Nouvelle Critique Research Articles

A Tale of Two Theories

A Tale of Two Theories

Anathematizing Barthes and Admiring Beckett with Eugène Ionesco

This article explores the world of theatre from within and beyond the stage and brings together Roland Barthes as a critic and Samuel Beckett as a playwright via a third character, the Romanian-born playwright Eugène Ionesco, who anathematized the former and admired the latter. The article starts from Martin Esslin’s The Theatre of the Absurd (1961), which defined Beckett’s and Ionesco’s art, pointing out that whilst Esslin showed why their works produced ‘bewilderment’ in England and the US, he ignored the Paris debates of the 1950s to early 1960s. It then covers the intricate history of Barthes’s polemical articles on avant-garde theatre and focuses on Barthes hailing Bertolt Brecht as an innovator who redefined theatre as belonging to a community. The next section engages with Beckett’s and Ionesco’s ideas on staging and their relation to Brecht and the Brechtians. The epilogue proposes a reading of Ionesco’s satirical play Improvisation or the Shepherd’s Chameleon (1955), which features Barthes and two other representatives of nouvelle critique as characters.

Freudismo y psiquiatría en la cultura comunista. Buenos Aires y París, 1949

En 1949, La Nouvelle Critique, la revista intelectual de los comunistas franceses, publicaba una dura critica al psicoanalisis, reproducida en Buenos Aires ese mismo ano por Gregorio Bermann en Nueva Gaceta, una revista de la constelacion del Partido Comunista argentino dirigida por Hector Agosti. En el escenario de la guerra fria, el psicoanalisis quedaba ubicado entre las expresiones ideologicas del capitalismo y alservicio de la ofensiva mundial norteamericana. En Francia esa cruzada duro pocos anos. Hacia comienzos de los sesenta Louis Althusser renovaba el pensamiento marxista y la lectura de y en 1964 publicaba en la misma revista, La Nouvelle Critique, Freud et Lacan. En Buenos Aires, en cambio, la guerra contra el freudismo duro por lo menos hasta fines de los anos sesenta. El articulo aborda el momento inaugural de esa historia y estudia las relaciones y malentendidos de la recepcion de esa polemica en las condiciones locales de la cultura comunista.

Le Nouveau Roman: une césure dans l'histoire du récit by Francine Dugast-Portes

Reviewed by: Le Nouveau Roman: une césure dans l'histoire du récit by Francine Dugast-Portes Karlis Racevskis Dugast-Portes, Francine. Le Nouveau Roman: une césure dans l'histoire du récit. PU de Rennes, 2018. ISBN 978-2-7535-7399-4. Pp. 401. The first edition of this wide-ranging and insightful survey appeared already in 2001. The re-edition became necessary, as Dugast-Portes explains, when she took stock of the continuing debates, commentary, and colloquia on the topic of the New Novel and its legacy over the past few years. Thus, the author finds that the time had come to reassess the movement and to revisit what she terms "un moment glorieux de la littérature" (122). It is also a unique and somewhat puzzling moment, and to refer to it as "une césure dans l'histoire du récit" is to underline the ambiguous meaning implicit in the notion of a caesura, as Dugast-Portes specifies: "entendons-la comme coupure, pause, suspens, qui implique des disparitions, des reprises, des articulations" (22). In terms of its own cultural context, this episode is marked by a paradox that serves as a guiding principle for the author's approach to the history of the movement because she sees it as "un phénomène à la fois subversif et intégré par la sphère culturelle" (347). In the first section of the book, entitled "Éléments d'histoire: une césure très médiatisée," Dugast-Portes stresses the mediating role played by universities—in France and abroad—by publishing houses, colloquia, the media, literary prizes, that effectively advanced the process of cultural integration. The section "Subversions" covers the whole range of methods, approaches, tactics and devices employed by the authors of a movement that makes itself known "par sa radicalité formelle, par une subversion de tous les paramètres" (342). What is questioned during this "Ère du soupçon," as Nathalie Sarraute famously put it, is the validity of all the established intellectual and aesthetic norms that constituted what could be termed "un certain type d'humanisme traditionnel" (207). In the final account and in a general sense, all of this subverting is to be seen as "Le questionnement obstiné du sens"—the title of the third section. In this regard, as Dugast-Portes points out, it becomes necessary to account for the complexity of the contemporary context informing the emergence of the New Novel and to appreciate "l'arrière-plan culturel [End Page 210] dans lequel furent formés, au sens scolaire, les nouveaux romanciers" (214). This background included the recent experience of death camps, Hiroshima, the emergence of "La Nouvelle Critique," the influence of psychoanalysis, of scientific developments such as relativity, quantum theory, computers, and, in a general way, of "l'incertitude liée aux limites de la compréhension humaine, l'importance de la complexité, du paradoxe, de l'entropie" (273). The section "Dans le mouvement des esthétiques" brings up the connections and rapport with other arts, in particular with music, painting, and film. It also brings out the importance of humor, of the ironic and ludic dimensions in the writings of the New Novelists, aspects that serve to underline the critical self-awareness of the authors. And while Dugast-Portes admits at the end that her interpretations probably produced meanings never intended by these authors, her highly informed syntheses make this critical study a most valuable resource in the field. Karlis Racevskis Ohio State University, emeritus Copyright © 2019 American Association of Teachers of French

