French Scholars Research Articles

НОВЫЕ КНИГИ ПО НАРРАТОЛОГИИ. ЧАСТЬ 1. ОБЩЕЕ ПРОСТРАНСТВО ТЕОРИИ

This review is the first one in a series of reviews and articles on the most noteworthy books on theoretical narratology published in the last five years and aims to outline the common space of narrative theory. The focus is on contemporary narratological theories as they relate to classical ones. Particular attention is paid to the collection of articles by French scholars, given that in France narratology has developed since the decline of structuralism differently than in the English-speaking countries, Germany, and Scandinavia. The review also concerns two books on postcolonial narratology and econarratology, less known branches of postclassical narrative theory.

Editor's Note

Editor's Note Wendy Pfeffer This volume of Tenso was produced in 2020, a year that, as I draft these words, augurs to be as weighty as 1347 and 1348 were for the medieval world. The earlier years saw the ravages in Western Europe of Yersinia pestis, the bacterium that causes bubonic and pneumonic plague; 2020 has become the year of SARS-CoV-2 (severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2), the name of the virus that has caused the pandemic disease identified as COVID-19. Tenso has represented and served as a voice for the community of Occitan scholars since its first issue in 1986–1987. How COVID-19 may change that world is hard to know as I write. What is clear is that the emergency has severely limited scholarly access to libraries, though it has expanded, at least temporarily, scholarly access to online materials, such as those posted by the HathiTrust Digital Library, normally accessible only via partner institutions. This volume serves as a special issue, edited by Daniel O'Sullivan, who organized two panels at the Medieval Congress in Kalamazoo, Michigan, in 2019—oh, the days when scholars could meet in person—on the theme of Thibaut de Champagne and the troubadours. Dan's introduction sets that stage separately. This issue also includes two brief pieces relating to scholar Jean-Claude Dinguirard (1940–1983), who deserves more recognition than he may have received during his too-short lifetime. His exceptional work in Occitan ranged from linguistic studies of Gascon to work on proverbs and medieval literature, and included translations into Occitan. His son has created a web site, described here, which will be of great interest to Occitan scholars, as the site makes available the works of the universitari tolosenc. In parallel, Pierre Escudé describes efforts to make Dinguirard's works available again in print. The genre of the Op-Ed is continued in Tenso 36, with a different team of scholars offering their perspectives on directions for Occitan studies. Bill Burgwinkle and Hervé Lieutard each [End Page iv] offer insights on new areas worthy of exploration by current and future Occitanists. Some members of the Tenso bibliographic team have expressed regret that their work is less complete than they might have wished, because of the pandemic. No apologies are accepted. The Web is an incredible tool, even as hard copies have proven harder to obtain in 2020 (let us now praise the work of Interlibrary Loan Librarians throughout the world). I propose a round of applause for our bibliographers and discographer for their continued and unstinting efforts to let the scholarly community know what is being published, in print and online, relating to our fields of studies. Though Tenso's bibliographers may not have been able to work in 2020 as they usually have, they offer here their always excellent research. As for works omitted this year, they will be incorporated into annual bibliographies in years to come, as has always been the case. One last observation: this volume includes two necrologies, one for Xavier Ravier, who had two passions, linguistics (principally Occitan dialectology and onomastics) and verse, which he knew as a critic and as a poet. Samuel Rosenberg's fame may be greater in the community of Old French scholars than among Occitanists, despite his significant work in our discipline. For me, Sam was a mentor and a friend. On his retirement, freed from the constraints of teaching and committee work, he engaged ever more actively in scholarship and translation, serving as a model for us all to his last days. COVID-19 has forced many of us into some form of "retirement" or confinement. Sam's career demonstrates that while such a retreat brings deprivations, it can also be filled with opportunities. Wendy Pfeffer Editor-in-Chief WORK CITED <https://www.hathitrust.org/>, consulted 14 August 2020. Copyright © 2021 Société Guilhem IX

Anthropology, Colonial Policy, and the Decline of French Empire in Africa by Douglas W. Leonard

