Between the Lines

Nausea Jean-Paul Sartre Penguin Modern Classics (2000) ***(3/5) Written in 1938, Nausea (La Nausée in its original French) is the first novel of French existentialist philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre. This review is of the Penguin Modern Classics edition translated by Robert Baldrick. The novel is set in the town of Bouville, France (literally ‘mud town’) and is believed to be a fictional portrayal of Le Havre where Sartre was living at the time of writing. The novel takes the form of the diary entries of 30-year-old Antoine Roquetin as he suffers from strange and unexplained sensations of sickness that he refers to as ‘the Nausea’. I found Roquentin a difficult character to relate to as, on face value, he is man who seems to wallow through a comfortable, bourgeois life in which he has very little to worry about. For the last decade, Roquetin has been been researching the Marquis de Rollebon, a French aristocrat who lived during the French Revolution. Roquetin’s sickness begins...

Structuralism is not solely a literary term, it is a methodology that is concerned with language and specifically signs and signification. Structuralists attempt to uncover the structures and patterns that underlie all cultural phenomena. Structuralism is not only applicable to literature, it is applicable to everything humans do from media to fashion. Structuralism can be a deeply complex cultural theory, and as my knowledge of linguistics is minimal, I will refrain from going into the finer details of this theory and focus this blog on its relevance to literature. Ferdinand de Sausseure Structuralist theory emerged out of the work of Ferdinand de Sausseure in the 20th Century. He established the notion of language as a sign system of unchanging patterns and rules. Following his death, his notes and lectures on structural linguistics were compiled and published in the work,  A Course in General Linguistics . The work was highly influential and marks the starting point of st...