Breve storia della forma in letteratura [en ligne

This essay will try to go back over the complex history of the concept of form, although its subject may often turn out to be unthinkable or unspeakable. In literary critcism the formalist approach is based on a double trend: on the one hand a widespread mistrust in the power of language to communicate and to represent reality, on the other, the beginnings of a formalist approach in art history, - in Burkhardt, Worringer, Wolfflin - leading to an art history ‘without names’ and giving rise in turn to a formalist approach in literary criticism. There are close connections between The New Critics of the thirties and fifties in the United States and in England and the French Nouvelle Critique , both of which ended up reinforcing the tenets of the various modernist avant-gardes: impersonality, the autonomy of the work of art and the literary specificity of a literary text. While underlining the ambiguities emerging from the original term – form covers both the sense of eidos-idea and hule-matter, the essay ends up acknowledging the current demise of formalist criticism.

A Distant Mirror: Engaging with Realism from the Sidelines

This article revisits the critique of realism by Marxist and structuralist critics of the 1960s, particularly Althusser and Barthes. It expounds Althusser’s theory that, rather than providing knowledge of society or history, the text makes ideology visible. It distinguishes the different currents that converged to form Barthes’s structuralism (as mobilized in his study of Racine): the nouvelle critique; a certain reading of Saussure’s theory of language; and Lévi-Strauss’s anthropology. It describes Barthes’s critique of the circular procedures involved in the belief in psychological realism. It explains why Barthes was not on the whole disposed to tolerate realism among the variety of acceptable theories. It casts doubt, however, on the validity of Barthes’s appropriation of Saussure, in the light of Benveniste’s distinction between semantic and semiological functions of language. Barthes’s rejection of realism finally depends on his notion of écriture, as a set of writing conventions conditioning representation. Barthes’s later critique of realism in S/Z is then described. He sees realism as an essentially oppressive conception: Prendergast’s rehabilitation of mimesis, however, allows its critical potential to reappear, and this is shown with reference to the novels of Marivaux and Rousseau, where apparent infractions of vraisemblance are used to challenge reader’s social and ethical assumptions. In conclusion, the emancipatory potential of the critique of realism is acknowledged, as are its limitations.

Reprint of ‘Realism: Model or Mirage?’ From Romance Studies, 1(1) (Winter 1982): 1–17

This reprinted essay, written in 1982 by the co-founder of Romance Studies, examined different ways of considering realism, from Balzac, Stendhal, and Baudelaire to Flaubert, Zola, Robbe-Grillet, and Barthes. In it, Nelson questioned the assumptions underlying la nouvelle critique’s denial of realism.

