Professor Of French Research Articles

Interview avec Christine Montalbetti

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Christine Montalbetti is a novelist, playwright, and literary theorist. At Éditions P.O.L, she has published a novella, two collections of short stories, and six novels, the most recent of which is Love Hotel (2013). In her work En écrivant Journée américaine (text and photos, co-published by Biro éditeur/P.O.L, 2009), she evokes the writing residency in the United States that led to her 2009 novel Journée américaine. Her play Le Cas Jekyll (2010), also published by P.O.L, debuted at the Thêatre National de Chaillot and has played throughout France. Western and L'origine de l'homme have been published in English translation by Dalkey Archive Press, and Journée américaine is in the process of being translated.Additional informationNotes on contributorsPhilippe BrandPhilippe Brand is an Assistant Professor of French in the Department of Foreign Languages and Literatures at Lewis & Clark College. His research interests range across a variety of topics in twentieth- and twenty-first century French and Francophone literature, film, and culture. He is particularly interested in literary innovation, post-apocalyptic fiction and film, immigration and national identity, and issues of social justice. He teaches a range of courses on French language and culture and French and Francophone literature.

Katsaros, Laure. Whitman, Baudelaire, and the Hybrid City. [review

Laure Katsaros. New York-Paris: Whitman, Baudelaire, and the Hybrid City. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2012. 176pp.Connecting, comparing, and contrasting Whitman and Baudelaire is a frequent enough practice in Comparative Literature studies. One recurring feature of such analyses (as in Marshall Berman's recent chapter in A Political Companion to Whitman [2010]) is their propensity to center on the amount of space devoted to the by these poets, despite the fact that much of Whitman's imagination-starting with the title of his magnum opus-relies greatly on natural environments. Examining both poets together may appear the logical thing to do. After all, 1855 saw the publication both of Whitman's first sustained attempt at free verse and of eighteen poems by Baudelaire, which were to be included two years later in the earlier edition of Les Fleurs du mal (The Flowers of Evil). It is a well-known fact (thanks, in part, to Betsy Erkkila's Whitman Among the French: Poet and Myth [1980]) that the Good Gray Poet's perception of his French counterpart-mentioned only once in his writings, in his article Poetry of the Future [1881]-was as limited as it was inaccurate. To make things equally frustrating, there is no written record suggesting that the celebrated translator of Poe's stories and poems was even remotely aware of his American contemporary. The first-ever French review of Whitman's poetry, however, Louis Etienne's infamous Walt Whitman, philosophe et 'rowdy,''' appeared in the November, 1861, issue of La Revue europeenne, which also featured one poem by Baudelaire-Recueillement (Recollection). Laure Katsaros, commenting on this happy coincidence, concludes that the French poet went to extraordi- nary lengths to make sure that each of his published poems appeared exactly as he wanted them, and therefore could not have not cast at least a cursory glance at the remainder of the periodical, and, as a consequence, must have perused Etienne's scathing diatribe. Katsaros concludes that the impression of Whitman he would have received is a distinctly repugnant one. What ultimately links these poets, she notes, is that [b]oth Whitman and Baudelaire, in the eyes of their more conventional contemporaries, degraded artistic and moral ideals by speaking of outcasts and ordinary people in a language more direct than poetry had ever used before.Katsaros, trained in France, is now an associate professor of French and European Studies at Amherst College. The book contains an introduction, four chapters, and a conclusion. Its central thesis is that both poets wrote at a time when their home cities-Paris for Baudelaire, New York for Whitman-were going through irreversible changes. This, the reader is led to infer, is probably what is meant by the hybrid city in the book's subtitle, a in which traces of the past were being relentlessly smoothed over and the future was being ag- gressively actuated. For Katsaros, indeed, both the ruthless and much-needed remodelling of Paris by Baron Haussmann and New York's dizzying territorial and population expansion encapsulated the political, cultural, and aesthetic uncertainties out of which the poets perfected their own style and language. Katsaros focuses on both poets' rewriting of traditional poetry, which leads her to attend to Baudelaire's city-themed prose poems rather than his more lyrical and more influential rhymed poems.One thing that this book does not do, however, is offer a systematic exami- nation of the two poets side by side. After the thoroughly-researched general introduction, which adroitly puts both poets into perspective, they each go their separate ways, with Baudelaire making a brief reappearance at the end of the two chapters devoted to Whitman, while the latter is hardly ever mentioned in those focusing on Baudelaire. Reading the book cover to cover, readers might, because of this distance kept between the two poets, find its title somewhat deceptive. …

