Les aléas de l’utopie canadienne: figures et représentations dans la littérature et le cinéma ed. by Marie-Lyne Piccione, Bernadette Rigal-Cellard

Abstract

l’Encyclopédie,” while O’Dea carefully traces the conflicting meanings of the term ‘philosophe’ throughout Rousseau’s work in “Soundings: the Word ‘philosophe’ in Rousseau’s Works and Correspondence.” The section ends by turning to politics with Kiyotaka Kawai’s “Rousseau citoyen de Genève et sa critique du système représentatif.” Part three, “Dialogues et confrontations,” zeroes in on specific debates. Two essays focus on Diderot: Carole Martin’s “Formes de l’empathie chez Rousseau et Diderot” (which successfully uses reproductions of Dürer and Vivant Denon to illustrate a complex theory about specularity), and John T. Scott’s “Another Dangerous Supplement: Diderot’s Dialogue with Rousseau in the Supplément au voyage de Bougainville.” Maria Leone’s “La nouvelle Héloïse et ses lecteurs philosophes ” shows how Rousseau integrated the problem of reception into his novel; together with Perrin’s and Volpilhac-Augers’s essays, it opens up a rich discussion of the hermeneutics of reading in Rousseau. Julia Simon turns the debate over to doux commerce in “Rousseau and the Philosophes on Commerce,” while Nathan Martin opens it onto music in “Rousseau and the Philosophes on Music History.” Martin Stern concludes the section with a reflection on the trope of conversion (“‘Voilà la véritable philosophie’: les conversions de Rousseau comme clef d’intelligibilité de sa relation aux ‘philosophes’”). The volume closes with Hulliung’s survey of the ‘Enlightenment wars’ of the twentieth century, and an invitation to move the discussion forward by looking back at Rousseau’s dispute with the philosophes. Ohio State University Louisa Shea PICCIONE, MARIE-LYNE, et BERNADETTE RIGAL-CELLARD, éd. Les aléas de l’utopie canadienne: figures et représentations dans la littérature et le cinéma. Pessac: PU de Bordeaux, 2010. ISBN 978-2-86781-691-8. Pp. 234. 18 a. This collection of twenty-four articles was published in the series “Gulf Stream,” dedicated to the study of the cultures and literatures of North America, the Caribbean, Ireland, and the United Kingdom. Along with three other books, it is a result of four years of research by faculty at University of Bordeaux and other French universities. With the exception of one essay on an Anglophone author , this work analyzes multiple permutations of utopia and dystopia in Francophone Canadian literature and film of the last fifty years. Acknowledging the difficulty of defining the term ‘utopia,’ the editors have chosen to organize the essays into three metaphorical divisions: “La source,” “L’arbre,” and “L’horizon.” The first treats the original notion of utopia and early utopias specific to Canada. The second illustrates the range and variety of utopian dreams, and the third demonstrates their elusive and often disappointing nature. In “La source,” Piccione considers four works by Michel Tremblay that describe an ideal Saskatchewan, his mother’s birthplace. The two essays by Danielle Latour-Lefort stand out: the first traces the theme of utopia in fifteen works of Antonine Maillet; the second analyzes Pélagie-la-Charrette, in which the exiled Acadians live according to the rules of an ideal society in their journey toward their idealized homeland. Turning to poetry, Yannick Resch finds that for Gaston Miron, utopia is in the heart of the poet. In the final two articles of “La source,” Daniel Marcheix finds in Sergio Kokis’s La gare a metaphor for contemporary Reviews 579 Quebec, and studies the protagonist’s desire to know and understand the Other (in this case, Hassidic Jews) in Myriam Beaudoin’s Hadassa. In “L’arbre,” Emmanuelle Quéré studies enchanted gardens in works by Gabrielle Roy and Marco Micone, and in a second essay, analyzes the fairy-tale world in several novels by Jacques Poulin and Michel Tremblay, where cats converse with and help their human companions. Antony Soron explores the cultural disconnect experienced by a Haitian immigrant in Laferrière’s satirical Comment faire l’amour avec un nègre sans se fatiguer. Marie-Pierre Andron and Christiane Albert treat quests for mythical utopias in the works of Sylvain Trudel; Marie-Béatrice Samzun analyzes dystopia in works by Gaétan Soucy, and Daniel Marcheix infers a utopian discourse in Jacques Savoie’s Un train de...