Baudrillard Seriously: The Joys of Misprision

Baudrillard Seriously: The Joys of Misprision

René Girard: un allumé qui se prend pour un phare by René Pommier

analysis of Michaux’s pseudo-anthropological Voyage au Grand Garabagne as an anti-humanist satire concludes the volume (253–64). It expresses the pessimism felt in Europe during the rise of Hitler. From this point on, Pérez’s discussions become inconclusive and less original than before as he examines Beckett’s minimalism . The same judgment applies to the epilogue, which concludes by capitulating to the pervasive indeterminacy of a nihilistic age. Michigan State University, emeritus Laurence M. Porter POMMIER, RENÉ. René Girard: un allumé qui se prend pour un phare. Paris: Kimé, 2010. ISBN 978-84174-5142. Pp. 133. 17 a. René Pommier has enjoyed a long, distinguished career as a professor of French literature at the Sorbonne and as the author of admirably thorough and sensitive “explications de texte” with various French publishers. A visit to his Web site () affords a very generous sampling of these luminous readings; it also alerts readers to his sideline in the equally French specialty of “éreintage,” his “démarche,” as he describes it, being “celle d’un polémiste et d’un rationaliste, infatigable pourfendeur de fariboles.” Roland Barthes, Freud, Pierre Barbéris, “la nouvelle critique,” as it was styled in the 1960s, have all come in for a zesty drubbing, but so does Pascal, not for his genius but for the belief system to which he devoted it. So does Theresa of Avila, religious belief being chief among the “sornettes” exposed to Pommier’s vigorous— and sometimes strenuous—derision. So we are not surprised to find Pommier taking on René Girard, whose works span literary criticism, religious anthropology, and Biblical exegesis, where he makes huge claims for Judaic and Christian scriptures as the abiding source of Western culture’s self-critical and consequently scientific impulses. All that is arraigned as “infatuation,” “présomption,” “outrecuidance” (10) in Pommier’s broadside, in which he does not refrain from ad hominem explanations for Girard’s work, which we learn is propelled by “un ardent désir de devenir célèbre” in quest of “une gloire universelle et éternelle” (119). He views Girard’s attraction to Christianity as mere self-affirmation: “En fait René Girard a toujours cru: il a toujours cru en René Girard et la foi en Dieu n’a été pour lui que le prolongement , l’approfondissement, l’aboutissement de sa foi en René Girard” (83). Girard’s mimetic theory has aroused skepticism in many quarters for its wide-ranging interpretations, its theory-of-everything proclivities, and Pommier reads Malebranche to good effect against the perils and prejudices attending “inventeurs de nouveaux systèmes” (120). Pommier reads a number of lengthy passages from Girard closely, citing whole pages at a stretch, and he does succeed in showing some factual errors and inaccuracies, while also allowing that these are not essential. It is the sweep of Girard’s claims that fires his animus: “Il soutient que ses théories expliquent tout d’une manière complète et définitive” (90). Any effort such as Girard’s to unify the human sciences will be met by symmetrical doubts about its possibility. His key insight, as informed, according to him, by great literary works, is that desire is mimetic: from early childhood on through the indefinitely prolonged adolescence that our advertising industry encourages among us, desire borrows its objects from others. If that is wrong, then nothing Girard has written has any validity whatsoever. But you have to get his founding 960 FRENCH REVIEW 85.5 idea right: mimetic desire is not “le désir d’imiter” (52, 54), as Pommier avers, for then it might be primary or primal, and every bit as “spontané, instinctif, fonci èrement individualiste et égoïste” (55) as he insists. For Girard, and for those literary critics, psychologists, anthropologists, and theologians allied with his project (see ), imitation is the origin of desire, not its object, and it is most often not at all conscious. Mimetic theory argues that our greatest writers dispel the illusion of an autonomous, free-standing subjectivity (this is what is meant by “mensonge romantique” in Girard’s thought) that Pommier, in his relentless appeal to “le bon sens,” is out to defend. Those...

The Avant-Garde in Italy: Theoretical Debates and Poetic Practices (review)

Reviewed by: The Avant-Garde in Italy: Theoretical Debates and Poetic Practices Rocco Capozzi (bio) John Picchione. The Avant-Garde in Italy: Theoretical Debates and Poetic Practices University of Toronto Press 2004. x, 250. $50.00 In the opening statement of his preface, John Picchione underlines that the debates on literature and the arts provoked by the Italian avant-garde are undoubtedly some of the most animated and controversial that Italy has witnessed since the beginning of the twentieth century, when T. Marinetti and the Futurists made their presences known. With the rising popularity of U. Eco's notion of the 'open work,' structuralism, semiotics, and the writings associated with the Tel Quel group, Nouveau roman, Nouvelle critique, Oulipo, and the Frankfurt School, as well as of international cultural gurus such as A. Robbe-Grillet, R. Barthes, M. Foucault, J. Lacan, R. Jakobson, and J.L. Borges, the focus was now on language, signifiers, signs, structures, forms and problems of communication, intertextuality, and, in short, on literariness more than on literature and content. In Italy critics such as A. Guglielmi, R. Barilli, F. Curi, and F. Muzzioli have documented the new trends and key protagonists of the avant-garde movements such as Neoavanguardia, Neosperimentalismo, Gruppo 63, and Transavanguardia. In the English-speaking world, readers have had to [End Page 529] search for articles in journals and collected essays in order to reconstruct the theoretical and ideological debates surrounding literature and the arts in Italy. The debates were published mainly in new literary journals such as Il Verri, Officina, Il Menabo, Quindici, Marcatrè, and Alfabeta – journals not readily available outside of Italy. These debates also saw the old guard pitted against the new, either defending or attacking experimentalism, tradition, political ideology, and old-fashioned realism. Picchione's text examines all of the above issues and is a most welcome and much-needed critical study that will help English-speaking Italianists, students, and scholars who wish to study some of the most important literary and overall cultural phenomena since the historical avant-garde. The first two chapters, 'Poetry in Revolt' and 'The Neoavanguardia and the Theoretical Debates,' summarize extremely well the key issues surrounding writers, artists, and critics amid debates and experimental works. Picchione, an expert on contemporary Italian poetry and an authority on Antonio Porta, has chosen to focus almost exclusively on poets and poetic practices, setting aside the presence and role, within the neoavanguardia, of several outstanding fiction writers of the same era. Picchione states in the preface that 'poetry is the area in which the neo-avant-garde was able to obtain its most remarkable results' and consequently he does not treat fiction writers such as L. Malerba, P. Volponi, and G. Celati, nor does he discuss the narrative works of G. Manganelli, E. Sanguineti and N. Balestrini. From the opening pages Picchione illustrates how we are not dealing with a unified movement or school, as he discusses elements of postmodernism as well as the links between art and technology, and culture and mass media, that characterize the writings of the new exponents of Italian literature who often conceived their works in terms of diversity and provocation. Others, such as Sanguineti, saw their writings as verbal manifestations analogous to the visual abstract compositions that dominated painting in the same decades. English-speaking readers should find the chapters on Giuliani and Sanguineti of particular interest in terms of understanding the central linguistic and ideological issues that either united or divided writers and critics during the early days following the publication of the anthology I Novissimi, and through the novelties proposed by the promoters of the Gruppo 63, during the uncompromising political and ideological issues that saw the end of the journal Quindici, and up to the days when, as Barilli properly states, we see the 'normalization of the avant-garde' in the 1970s. Basically we are dealing with a division between writers like Sanguineti who, as Picchione reminds us, remained loyal to Marxist and revolutionary ethics of literature, and those like Giuliani, who conceived poetry and literature in general as a linguistic experience. Moreover, North American readers will find interesting and informative the remarkably lucid presentations of Porta's own...

