Littératures québécoise et acadienne contemporaines: au prisme de la ville par Anne Yvonne Julien

with the notion, analyzing not only the admirable aspects of genius, but also the more negative associations with extreme or abnormal behavior. In the following century, the concept expands from an individual to a collective designation and is used to celebrate the glories of French language and Christianity—both seen as integral components of the genius of the French nation. On the other hand, genius also becomes the attribute of poets who see themselves as solitary and unappreciated figures in a hostile world or of self-destructive artists portrayed in novels. With the growing importance of the medical sciences, genius becomes subject to the medical gaze and is pathologized, thus setting a precedent for associating genius with insanity. The poet Hölderlin, for example, will eventually become an exemplary figure of the genius whose mental problems will be seen as indissociable from his poetic gift. The dawn of the twentieth century is marked by advances made in the measurement of genius, thanks to Alfred Binet’s“scale of intelligence.”Inevitably, any claim of genius will also bring up the question of its trustworthiness and the issue of imposture comes to a head in the case of a child prodigy, an eight-year-old poet named Minou Drouet. Jean-Paul Sartre and Roland Barthes use the occasion to discredit the entire notion of genius as an integral part of bourgeois mythology. Much later, imposture undergoes a Derridian deconstruction of an encounter Hélène Cixous had with a fake genius. While discussions of genius had frequently involved child prodigies and the childhood of geniuses ever since the beginning of the nineteenth century, women were generally not considered relevant to the debate—until the end of the twentieth century when Julia Kristeva rehabilitates and genders the notion of genius, proposing that a feminine and psychoanalytical approach“has the capacity to provide a better understanding of our contemporary world than any other form of thought”(218). Hers is undoubtedly one of the most original and far-reaching contributions to date in a debate that is nowhere near to being exhausted. Ohio State University Karlis Racevskis Julien, Anne Yvonne, éd. Littératures québécoise et acadienne contemporaines: au prisme de la ville. Rennes: PU de Rennes, 2014. ISBN 978-2-7535-3289-2. Pp. 530. 24 a. While Montreal is an obvious focal point for studies of urban contemporary Francophone Canadian texts, Julien has compiled an extensive collection of essays from over thirty authors who fill in the gaps, so to speak, in the overall map of literature from French-speaking Canada. In addition to Montreal, the collection includes essays centered on Moncton, Ottawa, Quebec City, Winnipeg, Sudbury, Chicoutimi, and other Francophone cities in Canada from which writers and stories have emerged. Julien attempts to provide a structure to the collection by first dividing the essays into four thematic parts, then further sub-dividing these parts into sub266 FRENCH REVIEW 90.2 Reviews 267 themes, including, for example,“Prolifération des non-lieux”and“Le lieu de mémoire générationnelle.” As these sample headings indicate, time, space, and identity appear as profoundly connected in texts from the many genres under scrutiny, including short stories, novellas, novels, drama, as well as songs and poems. Gabrielle Roy is shown to have opened the door after World War II to a new focus on the city as the Quiet Revolution was beginning to take hold with its sweeping social transformations and shift away from the privileging of rural culture. Taken as a whole, the essays are arranged to highlight a chronological progressive shift away from a struggle to establish a unified Francophone national identity within a pluralistic space, and toward a coming to terms with the increasingly pluralistic society of contemporary Canada, specifically due to increases in immigration. Thus, the essays address and transcend simple English versus French-speaking dichotomies. In fact, many of the Francophone Canadian authors under scrutiny, especially at the end of the collection, are not native to Canada, such as Danny Laferrière (Haiti), Sergio Kokis (Brazil),Ying Chen (China), and Abla Farhoud (Lebanon). In examinations of individual and collective identities, space (urban versus rural) and time (Bakhtin’s chronotope...

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