FROM THE ENLIGHTENMENT TO THE TERROR: NEW GENEALOGIES

Dan Edelstein is a prolific author. In less than two years he has produced not one but two books. His first, The Terror of Natural Right: Republicanism, the Cult of Nature, and the French Revolution, was published by The University of Chicago Press in October 2009. Its Irish twin, The Enlightenment: A Genealogy, appeared with the same press in the fall of 2010. Each of these books deals with a much-studied subject—respectively the Terror and the Enlightenment—the kind of subject, in other words, about which even the most recent literature alone can fill entire libraries. Yet in both cases, Edelstein manages to make a contribution of startling originality and importance. It is clear that this literary scholar—Edelstein is a professor of French and Italian at Stanford University—is one of the most important new voices in the field of eighteenth-century French intellectual history. In this review, I will start by discussing both of his books separately. I will then conclude with some reflections on what Edelstein's work contributes to our understanding of eighteenth-century intellectual history when read as a whole.

Introduction

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image sizeKeywords: dream theoryREM sleepAllan HobsonMark Solmsprotoconsciousnessneurobiology of sleep Additional informationNotes on contributorsLois OppenheimLois Oppenheim, Ph.D., is Distinguished Scholar, professor of French, and chair of the Department of Modern Languages and Literatures at Montclair State University. She is a scholar associate member of the New York Psychoanalytic Society and Institute and honorary member of the William Alanson White Society.

Poetry in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction: Denis Roche's Le Mécrit

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Acknowledgments I would like to thank Natalie Allen (Ph.D. candidate, University of Iowa) for her meticulous work editing this essay and translating the quotations from French to English. Funding from an Old Gold Fellowship from the University of Iowa allowed me to hire Allen as a research assistant for the summer of 2012. Notes Denis Roche was considered the poet of the Tel Quel, an Avant-Garde literary group that contributed to a literary journal of the same name. See Patrick Ffrench's The Time of Theory: A History of Tel Quel (1960–1983) (1995). Benjamin writes in “Little History of Photography” that the photographers of the 1880s “made it their business to simulate the aura which had been banished from the picture with the suppression of darkness through faster lenses” and by “using all the arts of retouching” (517). For more on Roche's comparisons between painting and poetry, see Sarah N. Lawall's “Yves Bonnefoy and Denis Roche: Art and the Art of Poetry” About French Poetry from Dada to “Tel Quel”: Text and Theory (1974 Lawall , Sarah N. “Yves Bonnefoy and Denis Roche: Art and the Art of Poetry.” About French Poetry from Dada to “Tel Quel”: Text and Theory . Ed. Mary Ann Caws . Detroit : Wayne State UP , 1974 . Print . [Google Scholar]). Additional informationNotes on contributorsRoxanna CurtoRoxanna Curto (Ph.D., Yale 2008) is Assistant Professor of French and Spanish at the University of Iowa. Her research explores representations of technology and sports in French, Francophone, and Latin American literature.

Interview with Christie Mcdonald and Susan Rubin Suleiman

French Global: A New Approach from Literary History, published in September 2011 by Columbia University Press, offers an innovative new look at the breadth of literary expression in French. Focusing on writers from all over the world, French Global's twenty-nine essays discuss works that span some 1200 years of literary history. Co-editors Christie McDonald (Smith Professor of French Language and Literature, Harvard University) and Susan Rubin Suleiman (C. Douglas Dillon Professor of the Civilization of France, Harvard University) attended the “Idea of France” conference and led a public discussion around their volume. David Pettersen (Assistant Professor of French, University of Pittsburgh) caught up with them afterwards to talk more about their project.