Le Reliquat scintillant: Pour une renaissance de la critique littéraire by Olivier Larizza

MLR, I02.2, 2007 533 work with theworld of consumerism and media spectacle itdepicts. For such critics, Houellebecq's work lacks the literaryquality which alone can resist the logic of the market; itwas forprecisely these reasons that, days after the end of theEdinburgh conference, La Possibilite d'une ilewas passed over for the 2005 Prix Goncourt. The twentycontributors to this volume had better be in the business of denunciation, it would seem, ifthey want toavoid contamination by this least aesthetic ofprovocateurs. Yet most of the essays here seem happy to take this risk. Which isnot to relegate the collection tomere boosterism: far from it.Very few remain uncritical, in fact; almost allmaintain a lucid approach throughout, and are sceptical where necessary. But none of these contributors appears content to dismiss Houellebecq as somuch media hokum. On the contrary, dirtying theirhands, they readHouellebecq closely, attentive in particular to his manipulation of voice and tone, and his talent forde lineating a cultural situation bymeans of the organization of its definingmaterials, whether inherited from thenineteenth century or announcing the twenty-first. Thus, while Andrew Hussey reads Houellebecq alongside the complex valencies of popu larmusic, the rigorous essays of Sandrine Rabosseau, Floriane Place-Verghnes, and Sandrine Schianno-Bennis demonstrate his use of nineteenth-century models; the tenacious discussions ofBruno Viard and Ruth Cruickshank illuminate the ideologi cal discourses and positions which make up the texture of his work; and through painstaking analysis ofHouellebecq's poetry,David Evans reveals a degree of intri cacy most have so farmissed. Other readings deftly deploy narratological, poetolo gical, and philosophical frameworks; the name Houellebecq here sits among such as Merleau-Ponty, Charles Taylor, and Northrop Frye. The author isnot redeemed by these associations: rather,theymap exactly thenodal cultural position he occupies by virtue of his ability to triangulate themultiple vectors of our bewildering moment. The collection begins with a tour-de-force introduction fromBowd, who uncom promisingly dismantles thedelusions ofHouellebecq's detractors, clearing the space for this collection with some magnificently cutting dismissals. Bowd also recalls Houellebecq's presence at the conference, earnestly taking notes in the front row, and engaging ingenerous discussion with the contributors. Itwas clear from this, as from the emotional speech he gave at the conference dinner, that this academic atten tion touched Houellebecq deeply. This response, and the quality of this collection, have uncomfortable implications for the thoroughly mediatized anti-Houellebecq circus. Things, itwould appear, aremore serious than theyhad thought. QUEENS' COLLEGE, CAMBRIDGE MARTIN CROWLEY Le Reliquat scintillant: pour une renaissance de la critique littraire. By OLIVIER LA RIZZA. Saint-Genouph: Nizet. 2005. i65 PP. Ei8. ISBN 978-2-7078-1287-2. Olivier Larizza's book falls into twomajor parts. The firstone, headed 'Diagnostic', isbasically critical. The author isopposed towhat he sees as the present acceptance of the 'Nouvelle critique' originating in the I95os and ig60s as a new orthodoxy, and especially of itsdominance in theeducational system and with such bodies as theSHS and CNRS. His criticism isdirected essentially at the claim of scientific status associ atedwith such authors asGenette, Todorov, orGreimas, although he himself accepts to some degree thevalue of 'scientificite'.Larizza reproaches the structuralistmethod with creating a jargonwhich puts criticalwriting out of the reach of theaverage reader. He considers any scientificmethod tobe at least limited because itcannot cope with the problem of literaryvalue, because itcannot found an interpretation-which he regards as the very essence of criticism-because science is necessarily concerned with what isgeneral and common and notwhat isunique or individual. He points out 534 Reviews that science by itsnature makes progress, whereas there can be no proof that literary criticism is now superior to criticism of the past, and he argues that some writing in semiotics is in fact amere tautologous display of itsown axioms. Against all this he sets the shining remainder-the element of vital transcendence in a literarywork which resists all explanation. These arguments are put forward in a lively and coherent manner, and carry a good deal of conviction. One may wonder whether the views criticized are really as much of an orthodoxy as the author claims, in view of the quite large number of distinguished critics he isable to cite inhis support. One may...

