Proses du monde: les enjeux sociaux des styles littéraires par by Nelly Wolf

Abstract

Reviews 247 Barthes’s travels in his writing and personal relationships. Stafford contemplates a series of important voyages, including a number of influential trips to the Far East (89), as well as his residency in Morocco in the late 1960s while working as a visiting professor at Mohammed V University in Rabat (104). The 1970s ushered in a new era, and as the biographer states, Barthes returned to a“new, more modern France”(114). His homecoming was marked by increased public interest in his work, opening up a vulnerable space of intimacy characterized in part by veiled homosexuality. Such an invasion of the private propelled Barthes to analyze constructs of self, culminating in the publication of Sade, Fourier et Loyola. Non-Barthesian scholars will be interested to learn that the writer equally turned to unconventional subject matter in his quest to study language and form, including an often-overlooked preoccupation with fashion, which he studied through a post-structuralist lens. According to him, any given outfit can be redefined and redirected through a series of micro-changes (117). The simplicity and ease of Stafford’s writing style is refreshing and welcomed, although this series is not intended to challenge or displace more exhaustive biographical studies—but rather frame and contextualize significant events and writings, as a springboard for further analyses. Utah Valley University Walter S. Temple Wolf, Nelly. Proses du monde: les enjeux sociaux des styles littéraires. Lille: PU du Septentrion, 2014. ISBN 978-2-7574-0608-3. Pp. 262. 24 a. Published a decade after Le roman de la démocratie (PU de Vincennes, 2003) established an analogy between the modern novel and real-world democracy, Wolf’s ambitious study takes a similar sociocritical approach to textual analysis. Expanding upon Claude Duchet’s concept of une socialité des textes littéraires,Wolf shifts her focus to what she calls la socialité des styles romanesques and brings to light historical and political dimensions—so many enjeux sociaux—that inform the novel’s linguistic, rhetorical, lexical, and narrative features. Wolf proceeds from a concept of literary style defined as “l’empreinte d’un écrivain dans la langue,” and performs a series of detailed sociolectures on a corpus of more than a dozen novels written since the French Revolution (15). The book’s case studies are grouped into four tableaux of roughly equal length, each of which corresponds to a particular period in French history as well as to a seminal moment in the evolution of literary style. In the initial chapter titled Peuple,Wolf constructs a taxonomy of modes de diction démocratique— transactional,citational,fusional,and consensual—to illustrate the stylistic mechanisms through which the spoken and written language typical of the popular classes, immigrants , and religious minorities worked their way into French literary language over the course of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. While Wolf’s first two modes will be familiar to readers of Balzac, Hugo, and Flaubert—think of the incipit of Un cœur simple or the use of argot in Les misérables—it is in elaborating how the latter two modes gain prominence over time that Proses du monde presents intriguing possibilities for rethinking the dynamic linking history, society, and the literary imagination. Starting with George Sand’s halting quest for a stylistic framework that would accommodate both the popular language of her “democratic” characters and the narrative voice of an educated écrivaine-menuisier, Proses du monde traces the evolution of novelistic style from the privileging of a common national language in the experimental novels of Zola, to the écriture blanche associated with Camus and RobbeGrillet , to the elliptical sentences of Modiano’s amnesiac narrators, to Annie Ernaux’s signature écriture plate. The chapter“Migrations”examines how stylistic choices made by twentieth-century Jewish writers like Albert Cohen and Irène Némirovsky converted the limited social capital of immigrants into cultural assets that improved their standing within an increasingly democratic civil and literary society. In contrast, the final two chapters document the eclipse of the roman engagé and the postwar rise of a formalisme triomphant, which reflected a desire for greater artistic autonomy on the part of a generation of writers reluctant...