XII

XII* Édouard Glissant Translated by Mary Ann Caws (bio) As one among the bright trees, reborn in the south wind,It’s the last night, tomorrow the stone on the stoneWill choose itself. And like one who sculpts a bone of blue sulfur.He was singing the bitter night open to the salt and a womanSadder than in the bonfire the nubile body of the sunWhen the fire of the sun, itself dying, is changingWithin the day and its burning. Mary Ann Caws Mary Ann Caws is Distinguished Professor of English, French, and Comparative Literature at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. She is author of such works as The Surrealist Look: An Erotics of Encounter, Women of Bloomsbury: Virginia, Vanessa, and Carrington, Robert Motherwell: What Art Holds, Picasso’s Weeping Woman: The Life and Art of Dora Maar, Robert Motherwell with Pen and Brush, and is editor and translator of Approximate Man and Other Writings by Tristan Tzara, The Secret Art of Antonin Artaud by Jacques Derrida, and Ostinato by Louis-René des Forêts; the editor and co-translator of the HarperCollins World Reader, The Yale Anthology of Twentieth-Century French Poetry, Capital of Pain by Paul Eluard, Essential Poems and Writings of Robert Desnos, Surrealist Painters and Poets, Surrealism, Surrealist Love Poems, and the co-editor and co-translator of Poems of André Breton and of Furor and Mystery and Other Writings of René Char. Recently, she has published Surprised in Translation, How Vita Matters, and Provençal Cooking: Savoring the Simple Life in France. She is the recipient of fellowships from such institutions as Guggenheim, National Endowment for the Humanities, Getty, and Rockefeller, and is a fellow of the New York Institute for the Humanities and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Footnotes * “XII” was originally published in French in Sel noir (Paris: Gallimard, 1983). The English translation is published with permission from Gallimard. [End Page 852] Copyright © 2013 The Johns Hopkins University Press

Marie de France: a critical companion

Marie de France is the author of some of the most influential and important works to survive from the middle ages; arguably best-known for her 'Lais', she also translated Aesop's Fables (the 'Ysope'), and wrote the 'Espurgatoire seint Patriz' (St Patrick's Purgatory), based on a Latin text. The aim of this Companion is both to provide information on what can be gleaned of her life, and on her poetry, and to rethink standard questions of interpretation, through topics with special relevance to medieval literature and culture. The variety of perspectives used highlights both the unity of Marie's 'oeuvre' and the distinctiveness of the individual texts. After situating her writings in their Anglo-Norman political, linguistic, and literary context, this volume considers her treatment of questions of literary composition in relation to the circulation, transmission, and interpretation of her works. Her social and historical engagements are illuminated by the prominence of feudal vocabulary, while her representation of movement across different geographical and imaginary spaces opens a window on plot construction. Repetition and variation are considered as a narrative technique within Marie's work, and as a cultural practice linking her texts to a network of twelfth-century textual traditions. The Conclusion, on the posterity of her 'oeuvre', combines a consideration of manuscript context with the ways in which later authors rewrote Marie's works. Sharon Kinoshita is Professor of Literature, University of California, Santa Cruz; Peggy McCracken is Professor of French, Women's Studies, and Comparative Literature, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor.

An introduction to Christine de Pizan

An impressive book by an authoritative interpreter of de Pizan, written with brilliance and wry humor.--Lori J. Walters, Harry F. Williams Professor of French, Florida State University An impressive piece of scholarship: a nuanced and erudite account of s complete literary corpus skillfully set within its relevant textual, cultural, social, historical, political, and religious contexts. Margolis s landmark contribution should become standard reading.--Susan J. Dudash, Fordham University de Pizan (1364/5-1430?) was, arguably, the first woman to support herself and her family as a professional writer and public intellectual. In recent decades, recognition of her importance for women s studies, political thought, art history, and literary criticism has prompted a boom in Christine studies. Despite this proliferation of scholarly output, no manageable introduction to this important figure has appeared in more than a generation. Designed as an introduction for students as well as a convenient, one-volume resource for medievalists and specialists in related fields, this authoritative work is both concise and comprehensive. It includes a complete account of de Pizan s life and times, summaries and commentary on all of her many works, and analyses of her sources and influences. This exhaustive yet accessible book is an essential reference for anyone interested in studies, women s history, and late-medieval France. Nadia Margolis, visiting professor in French and medieval studies at Mount Holyoke College, is coeditor ofWomen in the Middle Ages.