After Reading After Poststructuralism

After Reading After Poststructuralism David Bockoven (bio) Review of: Colin Davis, After Poststructuralism: Reading, Stories and Theory. New York: Routledge, 2004. After reading the title of Colin Davis’s After Poststructuralism, my initial reaction is to ask whether the shark hasn’t been jumped once too often on a book written in the “post-theory” genre. Since at least the early 1990s, critical theorists have referred to the death of Theory, which seems invariably to prompt further theoretical reflection on what methodological norms in reading literature academically might come next. (The hackneyed idea that cultural studies eclipsed deconstruction as the predominant theoretical method comes to mind.) But the freshness of perspective Davis gives the subject recommends the book. To begin with, the first two chapters helpfully detail three academic controversies surrounding French theory—the ways its enemies have gone “after” it, so to speak, and taken it to task. Davis helps the inexperienced reader, or even a reader who just needs a short refresher course, by situating the topic in a polemical fashion. We instantly know what is at stake—namely, whether poststructuralism offers a legitimate methodology of reading, or whether as its attackers claim it is fashionable but ultimately fraudulent academic discourse. Of these three controversies, the 1965 dispute between Raymond Picard and Roland Barthes over how to read Racine is the most interesting because of its relative unfamiliarity. Most readers interested in theory are probably more familiar with the Alan Sokal affair of 1996 and with Jürgen Habermas’s The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity (1987), Davis’s other two examples. What I find particularly fascinating about the Picard-Barthes conflict is the way in which Picard’s indictment of Barthes and of, generally, what he called la nouvelle critique so eerily foreshadows the same complaints made by more recent critics of theory: its jargon is mere obfuscation, its interpretations are unverifiable, and it uses examples out of context (16–18). What is interesting is the date of this attack, coming as it does even before poststructuralism proper really got going. So from its very inception, these charges have dogged it. It’s like the experience of a young person today reading a Flannery O’Connor story written in the 1950s and coming to the realization that perhaps the “good old days” never really were. The Picard-Barthes controversy sets up a pattern of fierce traditionalist opposition to Theory that finds a recent echo in the Sokal affair. But if Picard spoke with the authority of a scholarly point of view, Sokal, as a physicist, attacks from the outside. Davis treats the Sokal affair with a humorous touch. It turns out that Sokal’s attempt to play gotcha with postmodernism by planting a “fake” academic article in the journal Social Text imbricates him all the deeper in the very social phenomenon he rails against. One sign of this postmodernism is the burgeoning controversy around Sokal’s original Social Text article and the later Impostures intellectuelles. Rather than putting an end to the babble of “fashionable nonsense,” Sokal and Bricmont found themselves increasingly engulfed in a media Babel, as the meaning and significance of their work were wrested from them . . . .But each new act of containment produces new misunderstandings and a renewed need to assert the meaning of the inaugural event in the controversy. The text cannot be trusted to speak for itself, it requires supplements and commentaries which fragment it at the very moment they endeavor to shore up its unity. (28–29) For Davis, the Sokal affair becomes the postmodern controversy par excellence: the more Sokal struggles to assert the real meaning of events, the deeper he is pulled into a moral quicksand. The meat of the book is four chapters that take an in-depth look at four French theorists: Jean-François Lyotard, Emmanuel Levinas, Louis Althusser, and Julia Kristeva. One of the unexpected qualities of the book is that it doesn’t focus directly on what are arguably the big names of poststructuralism: Derrida, Foucault, Lacan, and Deleuze. (Davis does bring in a discussion of Foucault and Derrida in one of his framing chapters on Habermas, and the conclusion’s meditation on the spectrality...

ANGLO-AMERICAN REVIEW: Deppman, Jed, Daniel Ferrer, and Michael Groden, eds.Genetic Criticism: Texts and Avant-textes.Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004.

