La Fiction Research Articles

Marquis de Sade, The Marquise de Gange. Translated with an Introduction and notes by Will McMorran

This edition retrieves Sade’s late novel from the deep shadow of his pornographic production and places it squarely within the gothic canon. In so doing, it pursues a line also productively explored by Philippe Roger in his essay on Sade and the gothic in John D. Lyons’s collection The Dark Thread: From Tragical Histories to Gothic Tales (Newark: ­University of Delaware Press, 2019; reviewed in FS, 75 (2021), 405–06). Will McMorran’s excellent Introduction dramatically retells the story of the notorious true crime in which a Provençal noblewoman was murdered by her husband’s brothers in 1667, showing where Sade’s tale fits within the many accounts of her death. He also provides a very helpful selected bibliography of the retellings of the story, of which there are many from both before and after Sade, most recently in 1984, supplying in its fascinating entirety an English translation from 1744 of François Gayot de Pitaval’s influential version. ­Notable (re-)writers include Charlotte Smith, Alexandre Dumas père, and Elizabeth Gaskell. ­McMorran’s argument is two-pronged: firstly, that this novel is not of lesser importance to Sadean studies than the earlier works, and here he joins other recent scholars looking to rehabilitate the late novels (notably Michèle Vallenthini’s Sade dans l’histoire: du temps de la fiction à la fiction du temps (Paris: Classiques Garnier, 2019)). His second goal is to establish Sade as a properly gothic author, influenced both by the English gothic and by what might be seen as the genre’s origins in the Histoires tragiques tradition. And the result, in McMorran’s view, is that with The Marquise de Gange ‘the Gothic is coming home’ (p. xxv). So, what of the novel itself? Castles, dank rooms, fell premonitions, and a beautiful heroine unfairly treated are all abundantly present. The reader familiar with Sade will also recognize the disquisitions on nature and won’t be too surprised to discover that the ‘dissolute’ man is ‘inflamed rather than soothed’ by the beautiful ‘apologist for virtue’ (p. 90). There are some bravura passages of gothic horror and in one such we find the Marquise espying a hidden door: ‘a spluttering lamp reveals a glimpse of a chamber on the other side of the door; she enters… But what hideous object greets her eyes! There on a table before her, she sees an open cadaver, almost entirely ripped asunder’ (p. 130, punctuation sic). She escapes for the time being, yet ‘tottering, buffeted both by the gale and her own terror, [she] resembles a young willow battered by a storm’ (p. 131). Poor woman! Her horrid fate will not be eluded. In amongst all this turbulence, the (­relatively) sober account (p. 80) of what it’s like to be imprisoned adds depth and feeling, and if I can’t agree with McMorran that The Marquise de Gange offers a ‘taut, tense narrative’ (p. xxvii), he is right that this is a text worth revisiting and which should be part of a fuller sense of the gothic canon, on both sides of the English Channel.

Résurgence de l’Histoire dans la fiction: les massacres du by Michel Laronde

Reviewed by: Résurgence de l’Histoire dans la fiction: les massacres du by Michel Laronde Jennifer Howell Laronde, Michel. Résurgence de l’Histoire dans la fiction: les massacres du 17 octobre 1961 à Paris. L’Harmattan, 2021. ISBN 978-2-343-23538-7. Pp. 226. On 17 Oct. 1961, the French Federation of Algeria’s Front de libération nationale (FLN) led a peaceful demonstration against a curfew that unfairly targeted Algerian Muslims living in the French capital. Thousands of people, including women and children, participated in the march. Under orders from Prefect Maurice Papon, the French police and the Compagnies républicaines de sécurité attempted to block access to the city by securing subway and train stations and raiding public buses. Many protestors were brutally attacked, their bodies thrown into the Seine. The next day, official sources reported three deaths and sixty-four wounded. Yet, according to the FLN, journalists, and eyewitnesses, the death toll was considerably higher. Despite government attempts to efface the event from national history, it would later resurface in fiction beginning in 1982 with Georges Mattei’s La guerre des gusses. These works are the focus of Laronde’s study that comparatively analyzes twenty-four novels published between 1982 and 2012, and in which the massacres appear (Laronde ends his study in 2012, the year François Hollande became the first French president to publicly acknowledge [End Page 197] the massacres). The resurgence of 17 Oct. 1961 in French national history, Laronde argues, stems from the progressive development of a corrective discourse of the event in (historical) fiction. Inspired by historical omission, these works reveal the role that literature can play in the processes of individual, collective, and institu- tional remembrance. Through a sustained reading of novels that fit within narrow spatiotemporal and thematic parameters, Laronde’s analysis is perhaps best de- scribed as a case study of the relationship between postcolonial fiction and the workings of memory and postmemory. Similar to Marianne Hirsch’s model of remembrance in second-generation Holocaust literature (explained in the introduc- tion), Laronde understands the repetition of fictional references to the day of the massacre as the product of historical trauma. However, references vary significantly in narrative form and function. These differences—each defined according to one of three ekphrastic paradigms presented in chapter one—form the basis of chapters three and four. The author’s methodology is the subject of chapter two. Interestingly, Laronde notes in the conclusion that his study did not confirm his initial hypothesis. His chronological reading of novels by year of publication failed to reveal the emergence, development, and successful realization of a new literary discourse on 17 Oct. 1961. Rather than finding evidence of a corrective discourse evolving over time, Laronde discovered that reactions to the event’s erasure from national history depend on author identity. His analysis suggests that Franco-Maghrebi writers seek to reintegrate this forgotten chapter of French history so that personal, familial, and communal memory are no longer excluded from the national memory. In contrast, the writing of a corrective discourse by Franco-French authors establishes that “mainstream” cultural production has nevertheless evolved toward a more inclusive national discourse on colonial history, one that is decidedly postcolonial. Published nearly sixty years after the event, Laronde’s work is timely and contributes to our understanding of the processes of remembrance and historicization. Jennifer Howell Illinois State University Copyright © 2022 American Association of Teachers of French ...

La puissante écriture intertextuelle de Marie Darrieussecq dans Il faut beaucoup aimer les hommes

In 2010 Marie Darrieussecq published Rapport de Police, Accusations de plagiat et autres modes de surveillance de la fiction as a response to the accusations of plagiarism brought against her by Camille Laurens and Marie NDiaye. In this essay she claims her right to an openly intertextual writing. Il faut beaucoup aimer les hommes belongs to this type of writing: Darrieussecq draws strong images from other texts to renew and extend them. In particular, she reworks certain topoi, such as love at first sight, heterosexual passion, and White-Black relations. Her main intertexts are Passion simple by Annie Ernaux, Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad and Apocalypse Now, the film that Francis Ford Coppola made from it. She also uses several texts by Marguerite Duras, as well as songs, proverbs, key sentences, and anecdotes. She thus explores many clichés, including those relating to two legendary places, Hollywood and Africa. This rich intertextuality could have led to the dilution of her own voice if she had not also anchored her text in her own experience, by including the discreet presence of an auctorial I, and by ensuring through a large epitext that the autobiographical comparisons with its protagonist Solange are known as well as the fact that her text was also born from personal research on Africa and Hollywood. With Il faut beaucoup aimer les hommes, Darrieussecq has written a powerful and personal text despite, or rather thanks to, its vast intertextuality.

