Ce que je sais de Vera Cándida: Tema y motivos del creador de Macondo

Celebrations, Clusters, and Comparative Literature Dorothy M. Figueira In this issue of The Comparatist, I decided that we might try something different. I have had the occasion, as I grow older and my colleagues grow even older, to participate in various Festschriften offered in their honor. This is a charming custom, where colleagues join together to celebrate the career of one of their own. It is a custom that does not occur often enough in the States. On too many occasions, a scholar’s retirement is feted in the seminar room after hours with some punch and cookies or worse, with a dinner of glorified cafeteria food where administrators make lame jokes. When I first learned that Michael Palencia-Roth had retired after many years at the University of Illinois, I thought it reasonable to use my editorial discretion to collect a number of articles in honor of his work. Prof. Palencia-Roth is an eminent comparatist and a valiant soldier in our field. His work, both scholarly and pedagogically, exemplifies the best of our discipline. The Board of the Southern Comparative Literature Association supported my decision to frame this issue as a Festschrift to him. This year, Palencia-Roth took part in a keynote forum at our annual meeting at Auburn University, announcing this volume. The Board of the scla Press of its journal, the only regional American journal of Comparative Literature with a national, and even international, readership. I appreciate their encouragement as we venture forth with such alternative clusters of articles. Working with this perspective has brought forth unexpected connections: for example, David Damrosch’s article in this issue anticipates next year’s cluster on the relationship between comparative literature and world literature (this future cluster stems from an acla panel I organized devoted to this topic) while simultaneously recalling a cluster presented last year (the icla panel on the state of the discipline, which also took place at the acla). In coming years, we are also planning guest-edited topics and clusters that are comparative in scope culled from the scla annual meeting. Michael Palencia-Roth, the Emeritus Trowbridge Scholar in Literary Studies and Professor of Comparative Literature at the University of Illinois, was born and raised in Colombia. He taught at Illinois for thirty years, where he directed the program in Comparative and World Literature for six years (1988–94). He has published books and monographs on Gabriel García Márquez, Thomas Mann, James Joyce, the conquest period in Latin America, the Holocaust, Comparative Literature as a discipline, and comparative civilizational analysis. His approximately 80 [End Page 1] other publications include major encyclopedia articles on Latin American authors, as well as essays on Germanic subjects, English literature, the Spanish colonization of the New World, and theoretical issues in cross-cultural analysis. Palencia-Roth’s role as a teacher, mentor, and administrator bears particular note. He has molded a generation of comparatists, instilling in them a sense of what it means to work together both professionally and collegially. It is, therefore, both his scholarship and his work as a citizen in the profession that the scla honors in these pages. A number of scholars have written articles devoted to topics that Palencia-Roth has touched upon in his work. We begin this issue with an interview with Professor Palencia-Roth in which he discusses his peregrinations within Comparative Literature. He examines the nature of the discipline and the changes he has seen in it since his days at Harvard as a graduate student. He also offers a prognosis for its future, noting the possibilities and pitfalls that might occasion the transformation of Comparative Literature into World Literature. Palencia-Roth’s concerns (and celebration of Comparative Literature’s potential) nicely establish a framework that the essays in his honor will engage, beginning with David Damrosch’s comments on the American institutionalization of World Literature. Damrosch investigates the cultural and institutional impact of American Comparative Literature as both a limiting factor and an arena of possibility. He questions how Americentric American comparatism actually is. On a further note, he questions to what extent world literature is becoming a creature of American conglomerate capitalism and an export trade...

