matar la novela, dixit bourdieu

"The history of the novel, at least since Flaubert, may also be described as long effort to 'kill the novelistic', in Edmond de Gomcourt's phrase, that is to say, to purify the novel everything that seems to define it--plot, action, hero. The line goes from Flaubert and the 'novel about nothing' or the Goncourts and the ambition for a 'novel without events, plot, or low amusement' to the 'Nouveau Roman' and the dissolution of the linear story and, with Claude Simon, the search for an almost pictorial (or musical), composition, founded on periodic returns and internal correspondences of a limited number of narrative elements, situations, characters, locations, actions, repeated several times with modifications or modulations," dixit Pierre Bourdieu.