LUDIC NARRATIVE IN THE NOVEL: 'PROJET POUR UNE REVOLUTION A NEW YORK,' 'DAS SCHLOSS,' 'TRISTRAM SHANDY' (ALAIN ROBBE-GRILLET, FRANZ KAFKA, LAURENCE STERNE, FRANCE, ENGLAND, AUSTRIA)

There are striking similarities between the structure of the play-world and the structure of the fictional world: both create their own space, their own time, their own rules, and their own ends. Furthermore, fiction, like play, clarifies existence and provides a "cure" for the real.; This dissertation argues not, however, that all fiction is a form of play; it attempts rather to distinguish play as an informing technique in certain novels. Embarking from Ricardou's formulation, "l'ecriture d'une aventure," and from Fink's analysis of play as process, it defines ludic narrative as a kind of story-telling which follows no previously conceived notion of where it is going or how it will end, but discovers its own forms as it unfolds. The three novels of this study improvise stories which remain ambiguous and contradictory.; Ludic narrative does not imitate reality, but forms its story through operations similar to those found in play. An agonistic operation occurs when a text divides itself into two "voices" for the purpose of contesting itself. A mimetic function is present when a text reduplicates its own forms or its own functioning. The representative images of this two techniques are the dialogue (Tristram Shandy and Project) and the mise en abyme (Schloss and Projet).; These three novels also play with literary conventions and literary structures. Robbe-Grillet, Kafka, and Sterne are aware of the illusory nature of fiction and consciously manipulate the conventions of narrative to show the arbitrariness of the game's rules. Each of these novels assaults the accepted notions of what a well-made story must be: each breaks the rules of plot, character, setting.; Finally, all three novels propose a reader different from the traditional reader who hastens toward a novel's "solution." In these fictions reading is envisioned as a process important for its own sake, a game by which the reader converses with the narrator, thus participating in making of the text.