La séduction de la fiction by Jean-François Vernay

Reviewed by: La séduction de la fiction by Jean-François Vernay Diana Mistreanu Vernay, Jean-François. La séduction de la fiction. Hermann, 2019. 214pp. Published in Hermann’s prestigious “Savoirs Lettres” book series founded by Michel Foucault, Jean-François Vernay’s latest work is a compelling neurophenomenology of literary fiction. This makes it a valuable contribution to the burgeoning field of cognitive literary studies pioneered in Anglo-Saxon research in the late 1970s, but which French academia, with a few notable exceptions such as Jean-Marie Schaeffer, Pierre-Louis Patoine, Alexandre Gefen, Catherine Grall, or Françoise Lavocat, is still largely reluctant to embrace. The author is a lecturer in Australian studies at the Global Institute in Sydney, and he is a bilingual literary scholar whose recent research explores the complex interface between fiction and human cognition. Vernay’s book starts by restating a narratological cliché: in the words of Paul Valéry, stories accompany humans from the cradle to the tomb, as monsters, pirates, fairies, and other fantastic creatures fascinate children’s minds from the first years of their lives (7). A truism follows this cliché: the origin of any story is the human brain (16), as the author reminds us by underlining the bio-anthropological origins of fiction in pages that cite the works of Umberto Eco and Nancy Huston (the writer who coined the notion of “espèce fabulatrice,” “the tale-teller species” [2008]), and that echo the research of scholars such as Mark Turner (1996) and Jean-Marie Schaeffer (1999). Indeed, oral and written stories are not only created, but also interpreted by human minds, triggering states and emotions that range from extreme boredom to excitement and inviting identification with fictional characters. Nevertheless, the mechanisms of the interaction between the human mind and brain and one of its most sophisticated products, namely fiction, are largely still understudied in the field of literature. Placing fiction under the sign of seduction (8) – which allows us to read between the lines an homage to Roland Barthes, the theorist of the “plaisir du texte” referenced later in the book (85-86) – Vernay defines works of fiction as catalysts of a sensori-affective experience [End Page 151] that engages almost all our senses and arouses emotions (“le vecteur d’une expérience sensori-affective qui sollicite la quasi-totalité de nos sens et suscite des émois” [19]). Characterized by the interdisciplinarity that forms the core of cognitive approaches to fiction, Vernay’s study investigates the literary phenomenon in its complexity, asking not only how fiction seduces us, but also why it sometimes fails to do so. Drawing on state-of-the-art research in cognitive psychology and neuroscience, the book manages to eschew over-simplified or reductionist analyses. Our engagement with and consumption of literary fiction is thus analyzed by discussing marketing strategies and editorial choices, the activity of reading as a solitary pleasure versus a professional obligation, as well as the interplay between society, politics, and educational curricula. The author answers his multi-layered research question in nine different chapters, each of them exploring one facet of the relationship between literature and the human mind. The first chapter, “Émois livresques,” highlights the marketing value of books, as well as their status as objects of consumption, in the capitalistic sense of the word. Books are presented here as the targets of our desire, since in financial terms, the notion of reader, the author reminds us, is a mere euphemism for that of consumer (20-22). As we are entering the era of what Yves Citton, often quoted in this essay, calls “cognitive capitalism,” a system in which society is conceptualized as a set of machines that process information (21), fictional literature, along with the arts, is devalued. To counterbalance this trend, Vernay explains, the book industry has to adopt effective strategies that create a desire for consumption. Thus, this chapter addresses the editorial and marketing techniques designed to attract our attention and trigger our impulse to buy and read. From the smell and color of books to the blurb and the careful mention of literary prizes, no detail is overlooked or considered redundant. After addressing the...

Sade dans l'histoire: du temps de la fiction à la fiction du temps by Michèle Vallenthini

Reviewed by: Sade dans l'histoire: du temps de la fiction à la fiction du temps by Michèle Vallenthini Olivier Delers Vallenthini, Michèle. Sade dans l'histoire: du temps de la fiction à la fiction du temps. Garnier, 2019. ISBN 978-2-406-06901-0. Pp. 512. Vallenthini offers an in-depth study of three historical novels written by the Marquis de Sade towards the end of his life while he was confined at the Charenton mental asylum. Sade started drafting La marquise de Gange in 1806 and published it in 1812, around the same time when he began work on Adélaïde de Brunswick and Histoire secrète d'Isabelle de Bavière, two works that only became available in print in the twentieth century. These novels have generally received limited critical attention. Scholars have considered them tame in comparison to earlier works and have argued that Sade might have given in to the pressures of censorship in the Napoleonic era in an attempt to be recognized as a true homme de lettres. Perhaps because of that, Vallenthini takes great pain to situate Sade's historical novels within the context of his life, of his rich literary production, and of the historical transformations that took place at the turn of the nineteenth century. This is a successful strategy: Sade dans l'histoire is also an engaging histoire de Sade, highly accessible to non-specialists, and structured in such a way that it is easy to focus on specific aspects of Sade's articulation of history and time. In her detailed analysis of his major works (Les 120 journées de Sodome, Aline et Valcour, and the Justine and Juliette series), Vallenthini argues that Sade has always been deeply interested in depicting the violence of history. Controlling and managing time are defining characteristics of the libertine's experience. This translates into both highly structured sexual scenes and characters who are able to adapt easily to shifting temporalities. Vallenthini offers a narratological reading of Sade's three historical novels that in turn focuses on plot, characters, time, space, and style. While the analysis can feel formulaic and repetitive at times, the rich close readings give a clear sense of the originality of each work and show what they have in common. The Sadean historical novel provides a disillusioned assessment of the Enlightenment at the same time as it introduces new intellectual concepts in a style that corresponds to the literary culture of the period. The aesthetic heterogeneity of the three works (with elements of the roman noir, roman sensible, roman troubadour, and roman picaresque) can be explained by the fact that fiction had to adapt to successive political regimes in a short period of time. Like Chateaubriand, Constant, and Staël, Sade uses first-person narration to depict his characters as prisoners of time. At the same time, his novels clearly betray "la peur obsessionnelle de l'aliénation" and "le malaise existentiel qui est celui de sa génération" (311). Sade's last three novels are asking universal questions but also expressing personal distress. They belong to a larger literary movement that seeks to digest the French Revolution and its aftermath and that precedes the new types of historical novels heralded by Walter Scott and the rise of history as an autonomous, scientific discipline in the nineteenth century. [End Page 216] Olivier Delers University of Richmond (VA) Copyright © 2020 American Association of Teachers of French

Les miroirs de Thalie: le théâtre sur le théâtre et la Comédie-Française (1680–1762) by Jeanne-Marie Hostiou

