Reader Reception Research Articles

Aiming for Cognitive Equivalence – Mental Models as a Tertium Comparationis for Translation and Empirical Semantics

This paper introduces my concept of cognitive equivalence (cf. Mandelblit, 1997), an attempt to reconcile elements of Nida’s dynamic equivalence with recent innovations in cognitive linguistics and cognitive psychology, and building on the current focus on translators’ mental processes in translation studies (see e.g. Göpferich et al., 2009, Lewandowska-Tomaszczyk, 2010). My approach shares its general impetus with Lewandowska-Tomaszczyk’s concept of re-conceptualization, but is independently derived from findings in cognitive linguistics and simulation theory (see e.g. Langacker, 2008; Feldman, 2006; Barsalou, 1999; Zwaan, 2004). Against this background, I propose a model of translation processing focused on the internal simulation of reader reception and the calibration of these simulations to achieve similarity between ST and TT impact. The concept of cognitive equivalence is exemplarily tested by exploring a conceptual / lexical field (MALE BALDNESS) through the way that English, German and Japanese lexical items in this field are linked to matching visual-conceptual representations by native speaker informants. The visual data gathered via this empirical method can be used to effectively triangulate the linguistic items involved, enabling an extra-linguistic comparison across languages. Results show that there is a reassuring level of inter-informant agreement within languages, but that the conceptual domain for BALDNESS is linguistically structured in systematically different ways across languages. The findings are interpreted as strengthening the call for a cognition-focused, embodied approach to translation.

Masculinity and aspiring consumption: A reception study of men’s lifestyle magazines in contemporary China

Abstract Men’s lifestyle magazines came to China at the turn of the twenty-first century as a result of the commercialization and globalization of the media. Existing investigations of these publications focus on a new form of masculinity that is associated with middle-class identity and the cult of cosmopolitanism that the magazines promote. However, the consumption of men’s lifestyle magazines remains an uncharted area, leaving unanswered such important questions as who the readers of these magazines are, why they read them, and whether there is any discrepancy between their target and actual readerships. Based on two online questionnaire surveys with magazine readers, this study fills this gap by comparing textual readings of Chinese men’s lifestyle magazines with the findings of reader reception studies. It argues that, on the one hand, men’s lifestyle magazines generate fantasies about and project a ‘cosmopolitan masculinity’, particularly among China’s younger generation, that invites fruitful interpretation in light of the concepts of cultural capital and ‘technology of the self’; on the other, however, there is tension between the ideal masculinity featured in these magazines and the real-life perceptions and situations of their readers, primarily owing to a lack of purchasing power. This tension indicates the limitations of the lifestyle magazine, despite its growing power of influence, in the construction of new identities in present-day China.

Martín-Rodríguez, Manuel M., ed. With a Book in Their Hands: Chicano/a Readers and Readerships Across the Centuries. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2012. 288 pp. $45.00, cloth. (ISBN 978-0-8263-5476-1).

Martín-Rodríguez, Manuel M., ed. <i>With a Book in Their Hands: Chicano/a Readers and Readerships Across the Centuries</i>. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2012. 288 pp. $45.00, cloth. (ISBN 978-0-8263-5476-1).

Читательские практики и рецепция текста: томский чиновник XIX в. А.М. Горохов и его наставление детям

Читательские практики и рецепция текста: томский чиновник XIX в. А.М. Горохов и его наставление детям

ІНТЕРМЕДІАЛЬНІСТЬ ЯК ПРОЯВ МІЖМИСТЕЦЬКОЇ ПОЛІФОНІЇ У НОВЕЛАХ ОЛЬГИ КОБИЛЯНСЬКОЇ

This article deals with analyzing of the notion of intermedia, its background and theoretic backing. Attention is paid to the necessity of correlation of approaches which help to comprehend literary works through the prism of intermedia. The problem of connections between the arts isn't new and it was thought through by artists as well as by many scholars. Art forms cooperate with each other, interpenetrate, transpose. The concept of intermedia appears in the end of XX century exactly on the ground of interconnections between arts. By this point in time studies, referred to the intermedia in literature, continue to be a new branch of analysis, the core of which is focused on the integrity of author's consciousnesses, works of art, reader's reception. The intermedia explorations appeal for discovering the fixation of other-media inclusions to the literary work of art, which, in fact, encapsulate the fine literature. O. Kobylianska, in her works of flash fiction, paid great attention to sound-imitating elements, the perspective of music art in depicting the nature of human desires, lyrical dramatic pictures of landscape character.