Review: The Adventure of the Real: Jean Rouch and the Craft of Ethnographic Cinema, by Paul Henley

Book Review| September 01 2011 Review: The Adventure of the Real: Jean Rouch and the Craft of Ethnographic Cinema, by Paul Henley The Adventure of the Real: Jean Rouch and the Craft of Ethnographic Cinema by Paul Henley Steven Ungar Steven Ungar Steven Ungar is Professor of French and Comparative Literature, University of Iowa. Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar Film Quarterly (2011) 65 (1): 73–74. https://doi.org/10.1525/FQ.2011.65.1.73 Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Peer Review Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Tools Icon Tools Get Permissions Cite Icon Cite Search Site Citation Steven Ungar; Review: The Adventure of the Real: Jean Rouch and the Craft of Ethnographic Cinema, by Paul Henley. Film Quarterly 1 September 2011; 65 (1): 73–74. doi: https://doi.org/10.1525/FQ.2011.65.1.73 Download citation file: Ris (Zotero) Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search All ContentFilm Quarterly Search This content is only available via PDF. © 2011 by the Regents of the University of California.2011 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

Casse toi! —or, The Calling of Leo Bersani

This article provids a context for the appraisal of Leo Bersani’s interventions in the queer-theoretical project, the roots of that intervention in his literary criticism, and his status not merely as a public intellectual in America but also as a Francophile. Queer theorists in the United States have tended to be indifferent to the fact that, until recently, Bersani was the Class of 1950 Professor of French at Berkeley. This essay contends that the dailiness of his engagement with specific kinds of French complexity--linguistic to be sure but, more consequentially, literary and theoretical--has been instrumental in the formation of his critical and political positions.

Joie de vivre in French Literature and Culture: Essays in Honour of Michael Freeman ed. by Susan Harrow, Timothy Unwin

study of the late nineteenth-century socialist critic Paul Lafargue and one on the socialist theater that developed in France between 1880 and World War I. Lafargue was very critical of the career of Victor Hugo, whom he viewed as a pseudosocialist . He found in that author’s writings an underlying advocacy of the capitalist system. In the socialist plays, the illegitimate child was frequently used as a symbol of the dispossessed proletariat. In the final essays, Fayolle looks at the blossoming of Francophone literature in France’s former colonies. As with literary history, he finds an inner conflict, in this case between the effort to capture and preserve in literature traditional native cultures and the use of the language of the colonizer. If works are written in French, they are thereby destined for an audience that knows the language, and they may never reach people who speak only their native language and may not know how to read. University of Denver (CO) James P. Gilroy HARROW, SUSAN, and TIMOTHY UNWIN, eds. Joie de vivre in French Literature and Culture: Essays in Honour of Michael Freeman. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2009. ISBN 97890 -420-2579-0. Pp. 319. $86. The book examines the linguistic, literary, cultural, and historical dimensions of the concept of joie de vivre. It explores the complexity of its use and meaning in French literature and culture from the Middle Ages to our contemporary times. The topic pays homage to Michael Freeman, Professor of French at University of Leicester and Bristol (1990–2008); it epitomizes “Mike’s own joyous, energetic, and deeply committed approach to his profession” (13). From La chanson de Roland to Baudelaire, Harrow and Unwin examine in the introduction the tension between human drama and happiness through which “joy is often fleeting and fragile” (18). Significantly, the first attested use of joie de vivre as a substantive phrase occurs in Flaubert’s Éducation sentimentale and it portrays a feeling and emotion that will prove to be illusory. Precondition of happiness and joy of life, the expressions of humor, exuberance, enthusiasm, and/or playfulness are however very present in the works of French literature from Rabelais and Montaigne to Ponge’s renewal of language and Cixous’s “joy in the flesh of the text” (19). Based on canonical linguistic and anthropological research, Rodney Samson analyzes, in the first essay, the word “joy” from a broad range of lexical items in Romance languages that include the Latin “laetus” (emotional enrichment) and “gaudium” that conveys “the idea of inner joy” (37). Jane Taylor and John Parkin investigate the therapeutic function of joy in Bonaventure Des Périers through the process of recreation, from life’s misfortunes to playful parodic ploys in a Rabelaisian spirit. Exploring joie de vivre in the French Renaissance, Richard Cooper studies the impact of mock epic and comic interludes in Gérard d’Euphrate, and in a delightful reading of Montaigne eating melon and drinking wine, Stephan Bamforth explores a “joie de vivre associated with the volupté and sagesse of the Essais” (128). The three essays that follow by Richard Parish, Edward Forman, and Noël Peacock respectively, focus on joie de vivre as “the telos of the Christian soul” (136) in Saint François de Sales, “succour to the underdogs of society” (143), and through a “vaudeville hanté par la mort” (169) in Molière’s comédie-ballets. Underlining the fluctuating fate of happiness in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, Haydn Mason considers the states of joie de vivre in the context of the 358 FRENCH REVIEW 85.2 French Enlightenment’s development, Patrick O’Donovan investigates Alfred de Vigny’s discourse of happiness in post-revolutionary France “through which we glimpse joys still accessible to us in a world which seemed at the outset ‘fatal, écrasant et glacé’” (210), and Bradley Stephens studies the joy of Victor Hugo’s love affair with Juliette Drouet. The two following essays shed light on the concept of joie de vivre in Symbolist poetics and aesthetics. Beyond the void of Mallarmé’s néant, Hélène Stafford explores in the poet’s work a form of joie de vivre experienced through the mysterious inventiveness of...

