De l’autoportrait à l’autobiographie by Jan Baetens, Alexander Streitberger

Abstract

Reviews 253 previously published material), even if the presentation remains on the whole more impressionistic than entirely convincing. University of Kansas John T. Booker Baetens, Jan, et Alexander Streitberger. De l’autoportrait à l’autobiographie. Caen: Minard, 2011. ISBN 978-2-256-91166-8. Pp. 263. 28 a. This attractive publication’s back cover states:“les études réunies dans ce volume collectif traitent de la façon dont la photographie peut s’allier aux mots pour retracer un vécu personnel.” This description is an indispensable complement to the work’s title because it underscores the importance of photographs throughout the collective volume. Indeed, the “self-portrait” of the title is meant to point toward one of the oldest genres of photography, according to the well-written introduction by the coeditors . This is not the only recent publication to focus on the interplay of photographs and words in works containing autobiographical elements, but it is one of the best, thanks to its balance; while the chapters deal with a vast array of predominantly French-language works, their analyses come together to form a cohesive whole. There is a surprising lack of repetition in this book, even if some of the canonical theoretical sources reappear from time to time, including Roland Barthes and Susan Sontag, along with Gilles Mora and Claude Nori’s 1983 Manifeste photobiographique, the subject of a wonderful chapter co-written by Jan Baetens and Anneleen Masschelein. Other chapters turn to authors and artists including Marguerite Duras, Georges Perec, Hervé Guibert,Alix Cléo Roubaud, Denis Roche, Jean Le Gac, and Sophie Calle.While much has been written about the role of photographs in the work of Duras, Perec, and Calle, the chapters in this publication contain new insights and refreshing perspectives that are inspired in part by their ‘conversation’ with and juxtaposition to studies of other media. In their introduction, Baetens and Streitberger indicate that this volume bears witness in its very structure to the fact that photography, literature, and plastic arts can no longer be compartmentalized. Bringing together the terms ‘self-portrait’—a description of oneself that is more‘analytical’since it is conceived of in visual terms— and‘autobiography’—a description that has always been made up of‘narrative’—allows the scholars who have contributed to this volume to address the many questions caught up in these literary and visual creations from a variety of theoretical angles. Baetens and Streitberger argue convincingly that ‘contemporary practices’ of life narratives are strikingly original and therefore deserve our attention. The co-editors also evoke the crucial interplay between lived experience and the imaginary, between the real world and the symbolic; this is an interaction that comes out in unusual and diverse ways in the selected texts. The introduction highlights the fact that recent autobiographical texts constantly draw attention to the complexity of memory, revealing how its fragile, fragmentary nature obliges each author and artist to continually reinvent his or her own biography. This volume participates in very clear and helpful ways in an ongoing critical discussion of texts that are composed of words and photographs (whether real or imagined), and provides a valuable addition to a growing bibliography on the role of visual contributions to autobiographical works. University of Notre Dame (IN) Alison Rice Barr, Philippe. Rétif de la Bretonne spectateur nocturne: une esthétique de la pauvreté. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2012. ISBN 978-90-420-3539-3. Pp. 192. 40 a. Pornographic and prolific often come to mind when recalling printer and writer Nicolas-Edme Rétif/Restif de la Bretonne. Nicknamed le Voltaire des femmes de chambre and le Rousseau du ruisseau, Rétif laced his Balzacian-like output with familial and voyeuristic details excerpted from his experience as a member of the Third Estate. Barr, however, takes a different view of him in this treatise. He contributes to the rehabilitation of Rétif by portraying him not as a peasant philosophe of the lower classes but as an artiste, or more closely, a poète who depicted the poor with esthetic sensibility. In Les nuits de Paris, published in 16 parties between 1788 and 1793, Rétif uses Paris after dark as the setting to...