Reviewed by: Anthropology, Colonial Policy, and the Decline of French Empire in Africa by Douglas W. Leonard Benjamin Sparks Leonard, Douglas W. Anthropology, Colonial Policy, and the Decline of French Empire in Africa. Bloomsbury, 2020. ISBN 978-1-78831-520-3. Pp. 230. Soldiers, scholars, and administrators in Africa and Metropolitan France used the tools of ethnology, both oral and written, in their scientific quest to provide a better [End Page 254] understanding of colonized social, political, and intellectual life, as a means of improving colonialism, all the while ignoring and introducing greater weaknesses in the underlying structures, ultimately leading to the decline of the French empire in Africa. Colonialism acted as a unilateral, asymmetric power dynamic, lacking any consent of the governed, and was, thus, doomed to fail as an unstable political form. Ethnologists and later social anthropologists from the mid-nineteenth century to the mid-twentieth century, from Louis Faidherbe to Pierre Bourdieu, analyzed African societies from a non-European perspective, engaging in complex conversations with native intellectual communities, creating a rhizomatic network of native thinkers and metropolitan intellectuals. These social scientists believed that using the native African's perspective in colonial rule could help better understand and implement the methods required to create and maintain a fair, equitable, and humane, although seemingly paradoxical, colonial system through scientific examination. Douglas Leonard chronologically traces the biographies and studies of social scientists, soldiers, and colonial administrators, who had the support of the colonial state, beginning in the 1840s with General Louis Faidherbe and continuing to Marshal Hubert Lyautey, Maurice Delafosse, Paul Marty, Jacques Soustelle, and Pierre Bourdieu to analyze the productive intellectual engagement and the seeds of political destruction spread as a result of their work. Leonard argues the importance of biographical information on these individuals to unravel the rhizomatic structure of colonial ethnography in Africa. Leonard begins with Faidherbe, who was a colonial officer for the majority of his career and served as one of the early governors of colonial Senegal. Faidherbe was a proponent of the associationist approach to colonial governing and had an enormous influence on colonial political thought. He passed his methodology on to other generations, including Joseph Gallieni and Hubert Lyautey, who would become future colonial soldiers and governors, ranging from Algeria to Indochina, Madagascar, and Morocco where they reformed the colonial system as they went, employing natives to gain the information necessary to widen the cracks in local social and political structures. After Gallieni and Lyautey, Leonard presents Delafosse and Marty, two of the most prominent French scholars of West Africa, and their methods of moving toward a humanized colonial rule through employing Islam as a tool of governance. Following Delafosse and Marty, Marcel Mauss institutionalized ethnography and greatly influenced the next generation of ethnographers, including Jacques Soustelle, whose failures revealed the weakness of science as policy. The final portion of this work addresses the influence of Pierre Bourdieu in social anthropology's move away from focusing on a utopic colonial system. Instead, Bourdieu looks at the transition of these colonial societies and analyzes them in a postcolonial realm. Leonard's book provides an in-depth analysis of Francophone Africa's colonial governing system through the pitfalls of ethnography and social anthropology as instruments for policy change. [End Page 255] Benjamin Sparks University of Memphis (TN) Copyright © 2021 American Association of Teachers of French

Bessarion et la France

This essay studies the reception of Bessarion in France, from the reign of King Louis XI until the beginning of the seventeenth century. For the French Scholars, Bessarion is the one who established the concord between Plato and Aristotle, who alerted to the Turkish danger and who translated Aristotle’s Metaphysics.