At the outset of one of Colette's earliest collections of stories and essays, Les vrilles de la vigne (1908), is a parable of censorship. Je voudrais dire, we read in that first piece, ce que je sais, tout ce que je pense, tout ce que je devine, tout ce qui m'enchante et me blesse et m'6tonne; mais il y a toujours, vers I'aube de cette nuit sonore, une sage main blanche qui se pose sur ma bouche.' Perhaps by way of illustration, in the second piece of the collection, Une nuit blanche, the voluptuous pleasure in bed that two women experience together at dawn is never subject to expression, but is rather the place at which, with a discreet future tense allusion in the last sentence, the text falls silent. That mysterious hand had accomplished its task, it

Hostages of Authenticity:Paul Smaïl, Azouz Begag, and the Invention of the Beur Author Lia Brozgal . . . like it or not, all writers are "cultural impersonators."2 Henry Louis Gates, Jr. The surprise of the 1997 literary season in France was the novel Vivre me tue, written by the now-notorious Paul Smaïl. A "coming to writing" story of its narrator—also named Paul Smaïl, Vivre me tue is set in late-1990s Paris, where the 27 year-old aspiring novelist and son of Moroccan immigrants writes his story through flashbacks and tangents, in prose peppered with references to Melville, Shakespeare, Genet, and Rimbaud. Despite his education—Paul holds a master's degree in comparative literature from a Parisian university—he finds himself reduced to delivering pizza by day; by night he works the desk at a Pigalle hotel that rents its rooms by the hour. If the day job is his bread and butter, the night job offers him access to two crucial things: a word processer and, between checking in couples without suitcases, time to write. The hotel desk is as close as Paul comes to "a room of his own," and he uses these moments to reflect on the complex negotiations required of the Beur3 generation, and specifically on his own experiences of discrimination and racism, his love life, and the downward spiral of his brother, a gay bodybuilder addicted to steroids. The narrative's resonance with contemporary social issues of inequality and disenfranchisement, coupled with its inventive intertextuality and witty use of language surely accounted, in some measure, for the book's success; sales figures estimated that by October of 1997 it was selling at a rate of 600 copies per day.4 [End Page 113] In addition to the book's literary qualities, social and media factors may also have played a role in its popularity. Although Vivre me tue was billed by its publisher and initially hailed in the press as a novel, the onomastic coincidence of narrator-protagonist and author led a number of critics to read the text as an autobiography, thus endowing the text with a two-fold value: it was not only a good story but also, ostensibly, a true story. Smaïl undoubtedly contributed to this misunderstanding by cloaking his persona in enigma: "Je refuse de communiquer," he wrote in a press release. "Ni photos, ni interviews, ni rien. Ce que j'ai à dire, je l'écris."5 Responding in writing to a series of questions faxed to him by a reporter from Le Nouvel Observateur, Smaïl also fanned the fire by claiming to be in Casablanca (the Moroccan city where the character Paul Smaïl lands at the end of Vivre me tue), and by responding ambiguously to questions about the generic status of his work ("Oui, il y a beaucoup de ma vie dans Vivre me tue, et, oui, il y a aussi de la fiction"6). The media desire for Vivre me tue to be a personal testimonial suggests something beyond an incapacity to separate fact from fiction. With a French first name and a family name of Arabic resonance, Paul Smaïl had the potential to be a powerful cultural signifier: a living amalgam of France's colonial past and post-colonial present, Smaïl was no less than the great Beur hope for French letters. While the press quickly made it clear that Smaïl was a pseudonym—the name purportedly having been changed to preserve the author's desire to let his work speak for itself—by late November of 1997, rumors had already begun to circulate amongst the Parisian literati: "Paul Smaïl" was reported to be a pseudonym for French writer Jack-Alain Léger.7 In 2001, Le Monde des Livres called Smaïl's status as a pseudonym no more than a "secret de polichinelle," and in 2003 Jack-Alain Léger revealed, in a book of his own titled On en est là, that he was indeed the author of Vivre me tue (and of 3 other novels published in the intervening years under the Smaïl pseudonym).8 The media chatter surrounding this...

Book Review: Aullón de Haro, P. (ed.) (2015). Historiografía y Teoría de la Historia del Pensamiento, la Literatura y el Arte. Madrid: Dykinson.