Los espejos del yo: Existencialismo y metaficción en la narrativa de Unamuno by Luis Álvarez-Castro

Reviewed by: Los espejos del yo: Existencialismo y metaficción en la narrativa de Unamuno by Luis Álvarez-Castro Brian J. Cope Álvarez-Castro, Luis. Los espejos del yo: Existencialismo y metaficción en la narrativa de Unamuno. Salamanca: U of Salamanca P, 2015. Pp. 265. ISBN 978-1-58871-163-2. Los espejos del yo: Existencialismo y metaficción en la narrativa de Unamuno examines an interrelated cross section of Unamuno's literary production through the lens of reader-response theory and is the author's second monograph on Unamuno. In effect, the study explores the place of the reader in the hermeneutical labyrinths constructed by Unamuno in six key works: Vida de Don Quijote y Sancho, Niebla, Abel Sánchez, Cómo se hace una novela, Don Sandalio, jugador de ajedrez, and San Manuel Bueno, mártir. In the introduction, Álvarez-Castro establishes the study's general focus on the relationship between author, text, and reader. The critical framework that he builds seamlessly integrates the relatively scant but valuable criticism that has examined the role of the reader in Unamuno's novels from a reader-response perspective. One noteworthy strength of the study, in fact, is the way that it develops in careful dialogue with the scholarly criticism in general. Another is the way that it brings to light a profitable connection between two incongruent lines of inquiry in the scholarship on Unamuno: metafiction and existentialism. Álvarez-Castro acknowledges that, individually, these lines have received ample attention, and he makes a persuasive case for seeing in reader-response theory a generative space for examining their interconnectedness. In chapter 1, Álvarez-Castro recounts Unamuno's interest in Herostratus, the fourth century BCE arsonist who destroyed the Temple of Artemis hoping to acquire everlasting fame. Herein lies the root of Álvarez-Castro's critical inquiry: to understand the ways in which Unamuno's profound desire to achieve immortality through his writing left an indelible mark on his literary production in terms of structure, style, and theme. The bulk of this chapter offers an enlightening critique of Unamuno's professed motivation for writing. In the process, it highlights a salient contradiction in Unamuno's aesthetic outlook. On the one hand, Unamuno asserts his own autonomy as reader, but on the other, he pioneers a metafictional approach that, beginning with Niebla, essentially predetermines the reader's inferential interpretation of his novels' storylines. One strength of this chapter is the way that Álvarez-Castro uses theorists like Roland Barthes and Michel Foucault to provide perspective on Unamuno's obsession with achieving [End Page 681] immortality through literature. Another is the exposition of the original and evocative concept of "chantaje existencial." Chapter 2 examines Vida de Don Quijote y Sancho as the theoretical cocoon from which gestate Unamuno's heterodox ideas on literature and the role of the reader as co-creator of the text's meaning. The subjective commentary on the existential themes that Unamuno crafts as he reads Cervantes's masterpiece attests to his view of literature as a phenomenological experience that flouts the commonplace assumption of the text as a vessel containing the author's meaning. Unamuno's style of metafiction that arises in Niebla and evolves thereafter in subsequent works shares Cervantes's knack to place the burden of understanding on the reader but also exhibits originality in how it prefigures the reader's reception of the story. In chapter 3, Álvarez-Castro examines the ambiguity surrounding Augusto Pérez's demise in Niebla and alleges that the reader is made to play a game of existential extortion ("chantaje existencial") by virtue of the metafictional structure of the text. By participating in the extortion, the reader receives a payoff of sorts—existential validation—and, in the process, becomes the vehicle through which Unamuno's desire to perpetuate his own existence is fulfilled. Although at times very insightful, Álvarez-Castro's argument is premised on an unsupported assumption of the reader's cognitive dissonance and is unduly reductive in scope. In chapter 4, Álvarez-Castro argues that through metafiction Unamuno successfully situates the reader not as the recipient but rather as the originator of the text's truth. His reading of...