Russian-Central Asian Relations in the Works of Modern French Researchers

The article examines the views of modern French researchers on the relations between Russia and the post-Soviet republics of Central Asia. This allows us to identify various interpretations of Russian foreign policy, and to understand the main approaches of French scholars analyzing the goals and tasks of Russian geostrategy in the region. As the article demonstrates, French historiography, along with the objectivist view on the Central Asian vector in Russian foreign policy, also includes works of ideological nature. Special emphasis is put on French works that focus on Russian political authors who speak of Russias neo-imperialism. These studies explain the Russian policy in Central Asia through the ruling elites ambition to resurrect an empire in the post-Soviet space and to return superpower status to Russia. Of special interest is the position of authors who try to explain the Russian attitude to the Central Asian region as, on the one hand, an expression of nostalgic feelings harbored by a great part of the population about the nations former greatness, assuming that these feelings have an impact on the leaderships policies, and on the other hand, as the Russian leaderships attempt to use Russias active return to the international arena for the consolidation and self-identification of society. It is observed that some French authors speak of a New Great Game. This very popular concept considers the actions of Russia and other powers operating in the region (USA and China) as a continuation of the historical rivalry between the Russian and British empires in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Russian authors have always been interested in French historiography; this is due to the latters scientific prestige and objectivity, and in particular its application of methodologies that further develop the tradition of the Annales School. At the same time, the growing French scholarship on the issue of Russia and post-Soviet Central Asian republics has not yet been subject to close and complex consideration, which defines the novelty of the article.

Building bridges from K-12 to higher education in French and Francophone Studies

As scholars of French and Francophone Studies (FFS), our collective expertise encompasses a vast array of topics and methodological approaches. Too often, however, we write only for our peers, thereby neglecting opportunities and responsibilities to engage broader audiences. I advocate in this article for increasing the overlap between FFS, public humanities, digital humanities, and K-12 education, with a particular emphasis on the latter. In doing so, we can contribute to valorizing FFS, strengthen ties with our K-12 colleagues, inspire young people to pursue FFS in college, and promote intercultural understanding.

Parigi 1950: dalla Francia l’arte italiana tra 'Cahiers d’Art' ed 'Exposition d'Art Moderne Italien'

Paris 1950 Italian art from France between Cahiers d’Art and Exposition d’Art Moderne Italien An extraordinary conjuncture that connects the Exposition d’Art Moderne Italien at the Musee National d’Art Moderne and the monographic issue of Cahiers d’Art ‘Un demi-siecle d’art italien’ marks 1950 in Paris in the name of Italian art and verifies the resumption of Italy-France relations in the post-war artistic context. The central figure of these two events is Cristian Zervos, art critic and publisher of the Cahiers d'Art, who draws, with the collaboration of Italian and French scholars, a broad overview of Italian art of the first half of the 20th century. The essay explores, through the analysis of the critical interventions proposed in the Cahiers d'Art and the expository writing of the Parisian exhibition, the complex historical framework in which these appointments are inserted and the problematic critical and methodological implications of a reading of Italian art from France.

Some Preliminary Responses to “Beyond Single Stories”

Some Preliminary Responses to “Beyond Single Stories”

The problem of subjectivation in Cynicism

This article presents the analysis of the philosophy of the Cynics, dedicated to pursuit and conceptualization of the ideas of subjectivation. The concept of subjectivation, which can be found in the works of M. Foucault, still does not have a systemic and conceptual framework. One of the gaps determines in the works of French scholar is the disparate use philosophical ideas of the Cynics. An attempt is made to interpret the ideas of this philosophical trend for extracting the comprehensive model of subjectivation and outline the key techniques of &amp;ldquo;care of the self&amp;rdquo;. The article employs the translated sources, in the form of separate fragments written by the Cynics, as well as a number of analytical works carried out by Russian and foreign researchers. Alongside the method of historical and philosophical reconstruction, the work applies the comparative and analytical approach. The novelty consists in the attempt to describe the general ideas of the Cynics in the sphere of ethics and formulate the Cynic model of subjectivation for filling the existing gaps in corresponding writings of M. Foucault. Special attention is given to the following aspects: 1) identification of fundamental principles underlying the worldview of the Cynics; 2) formulation of subjectivation techniques that allow building the &amp;ldquo;selfhood&amp;rdquo;; 3) comparison and tracing the Cynic ideas borrowed by Platonism and Christianity.