Reviewed by: Death of a Discipline Roland Greene Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. Death of a Discipline. New York: Columbia University Press, 2003. Pp. 136. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak's book belongs to a short but dense tradition of retrospectives, proposals, and jeremiads on the topic of Comparative Literature, a discipline always in search of itself. Delivered in 2000 in the Wellek Library lecture series at Irvine, Death of a Discipline is one of the obligatory books of this decade for comparatists. While I cannot imagine anyone endorsing it in large, many readers will find much to agree with in little, including brilliant observations and suggestions that are scattered throughout the book's one hundred pages. The utopian aspect of Spivak's critique of Comparative Literature does not diminish its urgency or its impact. The premise of Spivak's argument is that, as of 2000, most academic programs in Comparative Literature in the United States centered their attention on "Europe and the extracurricular Orient" (6), in an unprincipled denial of the discipline's claim of worldwide scope. At the same time, programs in area studies—usually interdepartmental committees in Asian Studies, African Studies, Latin American Studies, and so on—found themselves in search of a renewed mission, having prospered with the Cold War and declined in its wake. Accordingly, Spivak first proposes an alliance between Comparative Literature and area studies, with the goal of making these enterprises resemble each other. Comparative Literature would gain from the linguistic and political coverage, institutional alliances, and rigor of area studies, while area studies would learn to think conceptually about things that are better understood through close reading of all kinds of texts than through empirical observation—for instance, in what ways cultures come to be imagined as others (the imagination is "the great inbuilt instrument of othering" [13]). Area studies, she believes, should learn to approach "the language of the other not only as a 'field' language" (9). Comparative Literature (represented for her in large part by the report prepared by the late Charles Bernheimer's committee for the American Comparative Literature Association and published by Johns Hopkins University Press in 1994), committed to a national and territorial model of the world, must, in turn, attend to the new demographic frontiers of the postcolonial and globalized era. The disciplines would find common ground in language—comparatists because they would learn languages outside the conventional ambit, area scholars because they would be exposed to languages "with literary depth rather than only social scientific fluency" (106). [End Page 154] Spivak's second chapter makes a provocative case that "collect-ivities"—the question of "who are 'we'?"—mark one of the most difficult issues for comparatists. Haun Saussy's recent report to the ACLA, soon to be published by Johns Hopkins, begins with a brief consideration of this question from an institutional standpoint: Who are comparatists? Spivak, however, raises the more elusive question of who constitutes "the 'human' of 'humanism'" (23), the cultural collectivity of and for whom Comparative Literature speaks. Perhaps in the continuing conversation taking place in the field, the question of collectivity has been pushed aside by an insistent focus on the objects of Comparative Literature; perhaps the matter of collectivities has seemed both too obvious and too difficult. Spivak's approach in this chapter is complex, with several extensive digressions, but the core of her argument here can be summarized in two points. The first is that comparatists should take account of what Jacques Derrida calls teleiopoeisis. Defined here as "to affect the distant in a poeisis—an imaginative making—without guarantees" (31), the term refers to acts of the imagination that cross time and space with uncertain outcomes and that are essential to the making of discontinuous collectivities.1 Spivak proposes that teleiopoeisis will be one of the decisive literary and critical modes of the globalized world, that a "copying (rather than cutting) and pasting" (34) across cultural zones is fashioning the works and readers of the present. It is hard to disagree, and one supposes that a sustained project on teleiopoeisis and Comparative Literature, both historical and contemporary, is overdue. Spivak's forays into the concept are uneven but illuminating: the most successful...

