Annie Ernaux Research Articles

Annie Ernaux'nun Les Années (Yıllar) Adlı Eserinde Toplum, Bellek ve Yazın

Annie Ernaux'nun Les Années (Yıllar) adlı eseri yayımlandığı 2008 yılında Fransız yayın dünyasında büyük bir beğeniyle karşılandı ve bu kitap konusunda, her ne kadar klâsik anlamda bir roman olarak sınıflandırılmasa da, “roman total” (tam/bütünleyici roman) nitelemesi yapıldı. Annie Ernaux kanserle mücadele ederken yazdığı, yaşamının son otuz yılı süresince arayışına çıktığı yazma biçimini sonunda yakalayabilmiş; kendi yaşamından yola çıkarak savaş sonrası Fransız toplumu ve kültürüne ilişkin her türden olayı kayıt altına aldığı bu kitabını, bildiği ve tanık olduğu her şeyi ölmeden geride kalanlara iletme kaygısıyla yazmış gibi görünüyor. Kişisel konuları ele aldığı yazılarının arka planında bile hep toplumsal yaşam ve toplumsal yaşamı oluşturan kültürel, siyasi, tarihsel olaylara yer veren Annie Ernaux, bu kitabını tam anlamıyla bir “toplumsal bellek” yazını olarak kurgulamıştır; çünkü bireysel kimliğinin oluşumunda toplumsal olayları nasıl yorumlayıp, nasıl anımsadığımızın ne denli önemli olduğunun ayrımındadır. Yirminci yüzyılın ikinci yarısından başlayarak insan psikolojisinin toplumsal bellekle yakından ilişkili olduğunu düşünen düşünürler artmış, bunun yansımalarına yazarlar eserlerinde yer vermeye başlamışlardır. Bir beceri olarak toplumsal bellek kimi kılgıları canlı tutmaya çalışırken, modern yaşamın bunu sekteye uğrattığı tartışma götürmez bir gerçektir. Bu bağlamda Annie Ernaux, 1940'lı yıllardan başlayarak 2008 yılına gelinceye değin Fransız toplumunun değişik kesimlerinin yaşantılarını kayda almış ve yazar olarak bir etnolog gibi çalışarak, yazınını bireysel yaşanmışlıktan toplumsal bellek boyutuna taşıyabilmiştir. Makalemizde yazarın kaybolmaya yüz tutmuş tüm kültürel ve toplumsal imgeleri ele aldığı ve modern yaşamın unutturma çabalarıyla başa çıkmaya çalıştığı “müze kitabı” bellek yazını çerçevesinde irdelenmeye çalışılacaktır.

INTIMIDAD Y RELATO DE INFANCIA

Resumen: El relato autobiográfico de infancia se entiende en este artículocomo una de las representaciones literarias más renovadoras de la intimidaden la medida en que implica la reconstrucción imaginaria de un yo infantilque ya no existe, pero habita como un fantasma la memoria del adulto. Estapresencia fantasmática toma formas diversas en los relatos de infancia deAnnie Ernaux y de Luis Landero, cuya escritura indaga en la persistenciaactual de los sentimientos de vergüenza (en la primera) y de culpa (en elsegundo), y en la dificultad de recordarlos y contarlos.Abstract: The autobiography of childhood is taken in this article as one ofthe most innovative literary representations of intimacy in that it impliesthe imaginary reconstruction of a childhood self that no longer exists butinhabits as a ghost the memory of the adult. This ghostly presence adoptsdifferent forms in the childhood autobiographies of Annie Ernaux andLuis Landero, whose writing explore the ongoing persistence of feelingsof shame (in the former) and guilt (in the latter), and the difficulty in remembering and expressing those feelings.

Das Andere erzählen - lebensgeschichtliche Reflexionen in populären Selbstzeugnissen

In contemporary autobiographical narratives, the experience of « otherness» seems to be a necessary condition for life-stories. The experiences of shame and exclusion due to class affiliation, sexual orientation or other habitual dispositions are at the centre of these educational stories, whether by Didier Eribon, Édouard Louis, Annie Ernaux or Dirk von Lowtzow. In these texts, the past of being different appears in its entire presence, is permanently present, but at the same time changeable and ungraspable. It is the historical narrative as narrative «work on the self» that makes this permanent visitation of the past visible and turns traumatic experiences into historical experiences of otherness for others as well.