Menegaldo, H. (2017). Diana Nikiforoff. De La Russie en révolution à la Cité interdite. Paris: Vendémiaire. (In French).

The review is devoted to Diana Nikiforoff. De La Russie en révolution à la Cité interdite, a documentarybiographical work by Hélène Menegaldo, a renowned French scholar of Russian émigré literature and professor at the University of Poitiers, dedicated to her mother, a fi st-wave Russian emigrant Diana Nikiforova (Nikiforoff ). Both in terms of the plot and the form (fi st person narration), this book is the author’s experiment combining research and creative writing, and analytical approach and documentary quality, on the one hand, and philosophical lyricism, on the other.The fact that the book and its likes spring into existence is evidence of the intense, profound and enduring emotions and experiences that characterize the fi st-wave Russian emigration.

The epistemological shift from palace chronicles to scholarly Khmer historiography under French colonial rule

Identifying the role of colonial-sponsored institutions and written texts produced by local scholars, this article argues that, although Cambodian scholars’ intellectual orientation was not necessarily restricted to French scholarship, French colonial rule had played the key role in introducing modern historiography and creating the platforms for the epistemological transition in Cambodia which underwent different categories of knowledge adoption and various projects of translation of local individuals. Capturing the dynamic of the epistemological transition allows us to highlight a broader picture of the interplay between a long-existing body of knowledge and more contemporary scholarship under Western colonisation.

Clausewitz, War, and Meaning Formation: Raymond Aron’s Experience of Philosophical Reflection

The article studies the influence of the ideological heritage of the Prussian war theorist Carl von Clausewitz on the works, worldview, and political views of the French researcher Raymond Aron. For a long time, in France the value and relevance of Clausewitz’s theory of war was acknowledged only in the light of specialized military issues. Aron was one of the first in the country to recognize the value and methodological potential of Clausewitz’s political philosophy of war for the understanding of the preparation and usage of military force, maintenance of national and international security, and Aron made efforts to popularize the Prussian theorist’s doctrine. The analysis of Aron’s works, in which he appeals to Clausewitz and the theory of war, has revealed the evolution that occurred in attitude towards the ideological heritage of the Prussian philosopher. Clausewitz’s works, which were primarily a source of citation for Aron at first, turned into the methodological framework for a philosophical conceptualization of war and international relations, in particular in the nuclear era. Based on the results of a thorough study of Clausewitz’s works and a deep reflection on his legacy, Aron in his later years wrote a two-volume work about him, seeing the Prussian thinker primarily as a political philosopher of war. An important reason for the interest of the French scholar was the personality and biography of Clausewitz himself: his character, relations with authorities, political position, acceptance by contemporaries, and the fate of his doctrine. In this regard, Aron’s understanding of Clausewitz is emotionally loaded, and the book about him significantly differs from Aron’s other works by the author’s personal attitude. The comprehension of Clausewitz and his ideological heritage encouraged Aron’s self-reflection and change of self-identification, a better understanding of the military culture of Germany and France. The article concludes on the importance of further conceptualization and development of the scientific legacy of Clausewitz and Aron.

A review of two beliefs of parliamentary government in postwar Japan: Japanese/French beliefs beneath the British canopy

Abstract Although the 1947 Constitution of Japan was enacted under the occupation of the General Headquarters of the Allied Powers, it is thought that a British-style parliamentary government was introduced in Japan at this time. Leading constitutional scholars in postwar Japan believed in two ideas derived from the British constitutional history: (i) monistic parliamentary government and (ii) the free exercise of dissolution power by the British cabinet. Both of these ideas have been widely shared among constitutional scholars in Japan. However, in fact, these two beliefs derived from French scholars, and British constitutional scholars did not share them. The difference in substance and approach between the Japanese/French and the British interpretations was never explored in Japan. Japanese scholars sought a rational understanding of the British parliamentary government, thereby overlooking the empiricist understanding.