The collected volume Companion to Comparative Literature, World Literatures, and Comparative Cultural Studies - edited by Steven Totosy de Zepetnek (Purdue University) and Tutun Mukherjee (University of Hyderabad) is intended to address the current situation of scholarship in the discipline of comparative literature and the fields of world literature and comparative cultural studies in a global context. While the discipline of comparative literature in the West appears to be losing ground in its institutional presence, in other parts of the world including Asia and Latin America, as well as in "peripheral" European countries such as Spain, Portugal, Poland, Greece, Macedonia, etc., the discipline is flourishing both in scholarship and in its institutional structure and pedagogical vitality. The field of world literatures is gaining renewed interest in US-American scholarship while the field of comparative cultural studies is a new area of study pursued by scholars who are committed to the intellectual trajectories of comparative literature - minus Eurocentrism and the nation approach - and cultural studies. 36 articles of around 6000 words each are presented in thematic groups in this volume: Part 1: Theories of Comparative Literature, World Literatures, and Comparative Cultural Studies; Part 2: Comparative Literature in World Languages (including the histories of the discipline in various countries); Part 3: Examples of New Work in Comparative Literature, World Literatures, and Comparative Cultural Studies; Part 4 is a Multilingual Bibliography of Books in Comparative Literature, World Literatures, and Comparative Cultural Studies (also available online in open access at http://docs.lib.purdue.edu/clcweblibrary/comparativeliteraturebooks). The volume is intended for students and faculty in the humanities and social sciences, as well as a general readership.

In her paper, "Comparative Literature and Latin American Studies: From Disarticulation to Dialogue," Sophia A. McClennen surveys the profound changes that characterize Latin American cultural studies today. McClennen reads these changes in light of recent transformations in the fields of comparative literature and cultural studies and suggests that scholars in these fields are now in a position to embark on productive dialogue and exchange. Before such interaction takes place, however, McClennen cautions, we should recall why there has historically been little intellectual exchange between comparatists and scholars of Latin American literature. Barriers to exchange between these areas have been: The traditional US-Eurocentric bias of comparative literature, the history of culturally colonizing Latin America, comparative literature's repudiation of inter-Spanish American comparative work, and the different tendencies in critical approaches and methods used by comparative literature scholars versus their counterparts in Latin American Studies. If scholars remain mindful of this history, she argues, there are several key areas of study that would be strengthened and enriched by greater collaboration between comparatists and Latin Americanists and McClennen outlines five key areas of collaborative research.

Early in their careers, most comparatists no doubt have faced the challenging task of explaining to curious interlocutors what comparative literature as a discipline is. Part of the challenge of explaining the discipline is that over the decades since its institutionalization in American academe it was been relatively flexible in expanding and reconfiguring itself to accommodate new areas and techniques for teaching and research. This flexibility and elasticity notwithstanding, one of the enduring characteristics that has served as something of a hallmark and a distinguishing feature over and against national language and cultural studies departments is the comparative juxtaposition of literary works from differing cultural and linguistic backgrounds--ideally in their original language--with the anticipation that this contrastive strategy will reveal important aspects of the texts under consideration more forcefully and clearly than their study in the context of their culture of origin alone. Although universal admiration for both the breadth and depth of the erudition of some of the earliest practitioners of the discipline remains undiminished--for Spitzer, Auerbach, and Curtius--during the early phases of its institutional life, comparative literature was comparing things that were not very different. As has been so often noted, the locus of attention was clearly western Europe centering on the Rhine River valley and North America. More recently significant initiatives to include the rest of Europe, Latin America, east and south Asia, the Middle East, the traditions of the Pacific basin, and north as well as sub-Saharan Africa have been undertaken and proven generally successful. The International Comparative Literature Association has affiliated associations in all these areas and is sponsoring major research efforts dealing with many of them. Just as the cultural-geographic purview of the discipline has expanded so have its methods and focus. During the 1980s in many institutions, comparative literature became the principal domicile of literary theory, which now has migrated in a number of different directions and more recently has been particularly hospitable to various approaches to identity formation and definition. It has responded to new methods of instruction and research that have come from both relatively proximate as well as more remote disciplinary investigations. Among the most recent of these--world literature--is obviously closely allied to comparative literature and at once addresses its historical Eurocentricism. It offers an exciting and highly stimulating new strategy that, as a number of books published in the recent years clearly suggest, has important implications for how literature is taught and for new emphases that can be brought to bear on understanding the production and dissemination of literary works. In a pioneering volume, David Damrosch defines world literature with an elegant succinctness that explicitly excludes any claim to chaotic universal inclusiveness, but rather as a mode of circulation and reading (5) applicable to individual as well as collections of works that range from established canonical masterpieces to new works that come to the attention of scholars and critics. He begins his discussion of world literature in this sense with a detailed presentation of Goethe's famous use of the term Weltliteratur in a discussion with his secretary Johann Peter Eckermann and interestingly draws Eckermann out of the shadows cast by Goethe's luminous presence in which he has for so many years remained all but hidden. I would like, though, to revisit this exchange and some of Goethe's other references to the all-important concept of world literature in order to examine some telling details. As is very well known, on Wednesday, January 31, 1827, Goethe advised his young secretary that the age of national literatures had passed and that the morning of Weltliteratur was dawning. …

