Engagement, désengagement: tonalités et stratégies

Abstract

advertising and advocates closer collaboration between the worlds of literature and economics. The volume was published before Beigbeder was awarded the Prix Renaudot for Un roman français (2009) as a more profound recognition of his work by the literary establishment. While we can hope this achievement will be addressed in future critical studies, this collection is an important step towards a deeper critical appreciation of Beigbeder’s writing. University of London Institute, Paris Russell Williams Études françaises 44.1. Engagement, désengagement: tonalités et stratégies. Montréal: PU de Montréal, 2008. ISBN 978-2-7606-2101-5. Pp. 173. $12,00 Can. This volume contains nine essays that bring to light the complexities of the genre known as littérature engagée. In the introduction, Danielle Forget, in the spirit of Sartre, defines the term engagement as the writer’s active and deliberate commitment to one or more sociopolitical causes through the texts s/he produces . Given the uniqueness of the relationship between author and reader, textual and literary spaces, by definition, thus become privileged sites of social activism. At the same time, this volume demonstrates how a writer’s diverse textual strategies, including the act of désengagement, can be viewed as protest and insubordination and thus as alternative forms of engagement. In “Forme et responsabilité: rhétorique et éthique de l’engagement littéraire contemporain,” Emmanuel Bouju analyzes the relationship between social ethics, literary aesthetics , and littérature engagée. In “Fuites et invectives dans les romans de Réjean Ducharme,” Marie-Hélène Larochelle considers the works of Réjean Ducharme in order to show that the author’s frequent masking of anger is yet another textual strategy of resistance through disengagement. In “Que peut la fiction? Yasmina Khadra, le terrorisme et le conflit israélo-palestinien,” the themes of terrorism and Muslim fundamentalism in Khadra’s works are examined within the framework of engaged literature in order to explore the recent rise in global terrorism and the sociopolitical dichotomies that exist between the West and the Orient. Maria Dolores Vivero Garcia in “Jeux et enjeux de l’énonciation humoristique: l’exemple des Caves du Vatican d’André Gide,” discusses Gide’s use of humor as a textual strategy that seeks to create distance between the speaker, the reader, and the point of view in question. Thus, humor draws the reader into a relationship of complicity with the narrative voice. The following essay contains Danielle Forget’s reading of Noël Audet’s Frontières, ou tableaux d’Amérique which features the protagonist’s nomadic journey across the American continent in search of universal truth and happiness. Similar to the protagonist in Audet’s novel, Lezama Lima’s short text “The Baroque Curiosity” evokes the theme of the quest for individual and collective identity within the cultural context of the Americas. In “Politique du poétique,” Jean-Michel Espitallier describes the artistic space of his poems as a site of political friction between himself and the world. Narrated in the first person, this article represents a meta-discourse on the relationship between l’écrivain engagé, the creative process, and reader reception. The last section of this volume contains two essays that focus on canonical works from the Renaissance to the twentieth century. Alain Schorderet, in “Saint-Amant, poète de l’hermétisme grotesque et du jeu,” identifies SaintAmant ’s works as a form of hermetic poetry inspired by Rabelais. Saint-Amant’s 356 FRENCH REVIEW 85.2 poetry thus mystifies the reader through an intricate system of signs and hidden meanings. In the final essay, “Des traces et des spectres: une lecture de Pompes funèbres de Jean Genet,” Melina Balcazar Moreno considers the literariness of Genet’s novel in order to show the relationship between ethics, poetics, and the political. She describes Pompes funèbres as privileging the intersection of the themes of death, memory, and history. The theoretical texts found within this issue of Études françaises provide a fascinating platform of discussion and analysis of the history, the limitations, and the very nature of littérature engagée. I recommend this volume to scholars of twentieth...