Levantine Epigraphy and History in the Achaemenid Period (539–332 BCE)

Levantine Epigraphy and History in the Achaemenid Period (539–332 BCE)

The figure of Sethel in the Medinet Madi Manichaean Writings: A result of the influence of the Gnostic Sethianism? Observations on Manichaeism as a religious system

In the Manichaean Coptic Psalm-Book (c. ad 400) we find a hymn (PsB 144.1–146.13) addressed to Sethel/Seth. Hence, a French scholar, André Villey, titled it Hymne à Seth. This is an interesting work, since the biblical figure of Seth is the eponym of one of the two most important movements of Gnosticism, namely Sethianism. In my paper, firstly, I study the characteristics of the figure of Sethel/Seth in the Manichaean writings from Medinet Madi; secondly, I examine whether, as for Sethel/Seth, we can talk about the influence the Sethians on ‘the religion of Light’ or, on the contrary, whether his figure in the Manichaean writings was an original, Manichaean, reinterpretation. Finally, this analysis allows us to draw two important conclusions regarding Manichaeism as a religious system. The first of them is that the Manichaeans drew on a broad base of Judaeo-Christian literature, not only from Gnostic Sethianism. The other is that Manichaeism caused external figures such as Seth/Sethel to lose some of their characteristics in the process of being adapted to the needs of the mentioned religion.

The Gallic Singularity

The popular narrative that the French relationship between the sexes is more emotionally rewarding than its American counterpart has entered into scholarly discourse over the past decades. Promoted by several well-known French feminist scholars, the narrative locates the particularity of the French relationship in its paradoxical structure: women are both equal and not equal to men. Sexual difference lies in the particular, which is subordinate to the universal value of equality. The narrative was most recently revived in the anti-#MeToo manifesto published in Le Monde in January 2018. This article surveys the narrative’s history, beginning with French feudal law and tracing it through some of its later iterations to highlight how it has long offered French women a way of performing femininity while exercising power. The emotional investment in this narrative explains why it continues to be accepted among at least some French intellectuals, whereas it is generally rejected by American feminists.

The French School of Violin Playing between Revolution and Reaction: A Comparison of the Treatises of 1803 and 1834 by Pierre Baillot

Pierre Baillot (1771–1842) was a central figure in the development of the early nineteenth-century French School of violin playing. This school was itself the source of the twentieth-century Russian and American schools, and all the great players of the modern era can trace their lineage back to Baillot and his colleagues. The French School was the first to systematize violin teaching within an institutional framework with normative aspirations. Its history is bound up with that of the Paris Conservatoire, established in 1795. Work by French scholars of the Conservatoire and its teaching has tended to assert a continuity of ideals and aesthetics across time, even an essential Frenchness, and work by English-language scholars has been more concerned with the influence of the School on developments in playing styles and composition than on the evolution of attitudes to music teaching. This analysis of the language of the two founding pedagogical texts reveals a contested cultural landscape, and explores how a revolutionary institution with lofty principles could be overtaken by cultural change in a few short decades. It finishes by questioning the traditional elision of the French and Franco-Belgian schools, and suggests that Brussels, rather than constituting a mere branch of the Paris school, rescued it from premature irrelevance.

The Philosophy of War in the Works of French Scholars

The article discusses the formation and development of the philosophy of war in the works of French scholars from the 19th century until present times. The emergence of the philosophy of war was a natural event in the development of views on war set forth in the works of ancient philosophers as well as by thinkers, political and religious figures of the European Middle Ages. In France, the emergence of this philosophical trend, which was an organic part of the philosophy of politics, was associated with the artillery general Marquis Georges de Chambray, a veteran of the Napoleonic Wars. It was he who introduced the term “philosophy of war” into scientific use. This name was soon accepted, not only in the French philosophical environment, but throughout Europe. At the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries, there appeared an entire galaxy of French authors who closely studied the phenomenon of war from the standpoint of philosophy. These included P.-J. Proudhon, R. Henry, J. Lagorgette, G. Lagneau, E. Lavisse, C. Letourneau, A. Rambaud and others. They contributed to the formation of the philosophy of war in French philosophical and political thought. The First and Second World Wars discovered new names in the French philosophy of war: Teilhard de Chardin, A. Bergson, M. Proust, J.-P. Sartre, R. Aron, C. de Gaulle, G. Boutoul and others. A later generation of “philosophers of war” successfully developed the already established trend in philosophy. Thus, A. Philonenko continued the tradition in his Essay on the Philosophy of War. French authors are very interested in the works of the Prussian philosopher of war C. von Clausewitz. Considering his views, R. Aron and R. Girard wrote works discussing the place of war in social life. In the 21st century, the problem of wars and military conflicts has not lost its relevance. The author concludes that French philosophy of war meets modern challenges. Its current representatives, such as J.-B. Jeangene Vilmer, J.-P. Dupuy and others, confirm the vitality and relevance of this trend.

