Corneille à l’école républicaine: du mythe héroïque à l’imaginaire politique en France par Ralph Albanese

Abstract

provide clear guidance and useful strategies for effective language learning and teaching. Teachers have access to a scope and sequence, instructional suggestions , and more. Students are provided assistance through graphic organizers, explanations, and other examples. Students are also prompted to reflect on their perceptions and beliefs by comparing and contrasting the similarities and differences between the first language and culture and the target language and culture. The primary strength of the current edition is its focus on the standards, particularly its emphasis on the presentational, interpretive, and interpersonal aspects of the communicative approach as well as its incorporation of authentic cultural materials. In addition, the expanded technological offerings undoubtedly will appeal to those who are acquainted with and accustomed to this format. However, there is an inherent expectation that students will be self-motivated enough to research the wealth of resources provided and to effectively review the material provided. While this is certainly appropriate and should be encouraged, it may prove challenging for those who are not acclimated to this approach. Such students may need additional guidance and support in motivation and regulation . Nonetheless, the current edition of Motifs provides clear and engaging information and direction that encourage confidence in the development of the target language skills of speaking, listening, reading, and writing in order for students to become self-sufficient and reflective learners. Kent State University (OH) Rebecca L. Chism Literary History and Criticism edited by Marion Geiger ALBANESE, RALPH. Corneille à l’école républicaine: du mythe héroïque à l’imaginaire politique en France, 1800–1950. Paris: L’Harmattan, 2008. ISBN 978-2-296-06639-7. Pp. 364. 32 a. After Molière and La Fontaine, this is the third in a series of studies by Albanese that focus on the reception of classical authors during the nineteenth and the early twentieth centuries in France. Like the previous volumes, this book is the result of extensive archival research: innumerable school manuals, official publications from the ministry of education, articles of journalistic and scholarly criticism, including monographic and broad-based studies on seventeenth-century writers by leading academics and intellectuals, and even transcripts of public commemorations or political speeches are considered. Albanese has shouldered the daunting task of presenting the mountains of printed opinion related to the work of Pierre Corneille and the meaning of his memory in post-Revolutionary France. Albanese asserts at the start that Corneille’s greatness goes beyond simple artistic excellence: it has served to inspire national pride and heroic defense of France’s claims to territorial and cultural hegemony against constant challenge. Corneille, in fact, becomes synonymous with cultural greatness itself: le grand Corneille is an indispensable reminder to schoolchildren of France’s past and future glory. The anxious years that separate France’s collapse in the debacle of 1870 and the simmering threat before August 1914 form the historical crucible in which this cultural and spiritual bouclier is forged. Among the most compelling pages in this 162 FRENCH REVIEW 85.1 book are those in which Albanese chronicles the struggle for France’s soul in the lead-up to and the aftermath of the drôle de guerre as a dead serious war of books. Corneille is the standard, even the sword wielded by Brasillach in favor of a fascist France and, at the same time, by de Gaulle in defense of France against Nazism and defeatism. While holding to an academic restraint and respect for the facts, Albanese documents the role Corneille played in de Gaulle’s rhetoric, his sense of devoir, his readiness to answer the call to greatness, and in his vision of France’s emergence from its longest, deepest modern crisis. Perhaps because the other stakes were so high, Albanese seems to have been disinclined in this book to delve too far into the realities of the école républicaine, the place it reserved for literature and its larger aspirations. It is also true that, in this third time around the schoolyard, Albanese has touched on many of these questions before. Perhaps for this reason, the review of Corneille scholarship during the Third Republic is both thorough and lacking in discrimination or authorial engagement: most studies are allowed to...