The Irish Contribution to the Ideological Origins of the American Revolution: Nonimportation and the Reception of Jonathan Swift’s Irish Satires in Early America

The Irish Contribution to the Ideological Origins of the American RevolutionNonimportation and the Reception of Jonathan Swift’s Irish Satires in Early America Sean Moore (bio) When scholars study the literature and history of the eighteenth century, it is a commonplace to say that the American Revolution inspired similar Irish decolonizing events like the 1798 Rebellion of the United Irishmen or even the 1916 Easter Rising, the one hundredth anniversary of which we commemorated last year. A newly discovered document at Harvard’s Houghton Library, an original copy of a text discussed by T. H. Breen, however, reminds us that the pattern might have been the reverse (236). The 1767 Boston Nonimportation Agreement, a covenant signed by hundreds of Boston merchants to boycott British imports in the wake of the Townshend Acts—new taxes on paper, paint, lead, glass, and tea—seems to have been inspired by Ireland’s similar idea in the 1720s. Led by satirist Jonathan Swift, this advocacy for an Irish boycott of British goods and the encouragement of domestic industry was targeted at the Declaratory Act of 1720, a measure that asserted the British Parliament’s right to levy taxes for Ireland without the Irish Parliament’s consent. This legislation, copied almost word-for-word when the British Parliament passed a similar Declaratory Act for the American colonies in 1766, was symptomatic of a greater centralization of the empire’s fiscal authority, generating much constitutional debate about the proper relationship between England and its external dominions (McIlwain 49–50, 50–51n2). Americans were inspired by this Irish debate because until the radical republican break with Britain in 1776, they were still attempting to make constitutional arguments within the tradition of anglophone political thought about their proper level of sovereignty vis-à-vis Britain. What both the [End Page 333] Anglo-Irish Swift and the Anglo-American Patriots were objecting to was the British fiscal-military state’s endless appetite for revenue, felt particularly keenly by the Americans in the wake of the Seven Years’ War (Brewer xvii). While the debt of the early Americans to the Irish political thought of the previous generations and centuries was well documented in the 1920s by Charles Howard McIlwain and more recently by Carla Mulford and Leo Lemay, little work has been done on literature’s place in articulating this thought. Further, though the Patriot and Loyalist receptions of Swift’s more English writings have been documented by many critics, much less work has been done on the reading and influence of Swift’s Irish satires in early America. This essay establishes that Swift’s advocacy for an Irish boycott, articulated in such literary works as A Proposal for the Universal Use of Irish Manufacture (1720), the Drapier’s Letters (1724), and A Modest Proposal (1729), influenced British Americans to propose similar political and economic actions to protest what they saw as unconstitutional London measures. It contends that the Anglo-Irish, a colonial elite struggling to protect its assets from imperial confiscation, were a political model for the Anglo-Americans, who similarly found themselves underrepresented in legislative deliberation affecting their economy. What both groups were arguing for in asserting control over their fiscal affairs was a measure of sovereignty, in relation to the British Parliament, over the proceeds of colonialism. This essay argues that the prism of book history, and its focus on reader reception, promises to make visible the relationship of Anglo-American to Anglo-Irish political thinking. It does so by drawing on the work of Hugh Amory, David Hall, and James Raven on the transatlantic book trade—the vehicle for the dissemination of such ideas. There is evidence, I explain, particularly from the America’s Historical Newspapers database and from the catalogues and borrowing records of the Salem Social Library and Redwood Library of Newport, that American readers took Swift’s Irish writings to hand during the nonimportation era. The broader implications of this argument are that Irish writing’s role in the ideological origins of the Revolution not only is manifest in the nonimportation agreements but also is indicative of the fact that American Patriots, like the Anglo-Irish, were not exceptional in their confrontation with...