Screening Youth: Contemporary French and Francophone Cinema ed. by Romain Chareyon and Gilles Viennot

Reviewed by: Screening Youth: Contemporary French and Francophone Cinema ed. by Romain Chareyon and Gilles Viennot Leon Sachs Romain Chareyon and Gilles Viennot, eds. Screening Youth: Contemporary French and Francophone Cinema. Edinburgh UP, 2019. 253 pp. This volume of fourteen chapters preceded by an editors' introduction examines, as its title indicates, representations of youth in recent French and Francophone cinema. The editors maintain that although the "teen film" is a well-established Hollywood genre accompanied by a significant amount of scholarship, the same cannot be said of filmic representations of youth in the French/Francophone context. Scholars of French and Francophone film have overlooked the "ways film can help us get a better, more nuanced and [End Page 367] true-to-life understanding of the complexity and struggles of youth" (1). The choice of the word "youth" in the volume's title is deliberate. The films studied in this collection embrace an expansive idea of youth, ranging from childhood to early adulthood, and the borders between different stages of development, like the very concept of coming of age, are fluid. The word "youth" is meant to capture this expanse and fluidity. The volume's essays examine films that are about youth but not necessarily aimed at youth as their primary audience. They focus on the particular ways contemporary directors broach the subject matter and how the topic of youth intersects with other concerns in contemporary society (democracy, globalization, economic disparity, immigration). The editors view these films as "sound boxes" offering an amplification and distortion of contemporary life through the filtering lens of young people who, according to the critic Timothy Shary, are entering a "more fast-paced [world that is] removed from the traditions and mores of their parents' generation" (4). The genre of French youth film, if it is a genre at all, does not have the same status as the "teen film" in America with its highly-codified, trope-laden format most commonly set in the high school (think Amy Heckerling's Fast Times at Ridgemont High or John Hughes's Ferris Bueller's Day Off). One reason for this is that the prominent role of the director as auteur in French film lends itself to a kind of general aversion to genre. Most of the directors considered in the volume still display a debt to the New Wave directorial tradition even if, as some of the essays indicate, there is an attempt to move out from under the shadow of the New Wave. The editors are at pains to argue that the youth depicted in the films in question do not conform to clichés about youth and therefore offer us more authentic images. They present individual struggles with the "process of youth" and avoid confirming preconceived ideas of what youth is. No single image of youth emerges from these films. Each film is better understood, the editors explain, as a "snapshot" of what it means to be an adolescent in contemporary France. Though it may be difficult to generalize about youth, there are a number of recurring themes in the essays and films, such as gender and sexual identity as well as social class and ethnic identity. Because of the number of contributions, it is impossible to discuss them all. What follows are some summary thoughts about a few of the essays that stood out for this reader. Another reader might well have selected different essays. Gemma Edney's contribution, "Un Vrai 'Teen Film' Français? The Contemporary Adolescent Genre in French Cinema," complements the editors' introduction as another point of entry into the topic in general. Edney divides [End Page 368] the genre into two types, those that have a popular audience and those that attract critical attention. The latter are about (and not necessarily for) teens, have an arthouse style and tend to present youth in a more realistic and less stylized or idealized way. Edney observes for instance that French actors in these films (as opposed to their American counterparts) tend to be closer in age to the characters they represent, thereby offering what seems to be a more authentic rendering of the teen experience. Karine Chevalier's essay on the films of...