Really

The contemporary French novel is striking in its diversity, its complexity, and its resistance to easy classification. This is not an utterly new phenomenon (one recalls both Gide and Queneau, in the 1920s and 1930s respectively, describing the novel as a fundamentally lawless genre), but it is legitimate to say that the novel's horizon of possibility has broadened during our time, allowing for new kinds of expression. Those latter may be based in formalist experimentation (I'm thinking of writers like Jacques Roubaud, or Paul Fournel, or Stéphane Vanderhaeghe), or personal confession (Édouard Louis, Camille Laurens, Philippe Forest, for instance), or an insistence upon narrativity (Jean Rouaud, Christian Gailly, Christian Oster), or autofiction (Christine Angot, Annie Ernaux, Chloé Delaume), or social and political concerns (Gérard Gavarry, François Bon, Laurent Mauvignier), or hyperfiction (Manuela Draeger, Lutz Bassmann, Elli Kronauer), or indeed in a conscious hybridization of any of the foregoing directions.

Vérité littéraire et vérité scientifique

What is literary truth ? More specifically : is literary truth of the same kind as scientific truth or is it a different kind ? To answer this question, the work of Annie Ernaux is carefully examined. It is shown that this autobiographical work aims to restore the truth of the atmospheres encountered by its author more than the truth conceived as a matter of facts. These atmospheres form the background on which everything is revealed. From there, a difference is established between the truths that science deals with (defined as factual truths) and the truths that literature deals with (defined background truths). In this way, a new conception of the relationship between the two kinds of truth is proposed.

Il valore finzionale della memoria

Memory is commonly viewed as the psychic function of recreating in our mind past experiences, as a simple static recollection. On the contrary, it involves a much broader semantics, a prismatic area of meaning, a dynamic and complex process. Therefore, in the spatiality and temporality of fictional worlds, memory is hybrid, depository of falsehood and, nevertheless, vehicle of an experience-shaping truth. If the boundaries between memory’s falsities and imagination is unstable, the distance separating the mind recollection from a supposed objective reality constitutes, precisely, the cognitive process of fictional worlds. Analysing Borges’s Funes (in Ficciones), Italo Calvino’s Le citta invisibili, Alice Munro’s Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage and Les Annees by Annie Ernaux, this paper focuses on the connection between memory and identity, showing the profound link with forgery, revision and falsehood of speech acts, whilst remaining in the domain of verisimilitude. In this sense, the narration of memory is both subjective and objective: because the narrative is conveyed by memories and memory is thematized by the act of narrating itself. The image, true or false, true and false, reflect the ambivalent quality that memory project on objects. From this perspective, memory interact in a very peculiar way with the narrative, working continuously on the true/false dichotomy.

'Il aurait peut-être préféré avoir une autre fille': Paternal Mourning in the Work of Annie Ernaux

Annie Ernaux discovered, at the age of ten, that her sister, Ginette Marie Thérèse Duchesne, had died of diphtheria in 1938, two years prior to Ernaux's birth. Ernaux relates the circumstances of her sister's death and parents' grief in Une femme and in several subsequent texts, culminating in L'Autre fille, a letter addressed to her deceased sister. In the latter text, Ernaux poignantly describes her parents' grief and this article examines Ernaux's perception of her father's mourning processes as depicted across a range of texts. The analysis of Ernaux's writing is informed by Freudian concepts of mourning and grief. According to Freudian theory, when one enters the melancholic stage of grieving, the lost loved one causes a diminishment of the ego. Ginette's death was clearly a profound loss for her father. Ernaux's mother, Blanche, recalls Alphonse Duchesne's reaction: 'mon mari était fou quand il t'a trouvée morte en rentrant de son travail.' (L'Autre fille, p. 16). It is significant, therefore, to note that Alphonse Duchesne, as described by Ernaux, particularly in La Place and La Honte, displays many of the behavioural elements which Freud considered melancholic including a decrease in self-regard – as can be seen through many examples in Ernaux's corpus of her father's abasement, humiliation and emasculation. Our reading of Ernaux's texts will be enhanced by Cathy Caruth's conception of trauma as 'the story of a wound that cries out'. By combining both of these approaches – the melancholia of grief and the trauma of loss – this article engages in a close reading of paternal experience of the death of a child, as related by Ernaux, with a focus on how this impacts on both the physiological and physical self.