Reviewed by: Comparative Literature: Theory, Method, Application Nicolae Harsanyi Steven Tötösy de Zepetnek, Comparative Literature: Theory, Method, Application. Amsterdam, Atlanta GA: Rodopi, 1998. 298 pp. In writing this book, Steven Tötösy de Zepetnek intends to enrich the field of comparative literature with a hitherto “lesser known theoretical framework and methodology that . . . represents to date one of the most advanced possibilities for the study of literature and culture” (260). The author’s motivation in his innovative stance lies in his awareness of the “problematic situation” (14) arising from the two contradictory developments noticeable in the discipline of comparative literature nowadays: a certain stagnation, if not recession, in its established centers in the US, France, and Germany, on the one hand, and a robust expansion in vast, non-traditional geographical areas such as the Far East, Latin America, and the Southern tier of European countries. At the same time, realizing that “it is the neglect and lack of rational inclusive, methodologically precise attention in operationality and functionality that results in flaws which in turn create—over several turns and twists—the marginalization of the study of literature” (21), Tötösy sets out to propose “The Systemic and Empirical Approach to Literature and Culture,” which he puts forth in an appropriately called Manifesto (Chapter One). The author then proceeds to offer several sets of applications of the proposed framework and method for a New Comparative Literature. Discussion focuses on a wide variety of literary and cultural areas of inquiry such as literary readership and the question of the literary canon in a context of cultural participation (Chapter Two). Interdisciplinarity, “taxonomically imprecise” (79), is debated in Chapter Three; Tötösy considers it as an integral part of a New Comparative Literature (82) and brings up as supportive arguments examples from literature and cinema. A very interesting Chapter Four focuses on the literatures of East Central Europe, the author proposing that their study follow the parameters of “inbetween peripherality” (135). This term acknowledges the peripherality of these literatures and cultures in relation to traditional cultural European “centers,” but, at the same time, does not lose from sight that East Central European literatures and cultures have long histories of their own, enjoying a certain degree of cultural sovereignty and self-referentiality. For a while Steven Tötösy lingers in the East Central European space in Chapter Five (“Women’s Literature and Men Writing About Women”) as well: when he considers the work of Hungarian fiction writer Margit Kaffka and its critical reception in Hungary Tötösy rightly emphasizes that the omission of feminist issues from evaluations of Kaffka’s prose is due to the patriarchal thinking deeply entrenched in the Hungarian critical practice. The last two chapters of the book deal with topics that have an ever closer bearing on the study of literature: the study of translation and the impact of new electronic technologies on literary and cultural studies. This book is useful not only for all those who are primarily interested in theoretical debates concerning the renewal of the study of comparative literature in the contemporary world, but also for all readers concerned with cultural studies dealing with East Central Europe. The author’s ubiquitous voice, alert pace of argumentation, subtle humor and irony enhance his persuasiveness. Nicolae Harsanyi University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill Copyright © 1999 symploke