Dark Lens: Imaging Germany, 1945 by Françoise Meltzer

Reviewed by: Dark Lens: Imaging Germany, 1945 by Françoise Meltzer Susan A. Crane Dark Lens: Imaging Germany, 1945. By Françoise Meltzer. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2019. Pp. 256. Cloth $35.00. ISBN 978-0226625638. An esteemed scholar of religious studies and comparative literature, Françoise Meltzer is also the daughter of an American father and a French mother who lived in postwar Germany from 1945–1956, initially in Berlin. Meltzer was born and raised in a trilingual household: a nanny taught her German, and Meltzer became her mother's translator at a very young age. The introduction to her book, Dark Lens: Imaging Germany, 1945, offers striking insights into Meltzer's childhood experiences as a foreigner in a defeated land, but this all too brief section then gives way to the [End Page 424] primary purpose of the book: the exploration of a set of ruin photographs taken by her mother, Jeanne Dumilieu, in 1945. Meltzer was so used to playgrounds surrounded by ruins that, on arriving in New York in 1956, she asked her mother, "where are the ruins?" (5) Her mother is not named again; she becomes "the photographer." Meltzer remarks that her mother's generation was famously "tight-lipped" about their wartime experiences (Dumilieu's participation in the Resistance, and disdain for those who merely claimed to have done so, is briefly noted); the author feels it is appropriate to do the same (2–5). The scholar takes over from the daughter as Meltzer seeks the appropriate lens through which to view her mother's images. The book is elegantly written and cogently argued. Chapter 1 compares contemporary witnesses' accounts of the destruction caused by Allied bombing in major German cities and life amid the ruins, including Hannah Arendt, W.G. Sebald, Marie Vassilichikov, Irmgard Hunt, Friedrich Reck, Margaret Bourke-White, Stig Dagerman, and Gertrude Stein. Meltzer distinguishes autobiographical writing from reportage, but it's not clear why she chose these examples over others, when only one is a photographer and other rich sources (Alexander Kluge, Hans Erich Nossack) are only briefly discussed. She is interested in the role of atrocity description, seeing it as an abstract protagonist in each of the narratives, serving the fictive role of allowing the reader a sense of "being there." Throughout the book, Meltzer considers the Romantic gaze at ruins and the experience of the sublime. She is concerned about the viewer who might be attracted to the photographs' eerie beauty without taking responsibility for the presence and absence of victims and perpetrators. Meltzer believes that the Holocaust is an absent presence in the photographs and worries that viewers might miss this; she also cannot know how "the photographer" felt about this. In chapter 2 her discussion of ruin paintings by Anselm Kiefer and Karl Hofer focuses on the relationship between representation and description, how to make the unbearable real and visible. She shifts her gaze to photography in chapter 3, with a longer discussion of a few of the photographs (all beautifully reproduced), to consider the ethics of revenge and forgiveness; then in chapter 4 she turns to suffering and victimization. Meltzer glosses the Romantic fascination with ruins as a given, but seems not to have considered, as they did, how those same ruins (for instance, the Gothic) were damaged in warfare; or how the sublime experience always required temporal distancing, a delay, before efforts to preserve its ephemerality in words or images. Meltzer is more familiar with French scholars on the war and the Holocaust than with the English-language scholarship. She doesn't read Stefan-Ludwig Hoffmann, Anne Fuchs, Rudy Koshar, David Crew, or Michael Meng, to name a few, who have written about living with postwar ruins or consideration of that photography. The [End Page 425] perspective of an outsider to the field, as with Inge Clendinnen's Reading the Holocaust (1998), can bring valuable fresh insights, but as Clendinnen knew, it's an uphill slog, and Meltzer's overarching concern is moral, rather than historical: she wants to consider how it is that anyone can ever look at atrocity photography, with ruin photographs often harboring invisible human remains. What does this do to...