The repositioning of literature in French foreign language teaching in South Africa: Performing dialogue, diversity and difference

The aim of this article is to address the repositioning of the literary text within the field of French Studies at tertiary level in South African universities. While language acquisition constitutes a major thrust of French at tertiary level, literature plays an important symbolic role, representing a disciplinary tradition evident in both corpus and teaching methods. Social transformation and the emergence of new teaching/learning models have seen academics inscribing new kinds of symbolic and cultural value to the literary text. The data set draws on a series of interviews conducted with academics working in the field of French Studies at university level in South Africa in 2011 and 2012. A qualitative method of analysis is used. The disciplinary “performance” described in both discourse and practice reveals that academics are distancing themselves from traditional approaches in their shift from text-centredness to learner-centredness and are carving out a new place for francophone literature in the South African context by “performing” its teaching as part of the democratic project. The emerging disciplinary ethos coincides significantly with reader reception theory and French foreign language pedagogy and further sheds light on the cultural and pedagogical roles literature can play in foreign language teaching and learning contexts. Key words : French Studies; South Africa; university; literature; teaching; repositioning

Faithfulness in translation of children’s literature

Faithfulness as a principle of translation has been upheld for a long time despite many debates among scholars in the field. In the context of translating children’s literature, this poses further challenges and recent studies have yet to reach a conclusion (Epstein 2012; Nikolajeva 2011; Henitiuk 2011; Kruger 2011; Emery 2004; Dai 2001; Hervey 1997). In this article, from the sociological perspective, I shall discuss this issue by examining Klingberg (1986)’s approach of being faithful to the source text and Oittinen (1993)’s strategy of being faithful to the readers respectively. A study of Chinese translations of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn for children readers will be looked at. Methods of dialogical approach: purification, simplification, rewording and modernization will be compared with equivalence method to find out which one offers a better reader reception. I argued that having an orientation and purpose of translation with a dialogical view will benefit readers more than simply adhering to the original without deviation at linguistic level. The reasons are that the target text will be more comprehensible for children readers’ stage of cognitive and psychological development, life experience, knowledge, cultural tolerance and linguistic development in reading gems of foreign literature in translation.

A Study of Chinese Translation and Reader Reception of the Modern Korean Novel, Focusing on the Last 5 Years

A Study of Chinese Translation and Reader Reception of the Modern Korean Novel, Focusing on the Last 5 Years

Contrastive Multimodal Analysis of Two Spanish Translations of a Picture Book

This paper focuses on two Spanish translations of a Children's book titled The story of Ferdinand (1935) written by Munro Leaf and illustrated by Robert Lawson. The comparison of this specific narrative type is made between two translations carried by two different translators, published on different continents and by different publishing houses and whose illustrations were made by two different authors. Consequently, we will check how the imagery and the text of each Spanish edition satisfy some specific communication needs (Moya and Pinar, 2007, p. 22) that determine the reader's reception of a text in a target culture.