From a Far Country: Camisards and Huguenots in the Atlantic World. By Catharine Randall. (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2009. 176 pp. $44.95, ISBN 978-0-8203-3390-8.)

Catharine Randall, a professor of French at Fordham University, has made a noteworthy contribution to Huguenot studies with her examination of the mystical Camisards. Unlike the more widely studied Huguenots who lived along France's southwestern coast, the Camisards lived in the isolated, mountainous Cévennes region. Additionally, they were often illiterate and from lower socioeconomic brackets than most Huguenots, who tended to be from the urban middle classes and were more likely to leave France around 1685 when the Edict of Nantes was revoked. Most Camisards remained in France, refusing to abjure their faith and battling the forces of Louis XIV into the early eighteenth century. Because Protestantism was illegal, the Camisards developed an intensely personal and apocalyptical faith and “relied on a sort of inspired prophecy” to help them survive in an atmosphere of persecution and chaos (p. 12). Some Camisards managed to escape, seeking refuge in the Protestant Atlantic world. The best known are the French Prophets, who settled in London. They alarmed more conventional Huguenots, who feared adverse repercussions from the Prophets' enthusiastic excesses, including claims to raise the dead. Camisard piety in British North America has received less attention, hence this book's importance. Randall highlights the careers of Camisard-influenced Gabriel Bernon (founder of a short-lived Huguenot settlement in New Oxford, Massachusetts), Ezéchiel Carré (pastor of the French Church in Boston), and Elie Neau (a New York merchant). Their impact extended beyond the French Protestant community. The Puritan minister Cotton Mather was a fervent supporter of the Huguenot cause and an admirer of the writings of Carré and Neau. Randall observes that some entries in Mather's “diaries sound like descriptions of the ecstasies experienced by Camisards” (p. 84). Moreover, Mather wrote the prefaces for and facilitated the publication of Carré's work and prepared English translations of letters and spiritual songs and poems that Neau had written while imprisoned for his faith in France. Neau's writings were published in 1698 as A Present froma Farr Countrie. The preface “exhorted readers to model their piety after Neau's,” suggesting that Mather hoped to invigorate Puritan piety (p. 106). After returning to New York, Neau eventually conformed to Anglicanism to secure funding from the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel for his school for slaves.

Humanities Now. What Matters and the Speed we are Moving at. An Interview with Jeffrey T. Schnapp

Jeffrey Schnapp is the Rosina Pierotti Chair and Professor of French and Italian and Comparative Literature at Stanford Universty. A graduate of Vassar College (B.A., 1975) and Stanford (Ph.D., 1983), he taught at Dartmouth College before returning to Stanford in 1985. His research interests extend from antiquity to the present, encompassing Dante and his age, Fascist culture, the material history of literature, 20-century architecture and design, and the cultural history of science and engineering. His books include: The Transfi guration of History at the Center of Dante’s Paradise (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1986), Staging Fascism: 18BL and the Theater of Masses for Masses (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1996), and Building Fascism, Communism, Democracy. Gaetano Ciocca: Builder, Inventor, Farmer, Writer, Engineer (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003). He has edited (with Robert Hollander) Bernardino Daniello’s Commento sopra la Commedia di Dante (Hanover: University Press of New England, 1989), as well as (with Rachel Jacoff) The Poetry of Allusion: Virgil and Ovid in Dante’s ‘Commedia’ (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1991) and A Primer of Italian Fascism (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2000). He edited the Oscar Mondadori edition of Filippo Tommaso Marinetti’s Teatro (Milan: Mondadori, 2004). He is co-editor of the journal Modernism/modernity. His main current projects are Quickening — An Anthropology of Speed (a transcultural account of attitudes towards velocity) and Songs of Matter (on the culture of modern materials such as steel, aluminium, tempered glass, and plastic). An internationally acclaimed curator who has collaborated with the Triennale di Milano, the Cantor Arts Center, the Wolfsonian-FIU, and the Canadian Center for Architecture, Schnapp’s recent curatorial work has emphasized experimentation with ‘mixed reality’ approaches to physical exhibitions.