Reviewed by: Les miroirs de Thalie: le théâtre sur le théâtre et la Comédie-Française (1680–1762) by Jeanne-Marie Hostiou Logan J. Connors Hostiou, Jeanne-Marie. Les miroirs de Thalie: le théâtre sur le théâtre et la Comédie-Française (1680–1762). Garnier, 2019. ISBN 978-2-406-08177-7. Pp. 870. In this comprehensive history of metatheatricality at the Comédie-Française from 1680 to 1762, Hostiou upends the misconception that France's most prestigious theater performed only lofty tragedies and highbrow comedies. Expanding on Georges Forestier's Théâtre dans le théâtre sur la scène française du XVIIe siècle (1996), which traces the rise of the play-within-a-play, Hostiou tackles a more inclusive corpus of plays "qui parlent du théâtre, à condition qu'elles le fassent explicitement" (12). She combs through hundreds of prologues, one-act comedies, and other performed metatheatrical works to construct a fascinating "histoire alternative du théâtre" (14). By illuminating an eerily (post?)modern world of intertexuality, citation, and ephemerality, Hostiou proves that the theatrical culture at the Comédie-Française was inextricable from French society's most palpable anxieties and vogues. Hostiou's book includes a lengthy critical analysis followed by plot summaries of her corpus plays, bibliographies, and indices. Her analysis is organized into three parts. Part one, "Définitions," is a quantitative and qualitative description of the metatheatrical phenomenon. Hostiou strikes a balance between separating plays into discrete categories (plays about theater professionals; plays about theater's effects; and plays depicting allegorical figures related to theater) and showing the flexibility and the "innommable" (96) quality of her corpus. In "Évolutions," Hostiou provides an analytical chronology of the rise and fall of plays about theater, from the boom associated with post-Molière anxiety at the Comédie-Française, to plays about spats with rival venues such as the Comédie-Italienne and the Fairs, to the decline of performed prologues and the metatheatrical genre as a whole in the 1760s. Hostiou argues that metatheater at the Comédie-Française collapsed because its distancing features were "inconciliable avec l'utopie d'un théâtre qui abolirait les frontières entre la fiction et la vie" (375)—the mission of theater encouraged by Diderot and other Enlightenment philosophes. In "Usages et images," Hostiou performs a series of close readings in which she highlights the phenomenon's most potent themes: authorial self-fashioning, score settling, social critique, publicity, political maneuvering, and more. Any critiques of Hostiou's volume are minor. There are several repetitions and the book can be difficult to search. The chapters are not numbered and many authors and plays are treated in all three parts. Even with Hostiou's helpful indices and lucid prose, her complex thematic approach requires readers to follow the specific logic of her book in order to get a full take on any given play, author, or polemic. This would [End Page 252] be a lot to ask of new students, but perfectly acceptable for more confirmed experts. Hostiou transforms a minor subgenre into proof that the Comédie-Française was a dynamic and inventive institution, not an ossified palace of high art looking backward toward glory. Logan J. Connors University of Miami (FL) Copyright © 2020 American Association of Teachers of French

Raconter l’Oulipo (1960–2000): histoire et sociologie d’un groupe. Par Camille Bloomfield

Camille Bloomfield’s ambitious study aims to ‘observer l’Oulipo pour ce qu’il est, c’est-à-dire un phénomène littéraire installé dans le champ, à la réception inégale mais à la diffusion indéniable’ (p. 12). A quick glance at Virginie Tahar’s extensive ‘Bibliographie critique sur l’Oulipo’ (in Formules, 16, 2012, pp. 343–415) suffices to reveal the hubris of this gesture, as Bloomfield is certainly not the first scholar to analyse the Oulipo or its history. However, as Bloomfield’s study approaches the group from more than a purely literary standpoint, she paints a more nuanced picture in this amusing, engaging, and informative read. The Introduction is a dazzling display of erudition from a scholar who has spent the past decade immersed in archives, interviewing members of the group, forming her own OuXPo, and participating in almost every major event in Oulipian scholarship and public life. For instance, her assessment of the nature of the Oulipo archives as the result of an intentional, strategic act in self-definition is particularly keen. Chapter 1 lays the theoretical and methodological foundations of the book, distinguishing between terms such as ‘avant-garde’, ‘movement’, ‘school’, and ‘group’ to situate the Oulipo amid other literary collectives. Chapters 2 to 4 are of a different nature, tracing the history of the Oulipo from the period leading to its founding (1950–60) to its first decade (1960–70), and then its subsequent expansion (1970–92). The epilogue defines the Oulipo as a ‘groupe-monde’, arguing that it constitutes a cultural phenomenon that has surpassed national borders. The main problem I anticipate with the reception of this volume is that, much like the Oulipo itself, it is written to appeal to a group of scholars who are already well acquainted with the group and its unconventional culture. This manifests itself most clearly in the analysis of the group’s role in the curation of its own public image, which Bloomfield admits poses a great challenge for her study: ‘Le problème est que cela a conduit à instaurer des réflexes critiques peu distanciés’ (p. 13). While Bloomfield is conscious of a lack of critical distance, she rhetorically falls prey to it herself at times, for instance in Chapter 2 when she expounds upon the self-proclaimed metaphor of Oulipians as characters in an unfinished novel by Raymond Queneau, concluding that ‘[c]es personnages sont leur double littéraire, leur création collective la plus aboutie, la plus réussie peut-être. La fiction est ainsi réintroduite là où on l’attend le moins, c’est-à-dire dans les interstices de l’histoire’ (p. 77). Luckily, this rhetorical slippage is kept in check for the majority of the study, as the structure of Bloomfield’s project serves to relegate the group’s ‘discours officiel’ to three ‘intermèdes’. Given the breadth of Bloomfield’s project, its interdisciplinary critical perspective, and its multifaceted conclusions, it should be considered one of the most important studies on the group to date.

Simone de Beauvoir: Le combat au féminin by Éric Touya de Marenne

Reviewed by: Simone de Beauvoir: Le combat au féminin by Éric Touya de Marenne E. Nicole Nunn Touya de Marenne, Éric. Simone de Beauvoir: Le combat au fémini. Presses Universitaires de France, 2019. Pp 128. ISBN: 978-2-13-081465-8. 9€ (paper). This concise Que sais-je? volume provides a superb and nuanced overview of Simone de Beauvoir, her life, influences, philosophy, novels, essays, autobiographical works, travel narratives and one play. The complexities of both [End Page 227] the woman and her writing shine through. Whether a Beauvoir scholar or a new(er) reader of her works, this well-organized, carefully researched volume offers a convincing interpretation both of the latest de Beauvoir critics (from Kristeva to collections such as L'Herne Beauvoir) and Beauvoir's own work and life. Touya de Marenne's first chapter overviews the relation of life and writing. The death of her childhood friend Zaza, her education, her relationship with Jean-Paul Sartre, and especially the pivotal occurrences of her time (the Occupation, her suspension from her teaching duties by the Vichy authorities, Sartre's imprisonment, the dropping of the atomic bomb on Hiroshima) incite philosophical, political and autobiographical reflection. Touya de Marenne convincingly considers Beauvoir's development of feminist thought, her original philosophy, and the reverberations of her oft-cited "On ne naît pas femme, on le devient." Her questions "Qu'est-ce qu'une femme?" and "Qui suis-je?" paradoxically raise the lack of parallel for men. Citing Danièle Sallenave's apt description in relation to Beauvoir: "La fiction est bien ce mensonge qui dit la vérité," Touya de Marenne's third chapter "Pouvoirs de la fiction" is a rapid tour de force. As he himself notes, the question of identity is at the heart of her novel(s). In addition, the discovery of the horror of the concentration camps and other contemporary events inspire both her own existential approach, and the necessity of witnessing the human experience. The fourth chapter addresses the contradictions, lack of mutual reciprocity, and other essential questions raised by Beauvoir's Le Deuxième sexe. His next chapter "Engagements politiques" develops the "combat" of the subtitle, arguing that "la liberté est au cœur de son combat," (73) while the many injustices of her time (whether those she experienced during the Occupation or others encountered through her travels to America, the USSR, China and Cuba) drive her to writing. The Resistance, the Liberation, and the War of Algeria mark her profoundly, whether in her political, autobiographical or fictional writings. Touya de Marenne argues that these pivotal events lead her to recognize the main contradictions of human existence when racism and sexism reign (77), and to declare herself a feminist (MLF). One of the many appealing aspects of Touya de Marenne's argument is his linking to our current moment (e.g., "#Me Too," present-day limitations on abortion (86) and other human rights violations). Confronting discrimination and sexism remains a leitmotif throughout Beauvoir's writings. "Étude de reception," the sixth chapter's first section, returns to critics' often opposing interpretations of her texts. Some write of her incoherent contradictions, essentialist thought, and devaluing of women. Touya de Marenne describes the complexities of labeling Beauvoir a feminist, while letting Beauvoir have the last word on the distinction between men and women being cultural (93). Across the entire chapter, Touya de Marenne highlights Beauvoir's impact on current feminist thought. Closing the volume, his final chapter discusses the "Héritages" which follow Beauvoir's groundbreaking work. Citing Sallenave, he queries: "Peut-on jamais conclure sur Beauvoir ? Peut-on en finir avec celle qui est certainement l'incarnation et la représentante absolue de ce XXe siècle ?" (105). Indeed, this [End Page 228] volume opens up current questions which occupy us now, leading to fascinating reflections that stretch the boundaries of gender in important ways. E. Nicole Nunn Augusta University (GA) Copyright © 2019 Women in French Studies