Poetry as a way of life: aesthetics and askesis in the German eighteenth century

Trop, Gabriel. Poetry as a Way of Life: Aesthetics and Askesis in the German Eighteenth Century. Evanston: Northwestern UP, 2015. 388pp. $89.95 (hardcover).Poetry as a Way of Life rereads the works of Holderlin, Novalis, and various rococo poets (e.g., Gleim, Uz, von Hagedorn, Brockes) through a methodological lens that takes each poem as an aesthetic exercise or ensemble of such exercises. Most generally, these exercises stimulate processes of cognition and imagination in the reader as well as retraining her perception of sensuous particulars. An opening discussion of Baumgarten's aesthetic reclamation of the sensuous modalities of knowing allows Trop to isolate various malleable dispositions of mind and body opened up and reconfigured by the aesthetic exercises staged in and as every poem. Such dispositions include inner sensibility, or attentiveness to one's own perceptual processes, the imagination as rendering the absent present, and memory as a cognitive operation involved in the retrospective generation of coherence from seemingly discrete, unrelated past events.This suggestive reconstruction of Baumgarten's aesthetics in terms of a typology of aesthetic exercises forms the starting point for a rich theoretical discussion, in which Trop distinguishes his notion of the aesthetic exercise from other paradigms of performativity, such as Sloterdijk's idea of anthropotechnics, Hadot's spiritual exercise, and Butler's account of performance. Aesthetic exercises for Trop are neither instrumental (directed at a desired end-state or habit, the instilling of a new capacity such as bicycle-riding or arrow-shooting) nor teleological (oriented toward an immanent end, such as eudaimonia or the virtuous life). Unlike pragmatically oriented exercises, aesthetic exercises possess no immanent telos. Unlike the second paradigm of the spiritual exercise as discussed in Pierre Hadot's studies of ancient philosophy, Trop's aesthetic exercises are not characterized by any claim to universal validity, for they do not seek to convert their reader/listener via her guided restaging of an uncontestable epistemic insight or truth-event. A third paradigm consists in socio-discursive practices of subjectformation, such as those described by Butler's notion of performance, Foucault's care of the self, and Bourdieu's habitus, which similarly revoke any claim to universal validity for all subjects, instead accounting for how the dynamics of subject-formation may be hijacked or reinvented by subjects themselves. Trop notes that such accounts of socio-discursive self-fashioning nonetheless remain parasitic on historically given normative codes of conduct. Unlike these practices, aesthetic exercises are not dependent on given normative codes, their normative horizon instead projected (and perturbed) by the poems themselves.When Trop provocatively asks, sort of self does this text call into being, what practices of life does it invoke? (11), he thus introduces a paradigm of poetic performativity that brackets questions of poetic performance's pragmatic orientation or immanent telos, the epistemic validity of its truth content or truth-event, as well as its normative status. The payoff achieved through this bracketing is primarily methodological, allowing Trop to sidestep productively questions of how form relates to content (whether functioning as its mimetic enactment or its performative contradiction), instead interpreting each poem as a dynamic bundle of operations that interlock, reinforce or even undermine one another, and ultimately affect the reader. Indeed, an implicit aesthetics of reception seems to underlie the idea of an aesthetic exercise, one in which the reader's reception of a poem is an essentially active posture of receptivity, a willed openness to be reconfigured in one's sensorium and cognitive apparatus.The heart of the book lies in its richly sophisticated yet clear close readings. In three core chapters on Holderlin, Novalis, and rococo poets such as Gleim, Uz, and Brockes, Trop not only devotes close attention to individual poems and poetic lines, but integrates systematic investigation of philosophical and poetological theories into the minutiae of close reading. …

How readers perceive translated literary works: an analysis of reader reception

Abstract - The aim of this paper is to investigate the reader’s reception of translated literary texts and to explore the reader’s expectations about literary works. For this purpose, three comparable corpora of British, American and Italian online book reviews commenting on the English version of Andrea Camilleri’s La forma dell’acqua ( The Shape of Water ) and on the Italian version of Stephen King’s Joyland were assembled and analysed. The way active target language readers perceive and evaluate a translated literary work was then explored by taking the language they actually used in book recommendation websites. The analysis demonstrates that the Anglo-American and Italian readers’ reception of the translated text is different, in terms of focus and perception. Riassunto - Il presente articolo esplora il modo in cui i lettori recepiscono testi letterari tradotti e quali sono le loro aspettative. A tale scopo sono stati raccolti e analizzati tre corpora comparabili di recensioni online scritte da lettori britannici, americani e italiani sulla versione inglese de La forma dell’acqua di Andrea Camilleri e sulla versione italiana di Joyland di Stephen King. In particolare, l’articolo esplora il modo in cui i lettori della lingua di arrivo percepiscono e valutano un’opera letteraria tradotta partendo dal linguaggio da usato dai lettori nei siti web di recensioni di libri. L’analisi dimostra che i lettori anglo-americani e italiani percepiscono un testo tradotto in modo differente e ne commentano aspetti differenti.

Beyond traditional publishing models

Purpose– The purpose of this paper is to investigate the state of contemporary publishing, specifically the realms of fanfiction and self-publishing, for the ways in which readership is represented in conjunction with authors and publishers within the publication process. The structure of this process is then compared with Robert Darnton’s communications circuit in order to propose a new model for the publication. As the publication process has a profound impact on the teaching and practice of collection development and reader studies in LIS, the discipline must be aware of any changes to the publication process.Design/methodology/approach– Using the case study approach, this research examines the cultural product,Fifty Shades of Grey(FSOG). Evidence included fanfiction and self-published manuscripts, reader reception of these texts, and a timeline of how the texts developed.Findings– Evidence gathered from the case study illustrate a variety of players and infrastructure present in the development and trajectory ofFSOG. Throughout the entire development of the cultural product, readers were found to be active agents in the publication process promoting strong connections between reader and author. Findings focus on the themes of textual development and their publicity.Originality/value– Proposes a new model for the publication process that includes fanfiction and self-publishing.