Comme les mathematiques ou la musique, l'ethnographie est une des rares vocations authentiques. On peut la decouvrir en soi, meme sans qu'on vous l'ait enseignee. (Like mathematics or music, anthropology is one of the few genuine vocations. One can discover it in oneself, even though one may have been taught nothing about it.) Tous les matins, je me rendais a la New York Public Library . Ce que je sais d'ethnologie, c'est pendant ces annees-la que je l'ai appris. (Every morning I went to the New York Public Library. What I know of anthropology I learned during those years.) The publication of Tristes tropiques in 1955 is a defining moment in Levi-Strauss's career, and a significant moment in the intellectual history of postwar France. Quite apart from its impact in anthropology – a number of French ethnologists cite Tristes tropiques as the initial inspiration of their choice of vocation – it drew favourable critical responses from across the intellectual spectrum, from Sartre to Blanchot. The book has since become a classic, and is still in print almost fifty years after its publication, both in French and in its numerous translated versions. The book was not originally Levi-Strauss's idea. The initial impulse came from Jean Malaurie, the veteran explorer and ethnologist who had recently launched a series named Terre humaine , in which the first publication had been his own Les Derniers Rois de Thule .

BOOK NOTES VIRGIL NEMOIANU, ed. Multicomparative Theory, Definitions, Realities. Whitestone NY: Council on National Literatures, 1996. 141 pp. This recent volume ofcollected essays encompasses a range ofdiscussions on the changing face ofcomparative literary study. In particular, the debate focuses on the problematic differences between traditional comparative literature, as represented by me Western canon model, and the more globally-oriented multicultural approach. The essays collected here provide a counter-argument to Comparative Literature in theAge ofMulticulturalism (reviewed in the 1996 issue of TAe Comparatist ), which was edited by Charles Bernheimer as an outgrowth ofthe official report on standards commissioned by the American Comparative Literature Association . That the globalization and politicization ofcomparative literary study is the primary focus ofthis Council on National Literatures world report becomes clear in "Globalism, Multiculturalism, and Comparative Literature," an essay by Virgil Nemoianu, me Council's executive director and editor. Nemoianu states from the outset that he does not claim "a unique or absolute mediating role for literature" since for him other things such as "religious energies and impulses . . . can be more important" (43). He grounds his critique ofEurocentric versions ofComparative Literature by stressing the field's more expansive characteristics: its possession of a "unique equipment ofself-contradiction and self-criticism," its tendency towards "innovation in all spheres," and its ability "to assimilate and to establish osmotic relationships with alternative civilizational models" (46-7). Similarly, Gerald Gillespie criticizes certain positions taken in Bernheimer's volume, notably those ofMichael Riffaterre and Peter Brooks, for not focusing on more "politically inflected cultural studies" (37). Though Nemoianu does point out die dangers and defects ofmulticulturalism, and calls attention to the inherent threat that national literatures may degenerate into exclusionary, anti-historical, static fields ofstudy, or may be debased into arbitrary "social constructs" (54-5), he does not provide an approach for resisting diese tendencies. Ultimately he argues rather lamely for comparative literary study on die basis ofits ability "to disarm our slothful inclination toward lack ofdistinctions and blanket levelling," particularly since "a true fostering of diversity must involve a cultivation of the history ofthe humanities " (62-3). Thus, while the conclusion calls attention to the dangers ofmulticultural theories and their tendency to respond to literature dogmatically along lines ofrace, gender, or class, an appeal to humanistic values seems to be the only solution that emerges in the course ofthis extended essay. One sees from these essays several problematic tensions that have marked die debate on globalizing literary studies, among them the influence ofpostcolonial studies on emerging national literatures. As new literatures attempt to enter the canon, tiiey eitiier redefine or reinvent tiieir literary past; and their internal conflicts reveal not only the problem ofpolemical definitions ofwhat is meant by "cultural tradition," but also ofseparating such a tradition from socio-political intent. This redefinition seems frequently to entail ascribing superiority to one cultural tradition over another, as for example in Quan Zhongwen's essay, "Re-establishing Value and Spirit in the Period ofCultural Change: Neo-Rationalism." This essay relies on the exhausted argument mat infusing traditional Chinese humanism into comparative literary study would temper the "irrationalism" of Western approaches and Vol. 21 (1997): 174 THE COMPAKATIST their declaration of"the death ofeverydiing" (7), as well as meir indulgence (by way ofcritical theory) in "meaningless intellectual games" (8). Otiier proposals for bringing comparative literary study into a broader multicultural perspective include "refounding die humanities on die sciences," developing a semiotic metiiod for cross-cultural study, and using an intertextual approach to contextualize the heterogeneity ofvarious Latin American literatures. The theoretical and methodological differences between the essays in this volume and the ACLA report edited by Bernheimer reveal that defining me current status of comparative literature is fraught with many polemical negations and contestations. The subject clearly needs furtherjudicious study and discussion. Christine Kiebuzinska Virginia Polytechnic andState University YVES CHEVREL. Comparative Literature Today: Methods andPerspectives . Trans. Faruda Elizabeth Dahab. Introd. Gerald Gillespie. Kirksville MO: The Thomas Jefferson UP, 1995. xv + 111 pp. Yves Chevrel intended this work to be a follow-up to a volume ofthe same title written by M.-F. Guyard in 195 1. The Guyard text went through six different editions and for many years was a major reference. Chevrel...

