French Genetic Studies at a Crossroads

Abstract

Over the past twenty years, (post)modern interrogations about the nature of the Author, the Text, and Writing have slowly crept into the relatively routine business of preparing critical editions of canonical texts. This has spawned the development of a new concern for what precedes the text (sketches, scenarios, notebooks, manuscripts, etc.) or blurs its limits-whether material (the margins of a manuscript, the paper on which it was consigned) or not (the evolution of a project, its reception, etc.). In fact, what started out as a mere gain in technical sophistication within a restricted and ancillary quarter of literary studies now appears as a focus for the potential development of a much-needed renewal of theoretical thought on literary creation. As the founding father of the fledgling discipline puts it: What is at stake is the whole of our ideas as to the nature of a literary work, as to the status of a text, as to the aesthetic dimension of a social communication (Hay 1987: 327).1 It should be noted that this new turn has mostly affected France, a country where nothing much had taken place since the disappearance of Roland Barthes, in contrast to the United States where, meanwhile, literary theorists have embraced deconstruction with so much enthusiasm that next to nothing subsists in the way of historical, authorial, and textual studies. The gulf between the continents is now so wide in