From Seriality to Transmediality: A Socio-Narrative Approach of a Skilful and Literate Audience

From Seriality to Transmediality: A Socio-Narrative Approach of a Skilful and Literate Audience

Da leitura à dele(i)tura: apagamento e temporalidade na literatura digital

Operações textuais de apagamento foram largamente empregadas na literatura impressa de vanguarda nos séculos XX e XXI, provocando reflexões críticas acerca dos processos de significação emergentes da dialética de impressão e supressão de signos gráficos sobre uma página. Na maioria dessas obras, o leitor modelo foi concebido como uma entidade discursiva posterior ao tempo da enunciação em que se daria o apagamento da materialidade discursiva, cabendo-lhe, portanto, apenas a leitura do produto já apagado, cortado ou rasurado. Por sua vez, graças a recursos de interatividade, algumas obras da literatura digital ensejam novas temporalidades na dinâmica de apagamento-escritura, especialmente instanciando o leitor como contemporâneo a (e responsável por) essas operações que alteram o corpo do texto. Dado o exposto, procede-se neste artigo a uma análise de duas obras de literatura digital – Petite brosse à dépoussiérer la fiction, de Philippe Bootz (2005), e Degenerative, de Eugenio Tisselli (2005) – à luz de pressupostos teóricos do pós-estruturalismo francês acerca da relação entre escrita e apagamento. Indaga-se, nessa perspectiva, como diferentes operações de deleção, no âmbito da literatura digital, criam uma dobra topológica na qual o leitor retorna sempre ao presente – ou a um presente – do delito contra o texto, ensejando um apagamento que paradoxalmente destrói a textualidade, mas constrói a leitura.

L'histoire sacrée de l'Islam dans la fiction maghrébine by Hanan Elsayed

Reviewed by: L'histoire sacrée de l'Islam dans la fiction maghrébine by Hanan Elsayed Touria Khannous Hanan Elsayed. L'histoire sacrée de l'Islam dans la fiction maghrébine. Paris: karthala, 2016. Pp. 180. Hanan Elsayed's book L'histoire sacrée de l'Islam dans la fiction maghrébine analyzes four key Francophone novels and shows how each text draws on diverse religious, historical, and philosophical sources and legacies to prefigure the authors' own imaginative perception of the early Islamic period. These narratives, written by Assia Djebar, Anissa Boumediene, Driss Chraibi, and Salim Bachi, reimagine early Islam as they reinterpret and reread original Islamic sources. The book examines how these authors translate early Islamic texts into new kinds of readings that unsettle hierarchies, reimagine the Muslim tradition to make it more embedded in contemporary local settings, and position fictions at the center of history. Elsayed argues that while all these texts challenge original sources, they at the same time highlight the authors' degree of familiarity and partiality in their thematic and stylistic choices. The first chapter examines representations of early Islam in three narratives, notably the Islamiyyat, a multi-authored corpus produced in Egypt during the 1930s in order to challenge the misrepresentation of Islam in colonial discourse. Chapter Two examines Djebar's reading of the original sources of Islam in her novel Loin de Médine. Elsayed argues that it is ironic that Djebar relies on an interlocutor and attempts to recover the voices of women, while overlooking the figures of women in these sources themselves. Chapter Three centers on Anissa Boumediene's La fin d'un monde, questioning the accuracy of its historical sources, as well as the novel's recreation of the rule of the third caliph othman. what is remarkable is Elsayed's allegorical reading of the novel's reconstruction of othman's rule. Elsayed argues that the civil wars of early Islamic history are an allegorical representation of the civil war that engulfed Algeria in the late 1990s. Chapter Four examines Driss Chraibi's novel L'homme du livre, which takes place in the twenty-four-hour period prior to the angel Gabriel's revelation of the Quran to the prophet Muhammad. The revelation begins, as Elsayed notes, with the command to read, to which the Prophet responds that he cannot read. Elsayed's astute reading of the influence of Sufism on Chraibi's interpretation of the act of reading as a movement from the letter to the essence of meaning is commendable. Chapter Five focuses on Salim Bachi's novel Le silence de Mahomet, which draws upon four distinct narrative voices corresponding to historical figures from early Islamic history. Elsayed questions the reliability of the novel's sources, as well as the prejudices of its author. In L'histoire sacrée de l'Islam, Hanan Elsayed cogently analyzes important narratives from the Maghreb and beyond in a rare and timely study that explores representations of early Muslim history in texts shaped by a diversity of sources. The author's compelling presentation of a broader historical and political context sheds light on these texts' diversity of themes, voices, and generic forms, and she challenges their omissions, prejudices, and misrepresentations in a way that makes this book pertinent for a wide audience. Her contribution is a significant one, providing an important framework for further work on Islam and Francophone Maghrebin narratives. Touria Khannous Louisiana State University Copyright © 2018 L'Esprit Créateur

