Reviews 137 Philippe Lejeune, ed. L'Autobiographie en procès: Actes du colloque de Nanterre, 18-19 octobre 1996. Nanterre: Centre de Recherches Interdisciplinaires sur les Textes Modernes (Université Paris X), 1997. 225 pp. This fine collection of papers does not put autobiography on trial (if it did, I suspect it would acquit). Rather, it examines the trials that autobiography (or, more generally, autobiographical writing) has been put through—the (many) accusations and the (few) justifications it has provoked—and it explores some of their psychological, historical, and aesthetic dimensions. Specifically, Edmond Marc, focusing on small encounter groups, studies internal resistances to self-expression which result from "communicational" defense mechanisms and the split between private self and public self. In the longest and one of the richest pieces in the volume, Jacques Lecarme isolates eight prominent forces hostile to autobiography: newspaper criticism, academe (from grade school on), politics, religion (for Catholicism, in particular, le moi est haïssable), philosophy and its will to abstraction, the "Holy Ghost" of literature, psychoanalysis, and autobiographers themselves (who eagerly claim that theirs is not a mere autobiography). Philippe Lejeune notes that, like autobiographies, private diaries have been called unhealthy, hypocritical, feminine, and worse, and he discusses two sets of responses to diary writing in order to foreground some of the pros and cons evoked by the practice. The first, published in 1938 by the right-wing and Catholic Revue Montalembert, includes a negative reaction signed "François Mitterrand." The second, published in 1982 by Le Monde, features such writers as Claude Simon, Michel Tournier, and Marguerite Yourcenar. Surveying the role of first-person discourse in academe, Marie-Françoise Chanfrault-Duchet shows how school promotes the adoption of a conventional, rhetorical "I" as opposed to the expression of a "psycho-socio-affective" subjectivity. Anne Roche explores the links between autobiography and writing workshops as well as the criticisms directed at the latter. In an elegant paper, MariePaule Berranger traces the desire for and deferral of the autobiographical in André Breton's work. Francis Vanoye argues that Henry Fonda and John Wayne were not only John Ford's privileged actors but also figures of the great director's self-representation. Alice Kaplan examines Paul de Man's conceptions of autobiography in the light of the "de Man affair." Claude Burgelin characterizes autobiography as a mixed genre—a genre métis—that gives form to the wound and the scar, the banal and the singular, the artless and the radiantly metaphorical. Finally, Régis Debray explains his (autobiographer's) uneasiness with autobiography: the latter is linked to existential failures; its increasing popularity may correspond to decreasing possibilities for individual political action; to him education is "de-biographization"; besides, he prefers imaginative literature. 138 biography 22.1 (Winter 1999) With the exception of Francis Vanoye, the contributors to the volume concentrate on the French tradition, which is undoubtedly very rich in great autobiographies—in the twentieth century alone, there is Gide, Leiris, Sartre, Perec, Sarraute—and which can boast about more than a few gigantic diaries: that of Jehan Rictus, for instance, is 34,862 pages long. Philippe Lejeune even wonders whether the denigration of autobiographical writing constitutes a French specialty (5,62). Perhaps it does. But I suspect that Aristotle too would rank fiction higher than autobiography, just as he put poetry above history. Besides, in the United States—the land of self-expression, selfesteem , Jerry Springer, and Oprah Winfrey, where the personal is political and the private longs to be public—autobiographical writing is not universally extolled. Canons and curricula offer a good example: Fielding or Dickens rather than Pepys or Gosse; Hawthorne, Melville, and Henry James instead of Henry Adams. Of course, from the point of view of production and sales, the autobiographical is thriving in America. All of my colleagues, I think, have committed some memoirs or diaries and these sell better than many a volume of poetry or (yes!) many a novel. But in France too, perhaps, autobiography is prospering (I even detected several bits of "personal criticism" in L'Autobiographie en procès) and I would be curious to learn just how well it sells just as I would like to...