Imaginaires de la vie littéraire: fiction, figuration, configuration éd. par Björn-Olav Dozo, et al

on Rabelais’s complex concept of interpretation, a problem that continues to mobilize scholars of the Renaissance. Brooklyn College and The Graduate Center, CUNY Bernd Renner Dozo, Björn-Olav,Anthony Glinoer, et Michel Lacroix, éd. Imaginaires de la vie littéraire: fiction, figuration, configuration. Rennes: PU de Rennes, 2012. ISBN 9782 -7535-1862-9. Pp. 376. 20 a. The introduction and twenty-three essays in this Québécois, Belgian, and French collection examine“comment la littérature se pense comme création et discours, mais aussi comme lieu de socialisation et de travail collectif” (back jacket). Edited by the three founding members of GREMLIN (Groupe de recherche sur les médiations littéraires et les institutions), the volume focuses on prose and poetry of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries from Balzac to Stephen King. It emphasizes the self-conscious tradition, including satiric and parodic self-representation by real, fictive, and symbolic writers, editors, and publishers. The four sections treat type characters, legendary figures in literary history, intermediaries (journalists, reviewers, academies, translators, librarians), and imposters.All the essays appear serious and fluently written; they often display insight, wit, and even charm. Among the best are Valérie Stiénon’s general discussion of the invention of the professional writer as a type character in the physiologies of the nineteenth century. Martine-Emmanuelle Lapointe explains how many authors born during or after World War II seem to have lost a sense of the value of political commitment in literature, and resign themselves to a marginal social role as entertainers. Using American examples, Marie-Pier Luneau analyzes“Chick Lit,”often set in a publishing house, as a fairy tale of ambition masking a quest for love, and culminating in a magical rescue where both goals are secured. Vincent Laisny, Pascal Durand, and David Vrydaghs respectively relate how minor disciples of the Naturalist, Symbolist, and Surrealist cenacles become disillusioned and write futile exposés to destroy what they had once worshipped. Guillaume McNeil Arteau contrasts Constant’s and Tocqueville’s liberal faith in journalism as a constructive force for fostering national cohesion and effective social action with Balzac’s conservative mistrust of journalism as a venal, corrupt practice of distortion that obscures communication and hinders the pursuit of desirable common goals.Anne-Marie Clément (missing an opportunity to integrate Sartre’s La nausée) analyzes three recent novels about biographers whose project of writing the life of another is subverted by preoccupation with their own. Caroline Paquette treats four recent Québécois novels with heroic vicarious artist-editors who refuse to compromise for commercial gain. She observes that the other two most common prototypes are the editor as chameleon and the editor as vampire. Alain Goulet shows how Gide uses his fictional works featuring writers to experiment with avatars of himself, concluding in Les faux220 FRENCH REVIEW 88.2 Reviews 221 monnayeurs by stating:“Nous vivons pour manifester.”His later reportages from Africa should have been discussed to underscore the earnestness of this statement. Clotilde Landais insightfully explores how Stephen King’s fictive writers discredit the institutional distinction between high and popular literature. Unfortunately, no overview or synthesis unites these essays. Because the editors concentrate on professional writers and their associates, dating from the advent of the mass market for prose narratives, the volume offers workers in that market the dreary fascination of shop-talk and professional gossip. It has relatively little to offer to students, teachers, and critics of French and Francophone culture. Oberlin College Affiliate Scholar (OH) Laurence M. Porter Grossman, Kathryn M. The Later Novels of Victor Hugo: Variations on the Politics and Poetics of Transcendence. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2012. ISBN 978-0-19-964295-3. Pp. xii + 285. £64. This study announces an ambitious double goal: first, to read Hugo’s final three novels within the Second-Empire context of their creation and initial reception; and second, to read Hugo “today” (meaning in the post-9/11 world) in order to explore “our own moral, political, and aesthetic challenges and to put them in a wider perspective ” (5). The second goal seems to be a response to the (truly worrisome) dearth of recent publications on Hugo...

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