Dementia and the Paradigm of the Camp: Thinking Beyond Giorgio Agamben\u2019s Concept of \u201cBare Life\u201d

This essay discusses the use of analogies drawn from the Holocaust in cultural representations and critical scholarship on dementia. The paper starts with a discussion of references to the death camp in cultural narratives about dementia, specifically Annie Ernaux’s account of her mother’s dementia in I Remain in Darkness. It goes on to develop a critique of Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben’s work on biopolitics and “bare life,” focusing specifically on the linguistic foundations of his thinking. This underpins a consideration of the limitations of his philosophy and ontologically derived notions of weakness and passivity in imagining life with dementia as a potential site of agency or as the locus for transformative ideas about care, community, and non-instrumentalist conceptions of human value.

Hazy Analogies: Sexual and Colonial Complicities in Annie Ernaux's <em>Mémoire de Fille</em>

Abstract This article examines complicity as an implicit theme in French writer Annie Ernaux's autobiographical book Mémoire de fille (2016). Through a series of close readings I study how Ernaux's complicity with her sexual violation at a vacation colony in France in the late 1950s is related to descriptions of complicit language and social norms specific to the context of the Algerian War. I argue that we are tempted to connect the different forms of individual and collective complicity in the book but are not provided with enough material to grasp the nature of the connection. I suggest that this tension stages complicity—what Mark Sanders articulates as the “folded-together-ness of being”—as a state of entanglement with violence that complicates conventional distinctions between individual and collective experience. I then turn to reflect on the issues my argument raises given the author's authorial project and her own use of the word “complicity” in relation to the process of interpretation. By situating my analysis with regard to Ernaux's statements and dominant interpretative approaches to her work, I acknowledge the possibilities and limitations of prioritizing the insights of Ernaux's text over her own statements about what she sees her work to be doing.

Escrever (sobre) os afetos: a escrita íntima de Annie Ernaux

Os romances da francesa Annie Ernaux, considerados pela crítica literária como inscritos no contemporâneo gênero “autoficção”, parecem construir toda uma cenografia dos afetos que põe o Eu em diálogo com o Outro. O movimento dos afetos que perpassa obras como La Place (1983), Une femme (1987) e Journal du dehors (1993), quaisquer sejam seus fluxos ─ do interior para o exterior, do exterior para o interior ─ encenam a constituição mesma do sujeito, indelevelmente inscrita em uma comunidade, familiar, fraternal, coletiva. A proposta aqui é, pois, percorrer essas quatro autoficções procurando nelas reconhecer uma particular escrita do(s) afeto(s).

A recusa do “eu” autobiográfico em Les Années

Este artigo tem o objetivo de analisar à luz dos artigos “Apparition et disparition du témoin: ‘l’autobiographie vide’”, de Yvon Inizan (2015), e “Éthique du récit testimonial, Annie Ernaux”, de Jérôme Meizoz (2010), como se dá, em Les années, a construção de uma autobiografia impessoal, coletiva e vazia, sem um “eu” e, ao mesmo tempo, a partir de um indivíduo. Com isso, se busca compreender algumas questões que subjazem à escolha da autora de recusar o “eu” justamente em uma autobiografia. Em um primeiro momento, são apresentados o projeto e a estrutura do Les années; em seguida, é analisado como o projeto se concretiza na materialidade do texto; e, por fim, são feitas algumas reflexões sobre as escolhas enunciativas da autora na construção dessa obra.

Mémoire de fille, ou comment écrire (avec la voix de) « cette fille »

Focusing on Annie Ernaux’s Mémoire de fille, and drawing insight from both a recent interview with the author and from historian Arlette Farge’s work on the use of archives, this paper considers briefly how Ernaux uses her archived letters to give voice to her “former self” and to a generation of girls whose public behavior was inevitably subject to evaluation and judgment.

“I am she who does not speak about herself”: The Impersonal Autobiography

This article examines how some contemporary autobiographies avoid narratives told from a first person viewpoint. Rejecting a philosophy of the subject that favors the first person pronoun over the other persons in language, Annie Ernaux’s impersonal autobiography The Years (2008) favors a mode of remembering that is collective rather than individual. But the narrator’s memories fall prey to a capitalist production system that denies the body while technology takes over the past, eliminating the subject as the owner of her memories.