Reviewed by: Genetic Criticism: Texts and Avant-textes Wim Van Mierlo Deppman, Jed, Daniel Ferrer and Michael Groden, eds. 2004. Genetic Criticism: Texts and Avant-textes. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. ISBN 0812237773. Pp. 258. $55. A standard textbook or thorough book-length exposition on genetic criticism for the English-speaking world is long overdue. By this I do not mean a final, authoritative statement of what genetic criticism is, does, or should be, but an overview of procedures and principles, something that would finally put the analytical study of modern manuscripts and the writing process on the literary-critical map in Britain and America. The next best thing has now appeared from Pennsylvania University Press: Genetic Criticism: Textes and Avant-textes, edited by Jed Deppman, Daniel Ferrer, and Michael Groden, is an outstanding collection of essays by the best and most noteworthy of today’s genetic critics from France, carefully translated from the original, amplified with exhaustive bibliographies, and accompanied by brief, informative introductions. The book follows three earlier collections, published as a special issue of Romanic Review (85 [1995]), of Yale French Studies (89 [1996]), edited by Michel Contat, Denis Hollier, and Jacques [End Page 162] Neefs (Drafts), and of Word and Image (13 [1997]), edited by Claire Bustarret. The difference between these three issues and the present volume is, I think, one of intent. The essays in the Yale French Studies issue in particular demonstrated a new method, a new theory, a new aesthetic even; in the present volume, theoretical considerations go as before hand in hand with demonstrations of how the method works in practice, but the essays selected by Deppman, Ferrer, and Groden mark a clear choice to gather together a broad range of angles, possibilities, and approaches to study a writer’s avant-textes. Even though it is not a textbook in the strict sense of the word, the volume is put together to have textbook allure, and it is hoped that its impact will be of the kind. As the title of the Introduction, “A Genesis of French Genetic Criticism”, indicates, and the inclusion of Louis Hay’s “Genetic Criticism: Origins and Perspectives” signals, the editors of this volume have been concerned as much with showing how genetic criticism works to a non-French audience as with exploring its earlier developments in its country of origin. The volume showcases the scholarship produced by ITEM, the Institut des Textes et Manuscrits Modernes, against the background of that organization’s own institutional history. Even though the editors have made a selection from thirty years of scholarly activity, French genetic criticism—or ITEM—is far from being a movement or school in the narrow sense. The essays they translate present instead a diversity of techniques, approaches, perspectives, assumptions, methodologies, and lines of inquiry that can be applied to the successful study of an author’s manuscripts. To maintain a sense of the historical, and of the importance of genetic criticism, the choices they have made in their selection is to concentrate on the early years, rather than on recent developments. Although the editors indicate that the timeliness of the present volume is due to the rising interest in the materiality of the text in the field of English studies, two things are made clear from the start: that genetic criticism, or critique génétique, is decidedly French (although Hay traces its origins back to German Idealism) and that it is a literary-critical enterprise. The intellectual allegiances are everywhere apparent, not just in the Introduction, but also in the contributions themselves. Possible precursors in French or English scholarship are quickly dismissed as having had no influence, and so are philology, textual criticism, and literary history; instead, one finds the origins in the ideas of psychoanalysis, nouvelle critique, structuralism, poststructuralism, and their notion of “writing’s mobility” and pluriformity (5) as well as in the work of such modernist writers as Stéphane Mallarmé and Paul Valéry. All the critics represented in the volume are more interested in the science of [End Page 163] writing than in the physical attributes of existing documents. To the extent that the direction the writing takes must be inferred...

In Theory's Wake

Provided with two decades of hindsight, we are now in position to assess the practical consequences of the epoch of theory, which have been very different in France and the United States. Antoine Compagnon, in the book here reviewed, says that the French new criticism was solidly incorporated into the curriculum of France's national education, especially in secondary teaching. This may well have been precisely what made it so rigid. It is impossible today to pass an entrance exam without mastering the subtle distinctions and jargon of narratology (3). In the United States, which lacks France's coordination of curriculum, testing, and college admission, theory had no comparable effect. Freed from the onus of reducing theory to national pedagogy and teaching it to students, professors of English were able to pursue their own theoretical interests, producing postmodernist discourse that is the subject of Walter Benn Michaels's book. Compagnon's book can be seen as the final episode of history recounted in his earlier writings. La Troisieme Ripublique des lettres, de Flaubert a' Proust (1983) traced the rise of literary history and explication de texte under the aegis of Gustave Lanson. In Literature, Theory, and Common Sense, he notes that the critical and theoretical issues important in other countries gained no foothold in France during the first half of the twentieth century. With the advent of the nouvelle critique and the new philosophers in the 1960s, the French leapfrogged over developments elsewhere, initiating theoretical phase that appeared to be ending in the 1980s. Pressed by others to write about developments after World War II, Compagnon did so indirectly in The Five Paradoxes of Modernity (1990; English trans., 1994). His teaching at Columbia University had by then exposed him to the alien vocabulary of this country's literary study. In the preface to the English translation, he says that his cisatlantic experience left him with a persistent sense of self-consciousness and Unheimlichkeit (vii). Unfortunate as it may

The premodern condition: medievalism and the making of theory

The Premodern Condition identifies and explains a surprising affinity for medievalism and medieval studies among the leading figures of critical theory. Drawing on a wide range of philosophical, literary-critical, and sociological works produced within the French nouvelle critique of the 1960s, Holsinger argues for reconceiving these discourses, in part, as a brilliant amalgamation of medievalisms. Holsinger shows that the preoccupation with medieval cultures and practices among Bataille, Derrida, Lacan, Barthes, Bourdieu, and their cohorts was so wide ranging that it merits recognition as one of the most significant epiphenomena of postwar French thought. Not simply an object of nostalgic longing or an occasional source of literary exempla, the medieval epoch was continually mined by these thinkers for specific philosophical vocabularies, social formations, and systems of thought. To supplement its master thesis, The Premodern Condition also contains original essays by Bataille and Bourdieu - translated here for the first time into English - that testify in various ways to the strange persistence of medievalisms in French postwar avant-garde writings. What results is an important and original work that will be a touchstone for specialists in medieval studies and critical theory alike.