Introduction Promoting the Study of Modern Literatures Worldwide: The MLA and Its Conventions

The question of the sublime in literature was, in its consequences, the most important single topic of literary theory to be debated in France in the last quarter of the seventeenth century. It is impossible now to consider the controversies that surrounded the adoption of this term into the French critical vocabulary without an awareness of its subsequent role in the permanent transformation of European sensibility. In the course of the eighteenth century the concept of the sublime was developed by Du Bos and Diderot, Burke and Kant, in ways that expand it almost beyond recognition from its modest beginnings in the Peri Hypsous, where it is used exclusively in a literary context. The evolving critical theory on the sublime has been extensively studied, together with its increasingly important role in cultural history and aesthetics.1 Relatively little attention, though, has been devoted to one of the most important aspects of the subject for those actively engaged in the seventeenth- century debate: that is, the interrelationship between the critical theory and contemporary literary production in France, particularly in poetry.Longinus's treatise is full of illustrations and analysis, but it is also intended to give specific help to an aspiring writer; the author not only provides copious examples, but also offers much detailed advice as to how the effects are to be achieved. However this aspect of the work is almost entirely lost in the seventeenth-century debate, which is basically descriptive rather than prescriptive. This was inevitable, since for most of the critics the sublime ultimately is decided according to subjective criteria: it is something that is felt, and thus by its very nature it almost defies analysis. Boileau, as usual, puts it most memorably, in the Preface to his translation of Longinus, where he distinguishes the true sublime from the 'stile sublime'. The 'stile sublime' is the pompous and self-consciously noble; but the true sublime has 'cet extraordinaire et ce merveilleux qui frape dans le discours, et qui fait qu'un ouvrage enleve, ravit, transporte'.2 Boileau returned to this theme nearly forty years later in the tenth of his Reflexions critiques sur quelques passages du rheteur Longin, which dates from 1713: 'le Sublime n'est pas proprement une chose qui se prouve et qui se demonstre; mais ... c'est un Merveilleux qui saisit, qui frappe, et qui se fait sentir'.3 Thus the particular fascination of the debate on the sublime can be understood as in some respects a continuation of two perennial seventeenth-century preoccupations: the relationship between genius and the rules, and the analysis of the features in literature from which the greatest pleasure is to be gained, but which ultimately elude exact definition - the famous je ne sais quoi, that turns competence into genius.4 The near-impossibility of providing an objective definition of the sublime, though, makes it even more problematic to suggest how it is to be attained. The uncertainties are reflected in La Bruyere's question of 1689: 'Qu'est-ce que le sublime? Il ne paraIt pas qu'on l'ait defini. Est-ce une figure? NaIt-il des figures, ou du moins de quelques figures? Tout genre d'ecrire recoit-il le sublime, ou s'il n'y a que les grands sujets qui en soient capables? ... Qu'estce que le sublime? Ou entre le sublime?'.5The seventeenth-century critics found the sublime in a fairly wide range of literature: in the Bible, eloquence, epic, tragedy, and lyric poetry; but in their discussions there is a conspicuous absence of illustrative examples from French authors. As far as epic is concerned, the only comments made about French epic poets are purely negative ones: Scudery's Alaric is too pompous, Saint-Amant's Moise sauve too trivial.6 Tragedy is the one case where modern examples of the sublime are given to complement the copious references to the Greeks, and even these appear relatively late in the day. It was in the 1701 edition of the Preface to his Traite du sublime that Boileau quoted le Vieil Horace's 'Qu'il mourut! …