The Journey Home: Annie Ernaux's Retour à Yvetot

The Journey Home:Annie Ernaux's Retour à Yvetot Natalie Edwards (bio) Traveling is a brutality.It forces you to trust strangers and to lose sightof all that familiar comfort of home and friends.You are constantly off balance.Nothing is yours except the essential things:air, sleep, dreams, sea, the sky. Cesare Pavese1 This article examines a very curious journey: not a journey to a destination, a record of an adventure, exploration or immigration, but a journey back to a home that the author had long avoided. Annie Ernaux was born in Lillebonne and grew up in the small, rural Normandy town of Yvetot. She has recounted her departure from this town in a succession of autobiographical texts that allude to the discomfort she associates with it. Having left to pursue her studies, she only returned for short visits to her parents' café-épicerie. Throughout her long career as a successful writer, representatives of the town have frequently invited her to attend events there but she has always declined. In an interview with Normandie Actu, Ernaux explains her reluctance thus: "Il y avait, à cette époque, encore beaucoup de gens qui m'avaient connue dans mon enfance. J'étais encore pour eux 'La fille du pays'. C'était pour moi très dur de revenir et je ne voulais pas vivre ce moment-là" (n.p.). In 2013, however, at the age of 73, she returned to Yvetot for a conference and subsequently published Retour à [End Page 344] Yvetot: the text of her speech, the transcript of the public interview she gave and of the questions she took from the audience, and photographs of her in Yvetot. In this article, I first examine the place of Yvetot within Ernaux's oeuvre. I then analyze the way in which she presents this enigmatic journey home in Retour à Yvetot as a tentative, collective endeavor in which she extends both her identification with her readers and her portrayal of Yvetot in her life and work. I show that by creating a plurivocal, multi-layered work that combines images and text, Ernaux further nuances what Nancy K. Miller identifies as the cornerstone of this author's oeuvre: it works the border between self and other that is "the potential for identification or repudiation, sympathy or revulsion, love or violence" (But Enough About Me 112). Evolving Depictions of Yvetot Yvetot has long occupied the backdrop of Ernaux's work, appearing as a distant presence in many of her texts. The recurring references to her parents' café-épicerie, the streets of the town and the school all strike a note of familiarity with readers of Ernaux's work. Yet these incursions into her texts are simply thumbnail sketches, alluded to but never described in any detail; whereas towns are awarded almost the status of characters in the work of some authors, such as Clos-Salembier for Hélène Cixous, Cherchell for Assia Djebar, or Sadec for Marguerite Duras, Yvetot is always firmly in the background for Ernaux. The frequent abbreviation to the allusive "Y" in texts such as Les Armoires vides is emblematic of the status accorded to the town in this author's work. The character of Denise in this fictional work presages the representation of shame, discomfort and even disgust associated with the author's place of origin; the local population who frequent the café are variously portrayed as lewd, unclean and untrustworthy, the few shops are provincial and old-fashioned, the streets are filthy and the woods are dangerous, and all of this is contrasted negatively with the middle-class people, culture and geography of the university town.2 Nora Cottille-Foley has even noted that urine is mentioned forty-four times in this text (888). Ernaux is well known for the depiction of shame associated with [End Page 345] class difference that pervades her work, beginning with this autobiographical novel.3 Yet Ernaux's representation of Yvetot is far from onesided. The town has been a constant presence in her work, as she continually returns to her place of origin to explore not just her memories and the nature of her self-knowledge but also the effects of socio-economic...

Producing a "Relevant" Translation: A Derridean Approach to Annie Ernaux's L'Evénement

This article proposes an examination of the English rendering of Annie Ernaux's text L'Evénement, translated by Tanya Leslie as Happening. I seek not to criticize Leslie's translation, but instead endeavor to offer an alternate, hermeneutic model of translation—that is, one that models itself on the notion of translations as variable according to a translator's interpretant. To be sure, the emphasis in the re-translated pages I proffer throughout my article is not on the notion of a single, indeed impossible, perfect translation, nor on the dissolution of the standard dialectic pitting the translation against the source. Rather, the suggested translations of words in what I translate as The Events stress the notion of the translator-scholar whose move to translate stems from a desire for the target-language version of a source text to achieve literary relevance in the Derridean sense of elevating the signifier to its meaning or value while guarding the signified of the source. While working locally on L'Evénement, my ultimate goal is to offer relevant translations—in the Derridean sense—of portions of Ernaux's text in an effort to suggest a way forward for literary translation more generally.

