humaine, a continué d’asservir les femmes au profit des hommes” (138). Or, in other instances, it has enabled discrimination against the poor or people of color. On the other hand, women’s liberation movements in developing countries must inevitably invoke “le langage du libéralisme politique pour justifier le combat des femmes” (138). This seeming contradiction points out the constant need to avoid skeptical dogmatism; critique must therefore find its justification in concrete situations of injustice or discrimination “plutôt que d’invoquer abstraitement l’égalit é, la justice” (143). In other words, the skeptical outlook must be seen as an essential component of life itself. The theme of Hume’s vitalism, in the final account , is the central motif of Deleule’s seminar and amounts to a new way of valuing the function of human understanding. Paradoxically, and in spite of its potentially subversive effects, skepticism is basically conservative. It is, by definition , unable to promote radical or revolutionary change and it tends to validate the system and values that support it. At the same time, in the case of a selfreflexive skepticism such as Hume’s, the conservatism is mitigated by the skeptic’s “double défiance,” i.e., a mistrust of one’s convictions and a mistrust of one’s doubts (46). Ohio State University Karlis Racevskis DAY, JAMES, ed. Stealing the Fire: Adaptation, Appropriation, Plagiarism, Hoax in French and Francophone Literature and Film. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2010. ISBN 978-90-4203165 -4. Pp. 230. $65. By grouping together adaptation, appropriation, plagiarism, and hoax, the subtitle of this collection suggests a far from self-evident link among diverse literary phenomena, which are treated in an eclectic set of essays across a variety of periods. Although the practices in question share a troubled relationship with authenticity , as methods of producing texts plagiarism and hoax are almost polar opposites: the former fails (perhaps) to invent enough original material, while the latter lets its creativity spill into the author’s biography. As Hélène Maurel-Indart notes in her opening essay, however, comparisons “with more or less genuine literary practices show that plagiarism cannot be excluded from reflection on literary creation” (2). What becomes evident in Maurel-Indart’s presentation of plagiarism ’s history as a concept and in the diverse essays that follow is that the commonalities among literary practices of questionable authenticity lie as much in the questioner as in the texts; Stealing the Fire’s best essays show the extent to which labels like “hoax” are determined by reader and media reactions to texts, and how much the reactions that generate the labels “adaptation,” “appropriation ,” “plagiarism,” and “hoax” have in common with one another. Prosper Mérimée’s literary career began with a pair of well-known hoaxes, which saw the Frenchman pass himself off first for a Spanish and later for a Slavic woman writer before abandoning his antics to publish under his own name. Mérimée is the subject of one of Stealing the Fire’s more ambitious articles, in which Corry Cropper argues that the French author’s later works retain a “hoax ethos” despite their unambiguous authorship. In Cropper’s reading, Mérimée’s later texts use a surface story to establish expectations which can then be suddenly subverted; much as the revelation of a hoax causes readers to revisit a text whose 1164 FRENCH REVIEW 85.6 author they had thought they knew, Mérimée’s jarring narrative revelations occasion a “second look” and a reevaluation of “clues” (94). Although Cropper sets out to shed light on Mérimée through the lens of the hoax, his article is a particularly worthy contribution to the collection because of the applicability of its analysis to literary hoaxes in general, which question conventional values and literature on a larger scale. Another strong essay, by Nora Cottille-Foley, addresses Marie NDiaye’s claim that her writing was ‘singé’ by Marie Darrieussecq. Much has been written in recent years about Darrieussecq’s alleged plagiarism of Camille Laurens, and a return to the earlier accusation provides a welcome broadening of perspective. While Cottille-Foley is careful to insist that her investigation is not...