<i>Dirt for Art’s Sake: Books on Trial from “Madame Bovary” to “Lolita”</i> (review)

Reviewed by: Dirt for Art’s Sake: Books on Trial from “Madame Bovary” to “Lolita” Gregg Mayer (bio) Dirt for Art’s Sake: Books on Trial from “Madame Bovary” to “Lolita,” by Elisabeth Ladenson. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2007. 272 pp. $17.95. Dirt for Art’s Sake, a title conspicuously playing on the famous “dirt for dirt’s sake” in Judge John M. Woolsey’s opinion regarding Ulysses,1 offers an engaging history of literary censorship in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Writing with a plain style and a touch of humor, Elisabeth Ladenson embarks on a wonderful exploration of how books (and movies) travel from literary obscenity to undisputed classics, her analysis never losing sight of the senseless repetition of the journey.2 [End Page 372] Not surprisingly, James Joyce and Ulysses are a central part of the analysis. Ladenson is an associate professor of French and comparative literature at Columbia University. With a comparativist’s eye, she traces what she defines as two lines of defense to a charge of obscenity: (1) art for art’s sake, elevating art above the chains of societal censorship, and (2) realism, an understanding that art must engage every aspect of life, even at its crudest. Ladenson begins with Gustave Flaubert, including a keen discussion of the 1949 film version of Madame Bovary that collided with the Motion Picture Production Code, requiring departures from Flaubert’s text, and even an actress change so as not to be “too sexy” (39). Ladenson moves through Charles Baudelaire and “The Flowers of Evil” (47), Joyce, Radclyffe Hall, D. H. Lawrence, Henry Miller, and Vladimir Nabokov’s “Lolitigation” (187). Other authors considered include the Marquis de Sade and John Cleland. As is well known, Ulysses first appeared in the United States in March 1918 in the Little Review (91).3 Publication stopped after the thirteenth episode in 1920 because of an obscenity suit. The Little Review’s editors lost their case and could not continue publishing, and Ulysses was an illegal novel when it was published in full in 1922, an act that ultimately reinvigorated the national censorship debate.4 In 1933, Woolsey issued his hallmark opinion, famously opining that the book is “somewhat emetic, [but] nowhere does it tend to be an aphrodisiac” (185). Because of the difficulty in reading Ulysses, Ladenson reminds us, it is “the most unlikely of dirty books” (80). Further complicating the matter is the law’s inability successfully to grapple with obscenity: “An assignment of what art is cannot be comprehended in a judicial sense, although attempts have been made historically to define the concepts of what art is not. . . . [Obscenity statutes] can lead to slicing up areas of creativity based upon the slimmest of emotional causes.”5 Ladenson identifies through Ulysses the separation between “dirty” words used in a sexual sense and “dirty” words that are simply vulgar without sexual overtones: Literary “dirt” is in fact a twofold category, referring alternatively—and often simultaneously—to the “four-letter words” that took on great importance in the trials of Lady Chatterley’s Lover and Tropic of Cancer, for instance, and to the depictions of sexuality that were no less at issue in those same trials. The persistent metaphors of “dirt” and “filth” as well as related terms such as “sewage” to refer to sex in literature and art, all of which were deployed unsparingly when Ulysses was first published, are, moreover, ample testimony to the degree to which eroticism and excretion are conflated not just for the Leopold Blooms of fiction but for their would-be censors as well. In works such as Lawrence’s and Miller’s, as in Ulysses, the use of vulgar terms is for the most part [End Page 373] inseparable from the representations of sexual situations they accompany. (89) Grappling with this troubling conflation further muddies the scope (at least as it is relatively defined) of obscenity. Censorship today seems unlikely to reach the breadth sought at the time of Ulysses,6 but one painful observation in Ladenson’s book refers to the recurrence of foolish censorship prosecutions. The most illustrative case may be her discussion of Flaubert’s Madame Bovary, a book subjected...

