The meaning of language in the fiction of Alain Robbe-Grillet and Juan Benet

My dissertation focuses on the novelistic world of Juan Benet and Alain Robbe-Grillet, acclaimed founders of the Spanish Nueva Novela and the French Nouveau Roman. I wish to clarify how much Juan Benet's fiction coincide with and differ from that of Alain Robbe-Grillet's. I study the literary, social and philosophical background to their literature in chapters two and three. I also describe the major theoretical views maintained by these two writers. Chapters four and five comprise the analyses of their most influential novels: Les gommes (1953), Le voyeur (1955), La jalousie (1957), Volveras a Region (1967), Una meditacion (1969) and Un viaje de invierno (1972).; I contend that the meaning of these narratives emerges when we place the functionality of language as the focal point of their fiction. The trivial view that these novels are superfluous, experimental and formalist, without having any direct contact or relationship with reality is undermined by the power of these narratives to force readers to reflect on how language (de)constructs such a reality. Robbe-Grillet and Benet shows us that reality is a construct made of language and, by extension, that language creates a reality, yet never able to transcribe the reality. And so, Robbe-Grillet and Benet are truly anti-realist writers, yet their narratives are meaningful.; Robbe-Grillet's characters embrace a "shifting reality." If the construction of a reality is possible, the construction of another is also achievable at the expense of the first. Language has the capacity to rename, reconstruct, deconstruct and modify a determined reality. Nonetheless, that particular reality is an artificial being subject to alteration. And so, reality is what we create, what we make it to be.; Benet portrays language as a medium for investigation. Narrators use language as a device to seek the essence or the truth about their own surrounding reality in post Civil War Spain. But language---the only means to investigate they possess---proves to be insufficient. In this context, characters in Benet's novels appear frustrated, unfulfilled and exude a strong sensation of despair and doom, a feeling of "no-way-out" which makes Benet's novels significantly more existential than Robbe-Grillet's.