ISI Cancellation Using Blind Equalizer Based on DBC Model for MIMO-RFID Reader Reception

Considering a dyadic backscatter channel (DBC) model, the previous methods with zero forcing (ZF) and min- imum mean squared error (MMSE) are not able to rapidly cancel inter-symbol interference (ISI) because of errors of post-preamble transmission in MIMO-RFID channel. In or- der to achieve the ISI cancellation, the proposed method is demonstrated to improve the convergence rate without post- preamble by using a constant modulus algorithm (CMA) in this paper. The CMA depends on the steepest descent algo- rithm function, which is based on the second order statistics (SOS) to estimate the channel characterization. We compare between the conventional method and the proposed method based on simulation and measured data. Furthermore, the multiple tag of post-processing is also considered under the assumption of the maximum likelihood detection. We can confirm that the proposed method is better than the conven- tional method with faster ISI cancelling and a lower bit error rate (BER) improving up to 12 tags.

Psychonarratology: from cognitive processes to readers’ narrative comprehension

Psychonarratology studies the cognitive processes of narrative comprehension in readers’ minds. There are thus close ties between psychonarratology and cognitive processes of mind while reading a narrative. This study aims to provide definitions and explanations for the two basic crucial concepts of ‘psychonarratology’ and ‘narrative’. First, it considers the role of readers in narrative comprehension and for this reader response theory and reception theory are elaborated on. Then, the cognitive processes which are active during narrative comprehension, are discussed. Three models of this cognitive processes are presented as well. ‘Narrative’, among other discourse genres, is the focus of this study. Because of its distinctive features, a narrative has its unique way of being understood. The processes of narrative comprehension will be considered and elaborated on in this study.

Prolegomena to Czech Post-November Literature

While literary history normally avoids using political milestones to define literary epochs, we can hardly ignore that (particularly when it comes to modern Czech literature) historical events and social changes had a direct impact on the quality of literary life and its products. In the nearly one hundred years since the establishment of the independent Czechoslovak state we can identify several periods, each of which tended to last for about twenty years each. Defined by changes in the political landscape, each of them likewise offered distinctly different conditions for literary undertakings, reader reception, relations between the authorities and the creative individual. This study describes the forms and functions of art as reflected in the choice of topics and formal execution, as well as in the emergence of trends, covering interwar literature (1918–1938), post-February literature (1948–1968), Normalization era literature (1969–1989) and, most recently, post-November literature (1989–present).

IMAGINING PLACE: AN EMPIRICAL STUDY OF HOW CULTURAL OUTSIDERS AND INSIDERS RECEIVE FICTIONAL REPRESENTATIONS OF PLACE IN CARYL FÉREY’S UTU

I provide empirical evidence from a longitudinal cross-cultural reader reception survey showing that cultural outsider (French) and insider (New Zealand) readers are differently influenced by the geographically and culturally-situated elements in Utu (French 2004, English translation 2011), a crime novel set in contemporary New Zealand by French writer Caryl Férey. After reading the novel, both cultural outsider and insider readers changed their opinions towards the image portrayed by Férey, even when his cultural claims were incorrect. Furthermore, for French readers, this influence extended beyond Utu’s final page to opinions about New Zealand and its inhabitants.

Narrative and Notice in Livy's Fourth Decade

This paper argues for the importance of Livy's annalistic notices in structuring the author's aims and the reader's reception of the history, as against the standard conception of the notices as archaic memoranda. Taking the later career of Scipio Africanus the Elder as a test case, the paper demonstrates the tension between the formal features of the narrative and the actual content of the notices. As summarized in the eulogy for Africanus (38.53.9â&amp;#x80;&amp;#x93;11), Livy constructs a narrative of Scipio's decline emphasizing his peripeteia after the Hannibalic war. This narrative finds corroboration in the confinement of Africanus' subsequent actions chiefly to the annalistic notices. The notices themselves, however, provide a counter-narrative to the main text, albeit in fragmentary and marginal form. Through the interaction of narrative center and periphery the notices thus offer a space for Livy, and the reader, to explore alternative visions of Roman history.