Dorsality: thinking back through technology and politics

In this highly original book David Wills rethinks not only our nature before all technology but also what we understand to be technology. Rather than considering the human being as something natural that then develops technology, Wills argues, we should instead imagine an originary imbrication of nature and machine that begins with a dorsal turn-a turn that takes place behind our back, outside our field of vision. With subtle and insightful readings, Wills pursues this sense of what lies behind our idea of the human by rescuing Heidegger's thinking from a reductionist dismissal of technology, examining different angles on Levinas's face-to-face relation, and tracing a politics of friendship and sexuality in Derrida and Sade. He also analyzes versions of exile in Joyce's rewriting of Homer and Broch's rewriting of Virgil and discusses how Freud and Rimbaud exemplify the rhetoric of soil and blood that underlies every attempt to draw lines between nations and discriminate between peoples. In closing, Wills demonstrates the political force of rhetoric in a sophisticated analysis of Nietzsche's oft-quoted declaration that God is dead. Forward motion, Wills ultimately reveals, is an ideology through which we have favored the front-what can be seen-over the aspects of the human and technology that lie behind the back and in the spine-what can be sensed otherwise-and shows that this preference has had profound environmental, political, sexual, and ethical consequences. David Wills is professor of French and English at the University of Albany (SUNY). He is the author of Prosthesis and Matchbook: Essays in Deconstruction as well as the translator of works by Jacques Derrida, including The Gift of Death.

Rituals of Memory in Contemporary Arab Women’s Writing

Gender, an issue that has been in the headlines for decades now, has naturallyalso attracted the scholarly attention of both men and women. In thebook under review, Brinda Mehta, professor of French and FrancophoneStudies at Mills College, inquires into the subject of gender from the perspectiveof a select group of leading contemporary women writers in theArab world whose compositions express the complexities of life for Arabwomen in the Middle East (Lebanon, Syria, and Iraq), NorthAfrica (Egypt,Algeria, andMorocco), and the United States (LosAngeles). The authors areallArabs on both sides, except forDianaAbu-Jaber, daughter of a JordanianbornArab Muslim father and an American Christian mother. The novelschosen for analysis have widely varying plots, but all reflect the place ofwomen inArab society and how they cope with difficult circumstances.The book is divided into six chapters, each devoted to one ormore compositions(novels) by a writer or two, whose stimulation to write was derivedat least in part from their own personal experiences ...

Imagery and ideology: fiction and painting in nineteenth-century France

Literature is ostensibly a sequential and thus temporal medium, and painting a static and spatial one; yet writers like George Sand and Emile Zola have attempted repeatedly to represent visual and spatial phenomena in literary texts, just as painters like Eugene Delacroix and Claude Monet have sought consistently to capture effects of time and movement on canvas. The incorporation of elements from one artistic medium into another creates a dynamic interplay of image and ideology, both between art forms and within individual texts and paintings, which constitutes the crux of this book. Each chapter involves the detailed analysis of a text and a painting, related through topic, theme, and technique.By juxtaposing the works of ten major writers and ten painters of comparable stature, the book explores the various modalities and layers of meaning in nineteenth-century French art, both verbal and visual, and proposes ways of reading the ambivalent artifacts of modernity. William J. Berg is Professor of French at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

In Memoriam: Elwood N. Berkeley

In Memoriam: Elwood N. Berkeley Donald Blayney The late Elwood N. Berkeley of San Rafael, California, was truly a man for all seasons. When he passed away on the first of May 2007—leaving a most substantial legacy in support of Prairie Schooner and in memory of his close friend Earl Avitt—his eclectic nature in all aspects of intellectual life manifested itself in an overwhelming desire to nurture the creative talents of young writers. The size of his commemorative gift will make this desire become a reality. Having been professor of French in the early years of his career following graduation from Northwestern University, his interests in languages and literatures ranged from Beowulf (he had known the renowned definitive editor Fr. Klaeber) through to the modern literatures of several countries—especially Great Britain. In his late 80s and early 90s, he loved to hear a professor friend read aloud from the poetry of Pope, Wordsworth, Keats, Thomas Hood, Robert Frost, and others; and he never tired of literary discussion and concern for the nature of genius. Mr. Berkeley’s generosity with those whom he loved and respected was unceasing, and his remembrance of Prairie Schooner with such a generous gift enriches the world of creative thought and literary arts. We are, and shall remain, greatly in his debt. Copyright © 2008 University of Nebraska Press

French Tragedy and the Civil Wars

Andrea Frisch, author of The Invention of the Eyewitness: Witnessing and Testimony in Early Modern France (2004), is assistant professor of French at the University of Maryland. She is writing a book on the impact of post-civil war discourses of amnesty and forgetting on the literature and culture of seventeenth-century France.