L’art de revenir à la vie par Martin Page

Reviews 273 qu’on attribue à la fiction plutôt qu’à l’histoire. On apprend notamment que, quand Maalouf a écrit son tout premier livre, Les croisades vues par les Arabes, il s’est appuyé en grande partie sur L’histoire des croisades de Joseph Michaud. Le hasard veut que Maalouf occupe aujourd’hui le fauteuil tenu jadis par Michaud. S’agit-il du hasard ou d’un coup divin opéré sur une filiation spirituelle? University of Portland Khadija Khalifé Page, Martin. L’art de revenir à la vie. Paris: Seuil, 2016. ISBN 978-2-02-117496-0. Pp. 170. This “roman/autofiction/science-fiction” (168), as the narrator, Martin, calls it, relates strange events happening during a little over a week in the life of a writer whose idea of excitement, he tells us at first, is knowing he will be able to pay his rent.Actually, things are more serious, as his house in a Belgian village needs expensive repairs to its furnace and its roof. His partner, Coline, a musician, has gone with their small child to Sweden to make a recording, and Martin has deferred his own trip there to spend a well-paid week in Paris writing a screenplay based on one of his books. Unfortunately, Paris aggravates his many health problems, which he says include a fragile“homéostasie psychologique”(10), asthma, hypochondria, and bipolar disorder. He narrates each event shortly after it occurs, and his early accounts are understandably gloomy, especially as the producer of the planned film, Sanaa Okaria, first wants to make major changes to the plot, then abandons the project entirely and, insisting that his contract obliges him to do whatever she asks, employs Martin on increasingly intimate activities she herself should do, including packing her possessions in anticipation of a move, visiting her blind sister in a mental institution (while wearing Sanaa’s perfume), and going to her doctor’s appointment for her. Each night in the apartment that a Parisian friend has lent him, Martin sleeps in a sculpture the friend has made, a sort of coffin labeled a “machine à remonter le temps” (18). Perhaps he does travel back in time, or perhaps he merely dreams he is doing so. But each night he meets his twelve-year-old self and, at first, tries to prepare the adolescent Martin for the problems he will face with school, friendships, employment, and love. Yet it is the boy who helps the man, giving him renewed optimism by reconnecting him with his youthful hopes and making him see that his life is not a failure: he has a partner, a child, and a career as a writer, even if the latter is precarious. The narrator has cheered up greatly by the end, having figuratively returned to life by deciding to be faithful to his youthful optimism. The author, the non-fictional Martin, is a prolific writer of novels, essays, and children’s literature. He also blogs and publishes fantasy under the anagrammatic open pseudonym Pit Agarmen. Like the fictional Martin, he and his partner, Coline Pierré, a musician, have created a small publishing house and silkscreen studio called Monstrograph. One of his Pit Agarmen books, La nuit a dévoré le monde, has just been filmed. In that respect and, it seems, in others, he seems to be significantly more successful professionally than the fictional Martin. College of San Mateo (CA) Susan Petit Reza,Yasmina. Babylone. Paris: Flammarion, 2016. ISBN 978-2-0813-7599-4. Pp. 219. Il n’est pas fortuit que ce roman commence par une référence à la collection de photos de Robert Frank, The Americans (1958). Cette méditation sur le passage du temps, sorte de chronique d’instants, d’instantanés en quelque sorte, s’apparente à l’observation de la vie quotidienne des photos dites “de rue” de Robert Frank, remarquables par l’authenticité des sujets qu’elles saisissent au hasard. La photo du Témoin de Jéhovah, Awake, choisie dès la première page par la narratrice, semble calquer au plus près la démarche de l’auteure, par ce qu’elle révèle d’humanité et de solitude. À l’image...

DA VIDA PELA METADE À PERENIDADE DEVIDA: JOSEFA DE SANTO ALEIXO E MARIA MOISÉS

O título enunciado pretende dilucidar os percursos figurativos que estiveram na origem da fortuna literária e artística de Josefa de Santo Aleixo e de Maria Moisés, no conto ‘Maria Moisés’ das Novelas do Minho, publicadas por Camilo Castelo Branco entre 1875 e 1877. Na perspetiva dos estudos de género, a vida ‘incompleta’ que carateriza o percurso existencial de ambas refere-se à parte da história individual inerente à construção da identidade feminina que estes seres de papel nunca concretizaram, dado o universo patriarcal vigente. Segundo Nathalie Einich, em États de Femme. L’identité dans la fiction occidentale (1996), os estados identitários da mulher, no contexto cultural de Oitocentos, são os de ‘fi lha, esposa e mãe ’, mas nem Josefa nem Maria Moisés os reúnem na totalidade. O equilíbrio e a coerência do ser em si da mulher estão longe de se consubstanciar neste universo ficcional. Em termos semio-narrativos, a incompletude converte-se no signo distintivo de ambas, signo fautor da assunção de múltiplas vias para a sua figuração, para a sua justa perenidade. Por outro lado, no que concerne à sobrevida das personagens (Reis: 2015), refira-se a reinterpretação do conto por Paula Rego através de cinco composições, Maria Moisés e outras histórias, expostas na Galeria 111, no Porto, em 2000-2001 (Lima: 2002). Os temas abordados pela artista plástica são, mais uma vez, aqueles que o tempo insiste em fazer perdurar: a paixão, a gravidez indesejada, a incompreensão familiar e social, a solidão.

Pascal et l’expérience du corps. Par Hélène Bah Ostrowiecki

This is an original and imaginative study. Hélène Bah Ostrowiecki sets out to show the body — whether animate or inanimate as pure physical entity, and distinct from mind, spirit, or soul — as the anchor of Pascal’s apologetic discourse, both as a nucleus in which his ideas cohere, but also as the essential and independent reference point in man’s search for God. ‘Bodies’ function as witnesses for those able to recognize them as such. The text is densely written, and careful reading is required to avoid becoming disorientated, because it imitates Pascal’s own to-and-fro style of argumentation, and constantly relates Pascal’s various ternary ordres to the Cartesian division of body from spirit. But the reader is rewarded by Ostrowiecki’s fresh insights, and her close attention both to Pascal’s writing, principally the Pensées, and to scholarly debate. From the matrix of ternary and binary interactions, five focuses are identified through which to interpret Pascal’s attitude to the body. The first is ‘Maladie: la fiction d’un homme sans corps’. After an excellent discussion the dualist proposition, ‘séparant un esprit (une intérieure salvatrice) et un corps (une extériorité corruptrice)’ (p. 43), is firmly rejected. Since this is not a physiological study, there is no extended discussion of the diagnoses of Pascal’s pathophysiological illnesses, nor of the effect of physical illness of the body on the psychopathological development of the mind. In the second chapter, ‘Chair’, Ostrowiecki provides an illuminating examination of Pascal’s distinction of corps from chair, how they interact, and the primacy of the former. Without the body, there can be no carnality. The following chapter, ‘Sentiment’, continues the exploration of corporality in the mystical subjects of feeling/conscience and experience and the place of the cœur in the theological argument. The notion of the body as witness is introduced and elaborated. The next and most inventive chapter is ‘Machine’, which deals with two of the most enigmatic words of Pascal’s imagery: ‘machine’ and ‘abêtir’. Here we find what might serve as a mission statement for Ostrowiecki’s enterprise: ‘[P]our Pascal, la réponse au défi apologétique passe conjointement par un geste de soumission et par un recours au corps, ce qui invite à explorer les voies selon lesquelles cette soumission est soumission au corps’ (p. 123). The final chapter, ‘Tout’, is a particularly absorbing text about the part played by the body in the constitution of the individual. The body opens the moi to experience and situates the individual among other bodies and also within metaphorical bodies such as the Church. Ostrowiecki incorporates Pascal’s scientific pursuits into this discussion, and by the end of the book all idea of the body as a barrier is convincingly abolished. There seems to be an inclination, possibly unintentional, to rationalize all of Pascal’s many personal activities under the apologetic umbrella, and the odour of hagiography is occasionally unmistakable, as, for example, when Pascal’s involvement in the commercialization of a public transport system, initially alluded to as ‘troublant’ (pp. 167, 168), has within a few paragraphs become ‘l’expression de la piété’ (p. 169). These few caveats notwithstanding, this thought-provoking book is a valuable contribution to Pascal studies.