Towards a Poetics of Consumerism

The influence of Gaston Bachelard's studies of the ‘poetic’ or ‘material imagination’ on the ‘nouvelle critique’ has long been acknowledged. Similarly, the importance of Bachelard's work in the history of science to social theorists such as Louis Althusser, Michel Foucault and Pierre Bourdieu has received considerable critical attention. What has been largely unexplored, however, is the impact of Bachelard's studies of the ‘material imagination’ on social theorists such as Henri Lefebvre, Jean Baudrillard, and Roland Barthes, in their analyses of the advent of mass consumerism in post-war France. This article examines the use made by these theorists of Bachelard's concept of the ‘material imagination’ as an index of everything authentic that risked being lost in France's embrace of mass consumerism. It also shows how Bachelard's ‘material imagination’ could serve as a powerful tool for explaining the affective appeal that the new spaces and mass-produced commodities of post-war France possessed for French consumers.

Foreword: Derrida and SubStance

ForewordDerrida and SubStance Michel Pierssens and Sydney Lévy There was a time when "French Theory" meant Structuralism. In those years, the late 1960s, the debate that had been raging in France was not very well understood in the US, even though the big names were already familiar to many: Lévi-Strauss, Barthes, Lacan, Foucault... In literature departments, people were interested mostly in the Barthes/Picard polemics and in the conclusions of various conferences that dealt with "nouvelle critique." The issues were those regarding the very notion of literature, and what should be done to enrich our understanding of how poems and novels actually worked. It was also a matter of importing non-canonical works into the list of reading musts: Sade, Artaud, Bataille, the New Novel and the "new New Novel"—meaning mostly Sollers and his Tel Quel epigones, long before they all turned their backs on "subversion" (a catch-word of fundamental importance at the time). While US campuses were busy with Structuralism, a select group of initiates were laboring in France to understand what a new voice was getting at under the term "grammatology," and why the strange insistence on "différance." To become a structuralist, it had been enough to get acquainted with Saussure and linguistics, but in order to get a glimpse of what grammatology meant, it became necessary to embark on a difficult voyage through the thick of modern philosophy, especially Heidegger. To convert to post-structuralism (soon to be known as "deconstruction"), one had to labor a lot, learn German and ancient Greek, etc. This was exciting, and the perfect challenge for normaliens who didn't know what to do with their classical training. It was thus only natural that when we started SubStance in 1971, we wanted to convey as much as we could of what then bore the most esoteric appeal, and could provoke the old guard into the heated challenges that we—young as we were—relished. If for our first issue we had asked for the patronage of Barthes, Crews and Faye (who obliged in a most forthcoming way) we quickly turned our attention to Derrida.1 With the hubris so typical of those years of emphatic theoretical preaching, we dedicated a full section of our issue no. 4 (1973) to him under the title: "Literature and Philosophy? The Dessemination of Derrida."2 We were obviously delighted when the opportunity arose in 1974 to publish an important excerpt from Gayatri Spivak's translation of On Grammatology,3 [End Page 3] for which Derrida expressed his gratitude, saying "Je lis aussi SubStance avec beaucoup d'intérêt et j'ai été heureux que vous y ayez publié un chapitre de De la Grammatologie." This was all part of the "French Theory" saga that François Cusset has recounted with much intelligent detail. It should be said however, that at SubStance, even though we remained very much interested in Derrida in the ensuing years, we did not espouse what was to establish for more than a decade a crushing monopoly under the label "deconstruction"—a term that Derrida himself encouraged, while well aware of its shortcomings. Our interests comprised a variety of philosophical and epistemic works that we tried to present to the intellectual public in the US throughout the 1970s and 1980s, with Deleuze and Serres at the forefront. A post-modern synthesis was impossible, as everybody realized, and Derrida reigned unchallenged. It remains to distinguish in this heritage what provoked truly creative advances, and what was mere froth atop the wave. The present issue of SubStance, true to its founding principles, attempts to do just that. This is our way or echoing, with much respect, the forceful appeal of Derrida, a major thinker who helped shape our own times, and whose work will now be read in a new light, its provocative creativity intact. Notes 1. The first reference to Derrida in SubStance was in issue no. 3, Spring 1972, where Michel Pierssens cited La Dissémination, published that same year. 2. The editors' introduction (by M. Pierssens) to SubStance no. 4 (1973) read: We would like the present issue of SUB-STANCE to appear as...