Le (néo)colonialisme littéraire: quatre romans africains face à l’institution littéraire parisienne (1950-1970) par Vivan Steemers

Huysmans’s “Carnet vert” taken during his walks in le Jardin de Ligugé become incorporated into his literary texts and the ways in which the abbey garden is exploited “pour le faire évoluer pleinement vers l’expression d’un naturalisme spiritualiste” (148). In “Huysmans et les Christs décadents,” Seillan traces the abundance of “les Christs aux ordures”in Huysmans’s works to the author’s“angoisse de la profanation” and his preoccupation with“la thématique obsédante [...] des hosties souillées et jetées dans les latrines”(186). The final cluster of articles,“Catholiques,”assesses Huysmans’s expressions of spirituality in terms of those of his fellow contemporaries of the faith, namely Barbey,Villiers,Verlaine, and Claudel. Contrasting Huysmans’s conversion to Barbey’s, Georges-Métral explains that whereas Barbey returns to his Catholic faith after a long spell of atheism,“la conversion spirituelle de Huysmans relève de la procrastination ” (201).Viegnes also adopts a comparative approach in arguing that while Verlaine’s Sagesse, inspired by nature and “une vision bucolique” became rhetorically transfigured into a spiritual tableau (250), Huysmans’s religious sentiment feeds on “une ambiance saturée de l’art et de littérature sacrés”(253). This anthology provides a thought-provoking read for Huysmans enthusiasts. Edgewood College (WI) Sayeeda H. Mamoon Steemers,Vivan. Le (néo)colonialisme littéraire: quatre romans africains face à l’institution littéraire parisienne (1950–1970). Paris: Karthala, 2012. ISBN 978-2-81110764 -2. Pp. 234. 24 a. Readers expecting in-depth textual analysis will be disappointed by this book, for the author’s objective is not the texts themselves, but everything that precedes, surrounds, and follows them. Taking her cue from Gérard Genette’s Seuils (1987), Steemers undertakes a paratextual study of four canonical African novels, representing two defining moments in Francophone African literature, its modern ‘emergence’ in the 1950s (Camara Laye’s L’enfant noir and Mongo Beti’s Le pauvre Christ de Bomba in part 1) and postcolonial literature’s first wave in the 1960s (Ahmadou Kourouma’s Les soleils des indépendances and Yambo Ouologuem’s Le devoir de violence in part 2). Her project will, however, engage readers interested in the role the Metropolitan publishing industry has played in African textual production, both through the editorial process and in the anticipation and even construction of reader reception through marketing strategies and,at times,collusion with popular press book reviewers. Never far from Steemers’s concerns is the discrepancy between the ideological perspectives of African authors and those of a French readership avid for the exotic and reticent to confront the ill effects of colonialism. The introduction situates Steemers’s study at the confluence of three theoretical vectors: Orientalism (Said) and Africanism (Miller); the culture industry economy (Bourdieu); reception theory (Jauss). If the 238 FRENCH REVIEW 88.2 Reviews 239 introduction is undertheorized, subsequent chapters build on Bourdieu’s claim that cultural products emerge, and derive their symbolic value, from particular sociohistorical contexts.Producers of literature include not only authors but also ghostwriters, editors, publishers, book reviewers, and/or literary prize panels—for the impact that the latter have had on reader perception and the novel’s success. In each of the two parts of Steemers’s study, a brief introduction defining the prevailing Zeitgeist is followed by two chapters contrasting a bestseller playing to the reading public’s desire for the exotic and authentic—L’enfant noir for its content and Les soleils des indépendances for its style—with an iconoclastic novel whose anti-colonial rhetoric (Le pauvre Christ de Bomba) or suspect authorship (Le devoir de violence) discomforted readers and discouraged promotion. Authors’ trajectories are seemingly secondary (ample references to Adèle King’s Rereading Camara Laye and Christopher Wise’s biography of Yambo Ouologuem, for example, fill this gap) to the analysis of the publishers’history, ideological leaning and financial objectives. Steemers gives insights into the politics of publishing, revealing for instance that Plon, with its history of supporting the Catholic right and publishing for short-term gains, underwrote L’enfant noir because it promoted the universal values of France’s civilizing mission, while Mongo Beti’s corrosive critique...