Intertextuality and Murder: Anne F. Garréta’s La Décomposition and À la recherche du temps perdu

In his introduction to the English translation of Anne Garreta's Sphinx, Daniel Levin Becker writes that Garreta's later novels Ciels liquides and La Decomposition are excellent examples of the class of modern French novel or film that sounds charming or fun when you hear its synopsis but turns out to be of existentially upsetting when you actually read or watch it.1 Leaving aside for the moment the question of what Levin Becker means by sort of existentially upsetting, I would point out, by way of a first approach to the novel, that even hearing the synopsis of La Decomposition might upset a Proustian, and would certainly offend a member of what Christopher Prendergast has called the Proust cult.2 The book's unnamed narrator-protagonist has devised a plan for executing perfect crimes, murders that are neither random nor humanly motivated, but determined by the rigorous impersonality of a constraint.3 The constraint is supposed to work in the following way. The criminal counts off the sentences of A la recherche du temps perdu until he finds one containing a proper name. In the thirty-seventh sentence Madame de Saint-Loup appears. He then takes up a position:Maintenant, postez-vous un apres-midi en quelque point strategique d'une metropole quelconque (la salle des pas perdus d'une gare, l'axe d'un tourniquet du metro, la terrasse d'un cafe faisant angle de deux avenues ...). Comptez les corps. Le trente-septieme a passer devant la mire que vous vous serez choisie sera le bon. Accord en nombre. A present, examinez: est-ce un passant? est-ce une passante? C'est un passant? Vous [...] renoncez au meurtre pour jour-la. C'est une passante? Bingo! accord en genre. [...] Vous voici dans l'obligation d'executer l'entite amphibie surgie a l'interface de la fiction et du [...] au couteau, au revolver ... tout cela est regle d'avance au gre des contraintes supplementaires de l'oeuvre. (D, p. 29)Not only are these supplementary constraints never explained, but the principal constraints leave the murderer ample latitude for choice: no rule is given for determining the place, the time, or where precisely in the visual field to begin counting.After having killed the stranger corresponding to a character from Proust, the criminal is required by the constraint to go home and remove from an electronic copy of A la recherche all the sentences containing the name of that character or a pronoun referring back to it: Par la facon a la fois fortuite et inevitable dont la victime a ete rencontree, il s'agit de nier la subjectivite comme methode criminelle dans la decomposition du roman et le depeuplement du monde (D, p. 31). The negation, however, is not entirely convincing. The unregulated choices required of the killer are so many windows through which subjectivity, kicked out the front door, may easily return. And no attempt is made to negate the subjectivity of the motivation for this singular project. While the serial killer is not provided with an explanatory psychological wound, he does give some reasons for his double destruction. At one point he declares that his aim is to make death palpable for the reader, to make her face ce bloc obscur de la douleur, the mortal body (D, p. 129). His nihilism seems to rest on a horror of mortality and physical decay, which nourishes a longing for disembodiment, to which I will return below.It becomes clear quite soon that the narrator-protagonist is a well-read madman rather than a brilliant criminal mastermind, gifted for rhetoric and literary style but not committed to coherent reasoning. And this becomes progressively clearer. On page 125, for example, he replies to the imagined objection that an eliminated character might reappear in a new work of fiction: Que m'importe, lecteur, que m'importe puisque effectivement, par mon meurtre, elle [Francoise] manque enfin a son origine. She is missing only from the electronic copy of A la recherche on the protagonist's hard drive, not from the numerous other copies, and certainly not from her historical origin in the mind of Marcel Proust. …

Lectures de Zola: ‘La Fortune des Rougon’ . Sous la direction d’Émilie Piton-Foucault et Henri Mitterand

One way of measuring Zola’s fortunes within the academy is to track those of his novels prescribed for the agrégation, starting with Germinal in 1952 (marking the half-century since his death) and followed, thirty-five years later, by La Curée. Overcoming their mild surprise that La Fortune des Rougon is a set text for 2015–16, publishers and specialists have not been slow to provide candidates with unprecedented illumination of this opening novel of the Rougon-Macquart series, in the shape of colloquia, special issues of journals, and bibliographical guides. This collective volume, however, signals a pedagogic context only in its ubiquitous referencing of the officially sanctioned 2007 Folio version of the text rather than David Baguley’s more recent, and expensive, edition (Paris: Classiques Garnier, 2015; see French Studies, 70 (2016), 121–22). For its fourteen essays open up critical perspectives that are both original, in relation to a novel seldom read other than as the introductory frame of the series, and with implications for approaches to Zola’s work as a whole. Corinne Saminadayar-Perrin, in highlighting Pierre Rougon’s role as quasi-surrogate novelist, concludes that ‘l’épopée burlesque des Rougoléon prouve la puissance intrinsèque de la fiction dans la fabrique de l’histoire’ (p. 27). Françoise Gaillard overlays the exhumed corpses of Zola’s Saint-Mittre on the 1786 relocation of those in the Cimetière des Saints-Innocents to detect behind the somewhat curious topography of La Fortune des Rougon the originating parricide of the French Revolution. Adeline Wrona offers a penetrating study of the role of the press within the novel, enhanced by cross references to Zola’s own newspaper articles of 1869. Éléonore Reverzy’s focus is that of the ‘discours-image’ (p. 65) of contemporary caricature, which informs the text’s own ‘ménagerie impériale’ (the title of Paul Hadol’s 1870 development of Grandville’s famous template). Marie-Ange Fougère’s essay demonstrates how dramatic irony works at the level of the characters’ knowing smiles as well as that of author and reader endowed with the wisdom of historical hindsight. Grounded in a familiarity with socio-linguistic analyses of everyday speech, François-Marie Mourad’s study of whispers, gossip, indistinct utterances, and telling silences argues that ‘ce roman de la loquèle’ (p. 91) is presciently modern. Véronique Cnockaert and Marie Scarpa look, respectively, at Silvère and Miette in the light of psychoanalytical and ethno-critical criteria. In the section of the volume devoted to mythical scenarios, Clélia Anfray’s focus is that of Pyramus and Thisbe (as visible in Madeleine Férat as in the writer’s domestic decorations), and Émilie Piton-Foucault adds Millais’s Ophelia to Romeo and Juliet in the mirroring surfaces in which Zola’s young lovers play out their tragic idyll. While Olivier Got details the symbolic value of spatial transgressions, his exploration of doors and thresholds can be juxtaposed with Philippe Hamon’s brilliant consideration of the novel’s incipit and the literal and metaphorical frames initiating the ‘pacte de lecture générique’ (p. 190). Sophie Guermès’s equally incisive reflections on ‘les caprices de la Fortune’ (p. 199), in its emphasis on luck, chance, and accident, liberate Zola from deterministic cliché. And Patricia Carles and Béatrice Desgranges, in their characteristically two-handed piece, evoke the visual dynamics of theatrical loges and pictorial viewing to conjure up the spectral outlines of paintings far less well known than Delacroix’s oft-cited La Liberté guidant le peuple. This intelligent collection of essays is not for agrégation hopefuls alone.

