Thresholds of Meaning – Passage, Ritual and Liminality in Contemporary French Narrative

Despite a number of broad surveys of contemporary French fiction that have appeared in the last decade or so, the question of the nouveau roman’s literary legacy remains an under-researched field. Thresholds of Meaning offers evidence not only of a reworking of certain traditional themes, but also of a reinstatement of meaning at the center of literary inquiry. Drawing on the fields of sociology, anthropology, and psychology, Jean Duffy argues that this preoccupation with meaning concerns not only the processes of its production within a work, but also the processes by which it is produced in the real world, including the various linguistic and gestural codes by which a community communicates, the customs a community assumes, and the rituals that it observes.