Writing, Reading, Grieving: Essays in Memory of Suzanne Dow ed. by Ruth Cruickshank, Adam Watt

Abstract

Reviews 229 qu’il pourrait aussi intéresser les historiens de la Première Guerre mondiale ou de la presse française. Case Western Reserve University (OH) Christine M. Cano Cruickshank, Ruth, and Adam Watt, eds. Writing, Reading, Grieving: Essays in Memory of Suzanne Dow. Nottingham French Studies 53.1 (Spring 2014). Pp. 114. $82.50. Inspired by a 2012 conference held in memory of Dow, this issue illustrates “central facets of her work, from female experience and madness to the insights of psychoanalysis”(vii). Perhaps best known for her monograph, Madness in TwentiethCentury French Women’s Writing: Leduc, Duras, Beauvoir, Cardinal, Hyvrard (Peter Lang, 2009), Dow died in 2011, before she could complete a book on Beckett. In brief prefatory remarks, the editors set the tone for this collection by expressing admiration for her “open-armed embracing of the challenging, the complex, the downright difficult” (viii). Appropriately, the first contribution is a transcription by Edmund Chambers of a paper Dow gave in 2010 in which she meticulously documents the overlooked impact of Beckett’s work on Lacan. In similar fashion, Katherine Shingler shows how punning structures in Apollinaire’s Calligrammes convey more generally the play of “the unfettered, irrational or pre-rational mind” (20). For Lucy O’Meara, Georges Perec’s La disparition and Anne Garréta’s La décomposition engage Oulipian restrictions and generic expectations of crime fiction to raise fundamental questions about how we come to terms with the past. The influence of Dow’s manner is apparent as well in the analysis by Katie Jones of Nina Yargekov’s novel, Tuer Catherine, in which the complex interaction of narrative levels and multiple voices suggests the underlying presence of madness. For Helen Vassallo, Le jour où Nina Simone a cessé de chanter, by actress and author Darina Al-Joundi, stages the challenges faced by Lebanese women in their effort to negotiate geographical, social, and ideological constraints in search of an elusive sense of freedom. Co-editor Cruickshank rereads Les belles images, not just as Beauvoir’s depiction of intra-family drama, but “as a strikingly prescient (if unintentional) reflection of French co-implication in the global politics of consumption ” (88). The final two contributions, by Thomas Baldwin and co-editor Watt, deal with Proustian texts, albeit in very different fashion. Baldwin’s examination of a scene between the Proustian narrator and Charlus in Le côté de Guermantes is weighed down by numerous, substantial footnotes to writings by Barthes and Deleuze.Watt, intrigued by the similarity of very close mother-son relationships for both Proust and Barthes, traces in Journal de deuil, published posthumously, “the intimate interweave of Barthes’s relation to his mother and his relation to Proust, considered at once as bereaved son and tutelary writer”(112). The range and diverse nature of the offerings in this commemorative issue pay fitting tribute to Dow’s inspiring scholarship and do indeed, as the editors hoped,“mark the enduring resonance of her work and life”(vii). University of Kansas John T. Booker Delogu, Daisy. Allegorical Bodies: Power and Gender in Late Medieval France. Toronto: UP of Toronto, 2015. ISBN 978-1-4426-4187-7. Pp. viii + 273. $75. This volume takes as its point of departure a seeming paradox in late medieval French cultural history: the same historical moment that witnessed the formalization of Salic law, which excluded women from royal succession, also favored the emergence of female allegorical figures as personifications of France. Daisy Delogu’s innovative study of late medieval political allegory vividly outlines what was at stake during the troubled reign of Charles VI (1380–1422). As a response to the king’s periodic fits of madness and the problems of succession that continued to destabilize the realm, authors such as Eustache Deschamps, Christine de Pizan, Jean Gerson, and Jean de Montreuil began to imagine the body politic in new ways. Delogu traces the critical move from metaphors of the kingdom as a human body to gendered allegorical representations that depicted France as a courtly object of desire, a damsel in distress, and a beloved mother. Such conceptual frameworks allowed writers to fashion powerful images of national identity in order to influence real...