Des identités mouvantes: se définir dans le contexte de la mondialisation by Jimmy Thibeault

the consolatory function of the popular novel in his essay on ideological issues in the Comte de Monte-Cristo, and Agnese Silvestri shows how, in George Sand, the future is open to those who use their wealth to prepare a more equal future. Luca Pietromarchi asks the extent to which the Flaubertian description of human relations obeys the dynamics of commerce and finance. Karen Haddad and Pierre Glaudes examine the abstract nature of money, the former seeing it as something that vanishes in Dostoyevsky, the latter understanding it as a source of deep spiritual anxiety in Léon Bloy. Valerio Cordiner studies the realistic fresco of industrials and bankers of the Third Republic in the virtuosic writings of Maurice Barrès. The final section sees money as a cultural object.Annamaria Lessara examines the paradoxical relationships between bourgeois ideology and dandyism in Chateaubriand, Stendhal, Balzac, and Baudelaire.Maria Luisa Maniscalco analyses the contribution that Alexis de Tocqueville made in creating the sub-discipline of the sociology of money. Carole ChristenLecuyer uses the example of savings banks, founded in 1818, to show how propaganda literature and novels employed pedagogies of money to resolve social questions. Finally, François Vatin demonstrates how the works of Eugène Buret (1811–43), known as a social investigator of poverty, cannot be disassociated from his literary Romanticism. This motley, enjoyable collection provides an invaluable contribution to the new field of economic criticism. It is highly recommended to all interested in the complex relationships between literature and economics. University of New Orleans Juliana Starr Thibeault, Jimmy. Des identités mouvantes: se définir dans le contexte de la mondialisation. Montréal: Nota Bene, 2015. ISBN 978-2-89518-505-5. Pp. 393. $34 Can. This expansive study of the construction of the individual’s concept of his or her own identity in thirteen Francophone Canadian novels has much to offer a reader interested in critical arguments related to the evolving nature of our understanding of identity in the age of globalization. Thibeault’s corpus includes novels published from1984 to 2001 by authors from Quebec, Acadia, Ontario, and the Canadian west, all regions in which the importance of maintaining Francophone identity has been a central concern both to writers and critics. Rather than focusing on the importance of maintaining the collective identity of a threatened Francophone minority in the face of an Anglophone majority, however, Thibeault’s analyses focus on the different ways in which the identity construction of individual characters in these novels breaks away from traditional collectivist ways of defining identity. In his first three chapters, he demonstrates how characters undertake journeys that encourage them to break away from a reductive conception of identity that is based on unnuanced and mythified 270 FRENCH REVIEW 90.3 Reviews 271 conceptions of their history (ch. 1), their geography (ch. 2) or their culture (ch. 3). He thus argues that within these works“est ainsi remis en question tout discours dont la fonction principale est d’inscrire le moi dans un même social et culturel en lui fournissant des repères fixes, dans le temps et l’espace”(261). In his final (and longest) chapter, Thibeault examines how individual protagonists reconstruct (or fail to reconstruct ) ties with the various collectivities that those analyzed in his first three chapters rejected (historical, geographical, and cultural), while managing to avoid falling into traditional reductive self-definitions based on those collectivities. Thibeault demonstrates how the individual comes to define himself or herself in relation to others by a multiplicity of connections within the social space:“À l’individu prisonnier d’un même identitaire d’autrefois succède désormais ‘l’individu social’, c’est-à-dire l’individu qui,par ses multiples connexions,constitue à lui seul un espace de sociabilité” (357).Although he deconstructs the traditional cadres in which identity is constructed, Thibeault does not argue that these cadres are no longer important. Throughout his analyses, he points to ways in which individuals define themselves within and against these cadres through their interactions with others, but always (when they are successful) by living those interactions in the here and now. He thus argues convincingly that “l’identité collective devient elle-même...

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