Ricardou, Jean (b. 1932). French novelist and theorist. Ricardou's first novels, L'Observatoire de Cannes (1961) and La Prise de Constantinople (1965), aligned him with the Nouveau Roman, and for a while he was their leading theorist. He then invented the ‘nouveau nouveau roman’—an even more radically and systematically anti-representational writing. His fictional texts are like difficult crossword puzzles; but he is most important for his substantial body of theoretical work. For Ricardou, the text subverts the ideological ‘dogmas’ of representation and expression through its self-referential structure and by maximizing the autonomous productivity of language through punning and anagrammatic wordplay. Le Théâtre des métamorphoses (1982) combines fiction and theory in a deliberately ‘unclassifiable’ text.
[Celia Britton]