Bonheur et fiction chez Rousseau par Guilhem Farrugia

Reviews 267 expressions in argot. She especially loved reading and appreciated literary language. She assumed the role of a writer when her father died in 1967 with the mission of her writing to explore the social issues in how to “écrire littérairement dans la langue de tous” (34). The disparities among the values of different social classes have thus been imbedded in her writings and led her to explore the degree to which she has or has not betrayed her origins. Retour à Yvetot includes the revision of a lecture Ernaux gave at Yvetot in 2012, pictures of Ernaux at various stages in her life, an interview given to the Ernaux scholar Marguerite Cornier, and an essay by Gortier explaining the role of Yvetot throughout Ernaux’s opus. This pamphlet has much to recommend its reading by those familiar with the écrivaine and especially by those not yet acquainted with her work. Trinity University (TX) Roland A. Champagne Farrugia, Guilhem. Bonheur et fiction chez Rousseau. Paris: Garnier, 2012. ISBN 9782 -8124-0500-6. Pp. 361. 39 a. “Peut-on, après Robert Mauzi, écrire sur le bonheur selon Rousseau?,”asks Michel Delon in his preface to a book dealing with a topic that has been discussed at length, not only by Mauzi and the Rousseau scholars with whom the author engages, but also in recent intellectual histories, notably Darrin M. McMahon’s History of Happiness (2006), with which he does not. This is largely an immanent, phenomenological study of happiness in Rousseau’s texts, in the tradition of Poulet and Starobinski. Delon answers his question by pointing to the connections Farrugia draws between happiness and the status of fiction, and there are indeed interesting discussions here of how Rousseau constructs in his reveries as well as in his works imaginary spaces either of happy solitude or affective communication among intimates, spaces that serve as “la matrice de la félicité”(20).While not empirically grounded, these imaginary constructs are“véraces,”in the sense that they foster genuine and positive human experience. The first part of the book explores the key forms of happiness Rousseau likes to imagine, and how Rousseau turns the fictions he elaborates about them into “fictions vécues,” modeled by the characters in his books but designed to be lived by his readers and by himself as reader of his own work. The second part focuses on the “oscillation” between restriction and expansion, between the notion that happiness finds its ideal location within the individual, solitary self and the idea that its proper context is the sociability of little communities of friends or lovers (about citizens the author has little to say). This oscillation gives Rousseau’s thinking its dynamism and his various fictions their contrasting but equally enabling character. Much of this analysis will be familiar to eighteenth-century specialists, but it is designed to support a thesis the author believes to be original: “Assignant à la fiction une réalité existentielle, une solidité affective et infléchissant ce terme du sens de mensonge vers celui de véracité, Rousseau est l’auteur d’une théorie moderne de la fiction” (339). Farrugia is certainly on to something here, but there is a disconnect between his phenomenological approach and his historical thesis. Modern compared to whom or to what? In the absence of any comparison with other writers or thought-systems, it is hard to know what to make of this claim. Did no one before Rousseau ever give fiction existential reality? Another difficulty is that the book never deals with the mistrust of fictions that also pervades Rousseau’s works. How does one distinguish veracious fictions from mendacious ones? And is it really true that only veracious fictions help one be happy? To borrow terms from Starobinski, there is a lot here about la transparence but not enough about l’obstacle. University of California, Los Angeles Patrick Coleman Feilla, Cecilia. The Sentimental Theater of the French Revolution. Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2013. ISBN 978-0-226-16058-0. Pp. 258. $99.95. This insightful, articulate study illustrates the impact that theatrical esthetics had upon the French Revolution’s overarching goal of transforming society. Drawing upon statistical...

The Poetics and Perils of Faction: Contemporary French Fiction and the Memory of World War II

In an essay published in the summer 2011 special issue of Le Debat entitled L'Histoire saisie par la fiction, the British historian Anthony Beevor describes and denounces the proliferation in contemporary culture of fictional works he labels faction. As Beevor describes them, these works include novels, films, television shows, and other entertainments that take as their subject matter important historical events and offer up provocative mixtures of fact and fiction that all too often not only distort history but in fact revise and falsify it, sometimes deliberately. As such, they mark a significant departure from earlier American variants of in works by the likes of Truman Capote in In Cold Blood, for example, or Norman Mailer in Armies of the Night. These earlier works offered highly imaginative literary accounts of current events happening at the time of writing and challenged less the borders between fiction and history than they did those between literature and journalism. (1) The dangers of contemporary as he defines it are in Beevor's view essentially twofold. First, given that the subject matter of much recent is the terrible traumas of the recent past (the Holocaust, the Cold War, the experience of totalitarianism), mixing fact and fiction irresponsibly can give aid and comfort--not to say ammunition--to politically motivated forms of historical revisionism in the present. The word faction itself of course implies a parti pris, and sometimes an extreme political position. The second danger of faction, closely related to the first, is that in a world that is becoming increasingly historically illiterate, works of can be quite persuasive in peddling what Beevor labels counter-knowledge (37), and not just to a small minority of fanatics looking for welcome confirmation of their extremist and historically dubious views. Depending on its entertainment value and degree of verisimilitude or plausibility, a work of might well take in a large and gullible public, promoting false understandings of the past that can prove politically problematic in the present. Of course, in a world in which fiction is routinely peddled as fact by governments in order to justify particular actions--who has forgotten Saddam Hussein's weapons of mass destruction?--faction is merely one method of promoting historical untruths and manipulating and dumbing down the general public. And anything seems possible if, as the Spanish novelist Javier Cercas points out, surveys as recent as 2008 indicated that fully one-fourth of all English people believed that Winston Churchill was a fictional character and therefore never existed (5). As Beevor observes, although works of can and do focus on a wide range of historical events and traumas, the preferred subject matter of most of those works is World War II. Drawing on the American context, Beevor cites--critically--several films, most notably Saving Private Ryan. While the British historian praises the opening sequence of Spielberg's film showing the Normandy landings as the most authentic battle scene ever filmed, the rest of the movie, he argues, descends into an endless recycling of Hollywood cliches that distort history while reassuring Americans today of their eternal innocence and goodness (36). This makes them--us--all the more dangerous in the world today, in Beevor's view. As for the British context, from which he also draws examples, Beevor is sharply critical of the television series Cambridge Spies. In one episode, the Soviet mole Kim Philby learns from his superior in 1941 that the British government has decided not to warn the Soviets of the impending Nazi invasion. In point of fact, as Beevor notes, Churchill warned Stalin many times about the imminent Nazi threat, to no avail (35). What of the French context? This will be the subject of the remainder of this article. Let me note first that while Beevor's observations on in Le Debat offer an excellent general framework, they do not identify some of the most salient characteristics of French and the historical, moral, and ethical issues it raises. …