La ri-mediazione digitale e la dissolvenza dell’io nel Photojournal di Annie Ernaux

The aim of the paper is the analysis of the Photojournal, an autobiographical photo-text dispositiv that Annie Ernaux composes as a preface to the volume of her works, Ecrire la vie (Gallimard, 2011). The biographical section of the volume becomes an autobiographical premise, where the author combines 70 photos and 100 passages from her journals to explain the reasons of her writing. The pictures illustrate the material reality and the diaries express the subjective reality: two conditions that allowed the writing of the author's works.The analysis of the phototextual composition highlighted two depth effects: the palimpsest and the collage. Through the layers overlapping of the documents reproduced, Ernaux translates into the space of the pages, the time of the autobiographical narration (as well as in the prose of Les Annees, 2008).The digital remediation of the diaries allows to Ernaux to reconstruct a continuously evolving self, a nomadic being always shifting from a passage another. Through the computer screen Ernaux not only is reflected in her past, but she finds a “Display of One's Own”, which continue the research on the impersonal form of autobiographical narration and the fade out of the self.

Knowing my body, knowing myself: interpreting aborted corporeality in Annie Ernaux

This paper examines the motif of abortion in the works of Annie Ernaux and the ways in which the corporeal language of her narrators leads us to an empathetic understanding of abortion as a legitimate reproductive experience within the Symbolic Order of language. I argue that as her narrators seek out the procedure of abortion that is “unintelligible” within the parameters of their world, they are subject to an epistemological injustice that is corrected through the reader’s interpretation of their experience. Abortion allows Ernaux’s narrators to regain the self-understanding that pregnancy takes away.

Annie Ernaux and Sophie Calle: Agency and the Ambient Language of Everyday Life

Integral to the writing process of both Annie Ernaux and Sophie Calle is a practice of documenting the ambient language of urban environments—informational signs, overheard conversations, messages on screens. Ernaux’s Regarde les lumières mon amour (2014) and Calle’s Où et quand: Lourdes (2009) demonstrate how listening to this infra-text allows Ernaux and Calle to reveal the deeper, hidden logics of our increasingly planned and controlled urban settings. Doing so provides a means of recovering agency both in the context of a male-dominated world and in the face of the more generalized alienations of postmodern everyday life.

Les littératures en langue française: histoire, mythe et création éd. par Papa Samba Diop et Alain Vuillemin

exemplary space to identify this mise en scène de soi for here, one may observe the representation of a réseau, an imaginative space of textual sociability (195)—though he correctly admits that much more work is required to detail the subtle tensions of “une poétique de la revue”(260). Nonetheless, Dickow capably situates these authors’ attempts to craft a new lyric subject within the larger framework of French literary history, particularly in relation to Romanticism. He also makes valid connections to cultural events (for instance, the 1905 laïcité law and its impact on Cendrars’s Pâques; World War I’s looming shadow over all literary output during the war years). His ability to free-associate poets into surprising groups shows the depth of his critical acumen, such as when he compares Cendrars’s characteristically minimalist poetic line to those of Guillevic, Ungaretti, Creeley, and Beckett (173). To be in such wideranging company is a pleasure, though at times the essential pursuit becomes obscured through discussions that, while lengthy, do not add much (for instance, a long section on Fantômas could have certainly been condensed). Ultimately, Le poète innombrable succeeds in offering new perspectives on these iconic figures even if its ambitions sometimes mirror the Modernist techniques of patchwork or collage in their reach.As Dickow claims in the final pages, the sense of contagious multiplicity, of self-important self, of communal literary spaces that could truly change one’s sense of daily life— this is the legacy that Cendrars, Apollinaire, and Jacob leave to contemporary poetry, if we care enough to look. Southern Connecticut State University Nichole Gleisner Diop, Papa Samba, et Alain Vuillemin, éd. Les littératures en langue française: histoire, mythe et création. Rennes: PU de Rennes, 2015. ISBN 978-2-7535-4188-7. Pp. 828. This vibrant collection of seventy papers explores the intersection of history, memory, and myth by extrapolating from the theories of Barthes, de Certeau, Ricœur, Nora, and others, to literature written in French on five continents. Mirroring the diverse geographic origins of literary production under investigation, contributors hail from twenty-nine countries. The introductory notes outline the history of French colonization and the subsequent spread of the French language to contextualize the inaugural keynote address and eight chapters. Chapters 1 and 2 focus on the connection between poetry, writing, and history by putting forth arguments that echo the Manifeste des 44 and largely increase the visibility of Romanian writers. Chapter 3 features Belgian, Polish, Romanian, Cambodian, and Haitian texts that grapple with the notion of dictatorship as a historical moment in African and European countries. The remaining sections are divided by the geographic origins of authors writing either from their native land or an adoptive country such as France, Canada, or the United States. Chapter 4 covers the Caribbean, the Indian Ocean, and Asia, while chapters 5– 8 move from Europe to the Mediterranean, Africa, and Quebec. The large scope of 218 FRENCH REVIEW 91.2 Reviews 219 articles proves that analyzing the complex diversity of literature written in French is an ambitious and challenging endeavor. Although this book is not an exhaustive resource, readers will certainly appreciate the variety of narrative genres, along with a blend of key figures (Dib, Glissant, Kourouma, Lê, Maillet, NDiaye), marginalized writers (Soth Polin, Anna de Noailles), and neglected regions of the French-speaking world (Comorian, Serbian, Bulgarian literary productions). Overall, the articles highlight a broad spectrum of historic events, eras, sites, and people that were absorbed in the imaginary of migrant authors, communities, or nations. It is rewarding to discover the various levels of meaning the concepts of history and myth can produce in the French-speaking world. However, these findings could have been summarized in chapter introductions or codas as they can lead to thought-provoking ideas for regional or cross-regional comparisons. The most noteworthy contributions explore innovative approaches (intermediality in African literature; the paradigms of Goethe’s world literature for Algeria), or comparative readings (Kossi Efoui and Dany Laferrière; Annie Ernaux and Ken Bugul). Another strength is the attempt at periodization for Algerian, Cameroonian, or Comorian literature. However, despite the rich collection...