Reviewed by: Theater: Sur le déclin du théâtre en Amérique (et comment il peut résister en France) Marie Pecorari Frédéric Martel , Theater: Sur le déclin du théâtre en Amérique (et comment il peut résister en France)Paris: La Découverte, 2006, 235 pp. Frédéric Martel's ambitious analysis of the decline of American theater fills a void in French scholarship. American theater has sparked very little interest in France since the early 1970s, outside of the odd special issue of professional journals. The book is the result of four years of fieldwork and archival research in the United States, funded by the French government. Martel, a journalist, does not approach American theater from an aesthetic perspective (although he is not immune to value judgments) but focuses instead on its socioeconomic standing. His methodology draws on sociology, cultural studies, political science, history, and a wealth of primary sources. (A quick look at the exhaustive online bibliography at www.fredericmartel.com reveals the paucity of strictly theatrical sources). Martel's account of the decline of American theater will come as no surprise to any observer. Among the most striking omissions to the bibliography, professional journals such as PAJ: A Journal of Performing Arts and TDR: The Drama Review would have provided a basis and precedent for the discussion of the demise and avoided unjustified claims to originality. (Richard Schechner's landmark essay on the same topic, "The Decline and Fall of the (American) Avant-Garde," is, after all, twenty-five years old). The publication is explicitly geared toward French readers who are knowledgeable about their own cultural system, and they are encouraged to draw cross-cultural analogies. The title is somewhat deceptive, however: only a handful of pages are devoted to how French and European theaters might buck the tide of commercialism to which their American counterpart has fallen prey—a comparison that, given the radically different economies of culture (all-but-free market vs. heavily government subsidized), may not come across as convincing in the first place. The transatlantic perspective might have been more relevant from an aesthetic standpoint. The book's strengths lie primarily in its scope. The few previous French publications on American theater were in fact devoted to the New York stage, but Martel gives valuable insights into the economic organization of regional, not-for-profit, [End Page 175] and community scenes. He insists on the vitality of American theater, provided the distinction between low- and highbrow, and between professional and amateur practices, is overlooked: "Ce que j'ai appelé le déclin et la fin du théâtre en Amérique n'est pas la fin du théâtre en soi ou de tout le théâtre. . . . Ce qui est en jeu, c'est quel théâtre et quelle sorte de culture vont survivre. . . . un théâtre de qualité peut survivre, mais il ne peut pas vivre. Il peut survivre dans les marges, les universités et les caves, mais mourir au grand jour" [By the decline and fall of theater in America I did not mean the end of theater itself or as a practice. . . . What is at stake here is what kind of theater and culture will survive. . . . quality theater can survive but cannot live. It can survive in the margins, like universities and cellars, and appear officially dead] (217). The book is peppered with bracketed Anglicisms, which the author deems useful to the reader's comprehension, though their number and relevance seem questionable. The publication is the condensed, preliminary version of a comprehensive study to be published by Gallimard later in the fall. Marie Pecorari New York University/Paris IV Sorbonne Copyright © 2007 Southern Comparative Literature Association

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