La littérature à l’éprouvette by Jean-François Chassay

medieval characters modeled on Mordred who mimic his deeds. In his stand-out essay anchored on Robert de Boron’s Merlin, Griffith reveals a treasure trove of rich representations and reinterpretations of Merlin: that shapeshifting prophet-magician, conceived by demonic rape (or adultery), who acts as a morally ambiguous independent agent, straddling the sacred and the sinful, at times threatening to usurp even authorial power. Kamath’s essay analyzes the allegorical Livre du Cuer d’Amours Espris wherein the author René d’Anjou casts himself as the hero Heart who fails in service to Love, bested by the anti-hero Refusal. Although the essay fits less naturally into the volume, it opens a welcome window into the emotional life of the late-medieval aristocratic male and adds a dimension of introspection lacking in other medieval narratives. The chapters dedicated to character-types present thought-provoking material (“Crusaders,” “Saracens,”and most fascinatingly“Ungallant Knights”where James Wade considers the codicological context of stories in household miscellanies), but devote little attention to French literature—excepting “Son of Devils” wherein Cartlidge examines the offspring of demonic unions (Marie de France’s Yonec, Robert de Boron’s Merlin, Robert le Diable) and probes such important issues of medieval identity as the trauma of recognizing one’s own sinfulness. Cartlidge provides a useful, if brief, introduction, but to appreciate the thematic threads that bind the essays, one must read the book. There is no comprehensive bibliography and the skeletal index inexplicably includes“kitchen implements, as weapons”but overlooks key common concepts such as“incest,”“rape,” or “adultery.” That the book leaves us thirsting for more—for other (anti)heroes and certainly for (anti)heroines who appear only tangentially here—proves its value. New York University Marilyn Lawrence Chassay, Jean-François. La littérature à l’éprouvette. Montréal: Boréal, 2011. ISBN 978-2-7646-2131-8. Pp. 140. $19,95 Can. Chassay’s major interest is the interaction between science and literary culture. This book provides a fine example of his knowledge in both areas. His essential argument in the five essays which constitute this collection is that the dichotomy often proclaimed between literary and scientific cultures reflects a major, albeit wide-spread simplification, and that scientific inquiry shares many elements with literary undertakings . According to Chassay,it was a combination of the Cold War and“la découverte de l’ADN” (128) that gave impetus to this split, and that rather than the two being opposed,“la fiction investit la science”(123). Although Thomas Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962) is not mentioned, Kuhn’s ideas pervade Chassay’s thinking. He conceives of scientific research as permeated by acts of the imagination and notes how much scientific explanation develops by means of metaphors. His essays all loosely follow the same structure. He begins with a discussion of a scientific concept or creation (the computer, for example), explains its history and potential, 258 FRENCH REVIEW 87.3 Reviews 259 and then entertains some academic hand-wringing about how this scientific advance threatens humanistic culture. The bulk of what follows will then demonstrate how artists, contemporary and from earlier eras, have already imagined or used this aspect of science in their literary works. In terms of artistic sources, Chassay is not limited to the Francophone world; he draws his examples from the literature of Europe (East and West), and the Americas. For those already open to a healthy interchange between the sciences and the arts, the arguments made may not seem terribly new, but what provides them with a renewed vitality,is Chassay’s relaxed,often ironic style.He is something of a provocateur, but one who knows what he is talking about. Thus a sentence like “au Moyen Âge, les populations avaient une mémoire beaucoup plus importante que la nôtre” (114) might initially raise some eyebrows, but, as a variety of scholars have demonstrated, it is quite true. Throughout this collection Chassay confronts complacent lieux communs with facts and this is nowhere more evident than in his rebuttal of the regularly announced death of literature. Chassay scoffs at this notion and suggests instead that if literature suffers, it is from...

“J’ai tué": violence guerrière et fiction ed. by Déborah Lévy-Bertherat, Pierre Schoentjes

by dead or living authors, and paves the way for future research on an archeology of intimacy in the nineteenth century. Written with rigor and elegance, her book can indeed provide a model for the study of other periods and other types of letter-writers. New York University Claudie Bernard LÉVY-BERTHERAT, DÉBORAH, et PIERRE SCHOENTJES, éd. “J’ai tué”: violence guerrière et fiction. Genève: Droz, 2010. ISBN 978-90-70489-21-2. Pp. 306. 40 a. The plethora of recent studies, colloquia, and essay collections examining relations between history and literature or between history and memory in literature has overwhelmingly focused on contemporary wars. This volume is no exception, spanning from World War I to Rwanda. It treats ‘conventional’ wars, insurgent revolutions, and genocides, not to erase fundamental distinctions among them but, on the contrary, to better delineate what sets the three contexts apart. Moreover, in a century that condemned wars of aggression and thus privileged victims’ perspectives, these scholars take the opposite tack by peering into dark and troubling works which represent “la violence guerrière du point de vue de celui qui l’inflige” (9). In the first section of the volume, a short piece by Monique Canto-Sperber and a substantial survey by Schoentjes seek to sketch out theoretical frames— esthetic and ethical—for broaching such literary (and on occasion here, cinematic) undertakings. The second section features articles on World War I by LévyBertherat (discussing Blaise Cendrars and Mikhail Bulgakov) and Corinne François-Denève (examining Aziz Chouaki’s play, Les coloniaux [Mille et une nuits, 2006]). The third contains works on World War II: Yan Hamel on Sartre’s La mort dans l’âme (Gallimard, 1949), Alain Kleinberger on American war films, and Vicky Colin on Jonathan Littell’s Les bienveillantes (Gallimard, 2006). The fourth section turns its attention to Algeria and Vietnam as examples of wars for independence (studies by Laurent Véray, Philip Dine, and Catherine MilkovitchRioux ), followed by a section addressing Rwanda’s civil war strife (Anneleen Spiessens on Jean Hatzfeld and Gilbert Gatore; Jean-Pierre Karegeye on fictional portraits of executioners; and Catherine Coquio on Gatore’s Le passé devant soi [Phébus, 2008]). The collection concludes with the transcription of a roundtable discussion among documentary producer François Bernard, renowned combat photographer Patrick Chauvel, playwright Gatore, and noted author Laurent Mauvignier (whose recent novel on the Algerian War—Des hommes [Minuit, 2009]—is especially relevant here). Among the most noteworthy studies, Milkovitch-Rioux devises a compelling interdisciplinary approach to these themes. As a point of departure for her reflections on the Algerian War, she contrasts historical testimony provided by perpetrators well after the events (collected in Patrick Rotman, L’ennemi intime [Seuil, 2005]) with fictional accounts. In successfully teasing out the psychological dynamics germane to such ‘confessions,’ she is able to contextualize the choices confronting authors such as Assia Djebar and Mohammed Dib who on rare occasions attempt to project their imagination into the world of assassins and torturers. The study is nuanced in its theoretical moves. Moreover, one would be interested to see how her analysis would approach Henri Alleg’s La question (Minuit, 1958)— 574 FRENCH REVIEW 86.3 the first significant historical account from a victim tortured by the French army—banned immediately in France upon publication. Colin’s discussion of Les bienveillantes eschews Milkovitch-Rioux’s psychoanalytic angle and opts instead for a framework inspired by clinical psychology. After an at times awkward prologue needed to establish her conceptual battery, Colin very ably negotiates a discussion of the protagonist Max Aue (played off of remarks made by Littell in interviews) that highlights an attention to symptomology and the metaphorical registers used to evoke said signs of trauma. This volume does not make contributions as substantial as those in the compelling special issue of Le Débat 165 (May-August 2011) titled L’histoire saisie par la fiction. The individual studies of “J’ai tué” come across as somewhat scattered; more contributions to the theoretical section would no doubt have served to deploy a broader hermeneutic umbrella. However, the majority constitutes serious scholarly discussions of frequently non-canonical figures and at...