Thinking about modernity - in satire and economics

Abstract The history of the structuralist and post-structuralist theory, in France and the United States, is marked by two famous discussions (it is tempting to consider them as its beginning and end … ): the fIrst is the polemics between Raymond Picard and Roland Barthes in 1965-6 about “la nouvelle critique”; the second, the international controversy around Alan Sokal's anti-postmodern mystification published in 1996. The two discussions were unusually abrupt and violent, mixing intellectual reasons with moral accusations. It is sufficient to say that the two books resuming the “anti-theoretical” views were containing in their titles the same word imposture: Nouvelle critique ou nouvelle imposture? by Raymond Picard and Impostures intellectuelles by Alan Sokal and Jean Bricmont. And those who defended the “theoretical” approach to culture utilised non-academic arguments too, trying to discover under the attacks against the theory a self-interested tendency: thus for example Roland Barthes, opening his r...

Coupling the Novel: Reading Bodies in La Morlière's Angola

Coupling the Novel: Reading Bodies in La Morlière's Angola Thomas M. Kavanagh Why has as provocative, witty, and innovative a work as Jacques Rochette de La Morlière's Angola, histoire indienne (1746) received so little critical attention? In his history of the French novel, Henri Coulet dismisses it in little more than a sentence as poorly done Crébillon, a "féerie orientale sans grande originalité." Robert Mauzi describes it as "un univers de carton," interesting only for the baroque scene towards the end of its story where tired and undone revellers stumble out ofa masked ball into the harsh light ofmorning. Philippe Laroch rises to a tone of almost ecclesiastical outrage to castigate a work he sees as "peuplé d'aimables parasites occupés àdilapider leurfortune pour séduire des filles qu'ils n'envisageront pas un instant d'épouser." Even Angola's most astute commentator, Raymond Trousson, defers to the consensus and relegates La Morlière to the status of an "écrivain du second rayon."1 1 Henri Coulet, Le Romanjusqu'à la Révolution (Paris: Armand Colin, 1967), p. 387; Robert Mauzi, l'Idée du bonheur dans la littérature et la penséefrançaise au XVIIIe siècle (Paris: Armand Colin, 1965), p. 442; Philippe Laroch, Petits-Maîtres et roués: évolution de la notion de libertinage dans le romanfrançais du XVIIIe siècle (Québec: Presses de l'Université Laval, 1979), p. 157; Raymond Trousson, "Le Chevalier de La Morlière: Un aventurier des lettres au xvme siècle," Bulletin de l'Académie royale de langue et de littérature française 68 (1990), 218. Trousson's article is the best work yet done on La Morlière. EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FICTION, volume 13, numéros 2-3, janvier-avril 2001 390 EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FICTION To a larger extent than most critics admit, Angola's, dismissal grows out of a strong distaste for La Morlière as its author. The successive waves of la nouvelle critique, structuralism, deconstruction, and postmodernism may seem to have consigned to mothballs the premises of any /'homme et l'œuvre approach. The fact is, however, that one finds repeated in every study of this novel the regret that everything we know about La Morlière the man hardly corresponds to any acceptable version of the significant author. His role as the organizer of the most aggressive and mercenary theatrical claques of the late 1740s and 1750s (which Voltaire did not hesitate to use) invites an image of him as cultural bully, if not terrorist. La Morlière also treated women shabbily, never hesitating to use seduction as the shortest path to a father's or a husband's fortune. Even a sympathetic preface-writer for the 1895 edition of Angola refers to La Morlière as "ce chef de cabale effronté, libertin et débauché."2 Those shortcomings pale, however, in comparison to the effect on La Morlière's reputation of Diderot's ferocious portrait of him in Le Neveu de Rameau. For Diderot, La Morlière is a blustering hothead always ready to hurl an insult or grab for his sword at the slightest provocation, someone "qui semble adresser un défi à tout venant." Diderot turns the sharpest of knives as he unmasks those histrionics as pathetic self-deception: "Que fait-il? Tout ce qu'il peut pour se persuader qu'il est un homme de cœur; mais il est lâche ... une longue et habituelle singerie de bravoure lui en avait imposé. Il avait tant fait les mines qu'il se croyait la chose."3 What we know about La Morlière the man is so heavy an albatross that Raymonde Robert took the not unexpected step of suggesting we accept as fact the period's dubious rumour that La Morlière did not write Angola at all, that he stole the manuscript from the duc de la Trémouille. This, as Robert sees it, would tidy things up considerably. With La Morlière as its author Angola can only be "la révolte d'un arriviste furieux des barrières qui se dressent devant son ambition." Attributing the work to...

Les «bricoleurs». Les cadres politiques de la raison historienne : l'exemple de La Nouvelle critique

The handymen. The political frame of the historian reason. La Nouvelle critique as exemple. Frédérique Matonti [95-114]. What is doing an intellectual when he accepts to elaborate theses accorded to partisan strategies ? French communist historian's work, in the 1960's and the 1970's allows to study the content of theses elaborated in expert's position and its principle, the interlacing of interests and beliefs. Experts «tinker» two types or theories. In the first case, they accomodate intellectual field's disruptions to make them compatible with PCF's ideology. In the second one, they elaborate short-lived theories to support the political line. These two types of expertise is founded on an implicit contract between intellectuals and political group and its different factions. As long as their political believes don't huit their academie believes, intellectuals exchange obedience against participation to partisan authority.