“Infra-noir” un et multiple: un groupe surréaliste entre Bucarest et Paris, 1945-1947 éd. par Monique Yaari

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 to engage with a recent history marked by the horrors of the Shoah (133–34). While it contains numerous previously-published articles that can stand alone,Wolf’s challenging study deserves to be read in its entirety. It rewards the patient reader while it lays the critical groundwork for a reassessment of the longue durée of French literary history. Davidson College (NC) Carole A. Kruger Yaari, Monique, éd. “Infra-noir,” un et multiple: un groupe surréaliste entre Bucarest et Paris, 1945–1947. Berne: Peter Lang, 2014. ISBN 978-3-0343-1762-7. $74. The surrealist group of Bucharest has long remained in the shadows of the history of the avant-garde. As this illuminating volume demonstrates, this obscurity is due to the exigencies of history and an aesthetic commitment to secrecy and opacity. In her concise introduction,Yaari provides the historical context: cut off from their Parisian counterparts during the war, the group saw an intense moment of literary and artistic production between 1945 and 1947, only to disperse after the arrival of a repressive communist regime. This volume’s most valuable contribution is to bring to light that work from 1945–47, reproduced here in a substantial appendix. The reader encounters firsthand the group’s varied written and artistic oeuvre and their purposefully ambivalent relationship to language. For if the choice to write in French signaled a desire to communicate beyond Romania’s borders, these works also resist simple understanding, blurring boundaries between writer and subject, individual and group. The organization of the volume’s essays exemplifies the “un et multiple” principle. Three bookending contributions analyze the works the group signed collectively. Jonathan 248 FRENCH REVIEW 90.4 Reviews 249 Eburne’s opening consideration of the 1946 exhibition L’infra-noir brings into sharp focus the political dimension of the group: as he contends, their language of secrecy and conspiracy represented not just an aesthetic position but“une condition d’obscurité plus étendue”targeting power itself (34). Two closing essays on cinema and the visual arts establish important ties to André Breton’s surrealism. Régine-Mihal Friedman’s chapter on the group’s praise of the 1942 Italian film Malombra precisely links this text to surrealist fascination for cinema and the roman noir. Jacqueline ChénieuxGendron ’s analysis of “La salle nocturne,” the group’s contribution to the 1947 Exposition internationale du surréalisme, uses this experiential installation to suggest how their ultimate intent was to push the limits of surrealism’s poetic art. This desire to keep surrealism in “un état de changement et développement révolutionnaire continuel” (75) is underlined in three central essays on the group’s key members: Ghérasim Luca, Trost, and Paul Paun. Through extended (sometimes laborious) close readings and analyses of visual works, each contributor shows how the writers reinvigorated essential notions of 1930s surrealism (notably mad love, objective chance, and dreamwork). Krzysztof Fijalkowski demonstrates how, for Luca, desire becomes a motor for artistic production...