 « The anxiety of influence and the urge to originate : Nathalie Sarraute’s Entre la vie et la mort »###

BESSIÈRE, Jean, « L’Incommencement du commencement: Carlos Fuentes, Gertrude Stein, Nathalie Sarraute », dans Jean BESSIÈERE (dir.), Commencements du roman, Paris, Champion, 2001, p. 187-211. +++ Chapitre de collectif

WILLGING, Jennifer, « The Desire to Tell and the Anxiety of Telling: A Study of Narrative Production in Marguerite Duras, Annie Ernaux, and Nathalie Sarraute », thèse de doctorat, Department of French, Nortwestern University, 2000, 234 f. +++ Thèse de doctorat / mémoire de maîtrise

### Abstract
The desire to tell a story and the anxiety that sometimes accompanies such telling are forces that leave their trace in the narrative text. In this dissertation , I look for such traces in four twentieth-century narratives written in French: Marguerite Duras’s “Madame Dodin” (Des journées entières dans les arbres. 1954) and “Monsieur X.” (La douleur. 1985), Annie Ernaux’s La honte (1991), and Nathalie Sarraute’s Entre la vie et la mort (1968). My objective is to untangle the two forces in each text, describe how they have affected the construction of the narrative, and determine to what extent, if any, the act of narrating, the movement they propel, quells them. Different kinds of desires and anxieties permeate each text. In “Madame Dodin,” the narrator wishes to be an advocate, through narrative, for her contentious but fascinating concierge, but resistance from her fellow tenants as well as from Mme Dodin incites in her an anxiety of authorship that inhibits her narration. In both “Monsieur X.” and La honte, the narrator’s principal desire is to reconstruct in narrative a traumatic experience, thereby giving order and sense to the memories that torment her. In Entre la vie et la mort, the narrator vacillates between two desires, one to produce literature that reveals a hidden reality and a more mundane wish to attain critical success. His most salient anxiety is that the work he produces will be “dead” and so will never procure for him either of the prizes he covets. The narrators of all four texts do possess a common desire: to tell the truth , as they conceive it, about the object of their narration, whether fictional or autobiographical. While all three authors have written during an age of profound skepticism about the existence of any real connection between literature and the world, this comm on anxiety suggests that they share a faith in language’s capacity to point beyond itself. Assuming the responsibility of authorship is anxiety-provoking for these writers. At the same time, how ever, it allows them to satisfy a pressing desire not to let the contents of their memories and imaginations remain unsaid.

La version PDF de la thèse est disponible pour les membres de communautés universitaires qui ont un abonnement institutionnel auprès de UMI - Proquest ###

FLAMBARD-WEISBART, Véronique, « (Re-)écrire le lieu commun: Nathalie Sarraute et Agnès Varda », RLA: Romance Languages Annual, n° 6 (1994), p. 52-56. +++ Article de revue

### Port également sur Le planétarium. ###

KNAPP, Bettina L., « Nathalie Sarraute’s Between Life and Death: Androgyny and the Creative Process », Studies in Twentieth Century Literature, vol. 11, n° 2 (printemps 1987), p. 239-252. +++ Article de revue

WRIGHT, Madeleine Guérin, « Nathalie Sarraute : Entre la vie et la mort, une interprétation linguistique », thèse de doctorat, University of Wisconsin - Madison, 1973, 230 f. +++ Thèse de doctorat / mémoire de maîtrise

### La version PDF de la thèse est disponible pour les membres de communautés universitaires qui ont un abonnement institutionnel auprès de UMI - Proquest ###