Jeux pragmatiques dans les 'Contes et Nouvelles' de Guy de Maupassant by Floriane Place-Verghnes

548 Reviews the issue of the female form and itsviolent representations, drawing analogies with certain distinctive Baudelaire poems (such as 'Aune passante' or 'Une martyre') or tropes (such as thefemme sauvage). In her focus on Camus, Sanyal returns to theno tionof thevulnerability of thehuman body, re-emphasizing the important oscillation between the figures of victim and executioner as a means of exposing the force of irony. While it isunderstandable that in the scope of this study Sanyal cannot offer a comprehensive analysis of theBaudelairean legacy, it is at times frustrating to find her resorting to suggestions that the textsof these authors offer 'strikingsimilarities' or 'echoes' of Baudelaire (supported typically by only one or two poems forwhich contradictory readings can often be found elsewhere inBaudelaire's aeuvre). For a studywhich is sowide-ranging in itschoice of textual corpus and theoretical (re)formulations, Sanyal's analysis is somewhat overburdened with a dense style and shifting critical vocabulary. None the less, this study offers a refreshingly innovative approach not just toBaudelaire but also tobroader critical interpretations of violence, modernity, irony,politics, and form.For Sanyal, ironybecomes away of hitting back at thedespotic oppression of representation; it isa trenchant formof counterviolence, aweapon thatBaudelaire and his followerswield persistently throughout their texts, and a toolwhich ultimately exposes theviolent nature of the reading process itself. BANGORUNIVERSITY HELEN ABBOTT J7eux pragmatiques dans les 'Contes etNouvelles' deGuy deMaupassant. By FLORIANE PLACE-VERGHNES. (Romantisme etModernites, 88) Paris: Champion. 2005. 335 pp. E6o. ISBN 978-2-7453-II53-5. IfMaupassant's creative productivity ill served his reputation, both for contem poraries and posterity, the apparent 'effortlessness' of his writing has not survived modern textual scrutiny.From Greimas's decoding to themany microscopic narra tological analyses in thewake of his La Semiotique du texte: exercicespratiques (Paris: Seuil, 1976), the privileged status of the short story has itselfbeen partly respon sible forbringingMaupassant back to serious critical attention, often in the shape of essays devoted to individual texts.Not the least original dimension of Floriane Place Verghnes's book is that it provides an overarching study of thewriter's narrative strategies, accommodating earlier research in both French and English but persua sively arguing thatunderlying them isan acute awareness of the modulations of reader response. The theoretical debt to seminal thinking about the latter ismade explicit. From titles to epigraphs, and from invocations to exclamations, Maupassant's ludic presence plays on expectations and emotional rhythms.For all his distancing modes and Flaubertian indifference,seldom has Maupassant declared himself more clearly than in theworking of his words. The strategies range from theobvious to the subtle: digressions, deferred satisfactions, ironic inversions, meditative pauses, sleights of hand, changes of register, generic admixtures, colloquial intimacy and authorizing pomposity, complicity and duplicity, the displacement of sympathies, the disequi librium of alternating tenses and voices, incipitswhich return to another beginning, dead ends and endings devoid of closure. It is a (literally) dazzling performance. At the same time, Place-Verghnes never loses sight of the larger reading context, from thedevelopment of thenineteenth-century press to theprofessionalized profile of the author engaged innew kinds of contractual relationship with the reading public. This is also an immensely detailed study. It zooms from overview to themost precisely focused enlargement of textual segments, bringing differentiated practice and variations on a theme into telling juxtapositions. And those rhetorical devices and effects are defined in relation to the specificity of, for example, the chronique: MLR, I03.2, 2oo8 549 'rhetorique qui seraitmaladroite dans une ceuvre de fiction' (p. 249). Paradoxically, such isPlace-Verghnes's mastery of the corpus and intricateweaving across it that hers is a book which even specialists may approach through its comprehensive in dexes in order to do justice to her penetrating insights. Its appendices are equally useful, from taxonomies of character types to an illuminating inventory ofMaupas sant's dedicaces. The bibliography is exemplary. In short, this is a work of critical distinction grounded in immaculate scholarship. FITZWILLIAMCOLLEGE, CAMBRIDGE ROBERT LETHBRIDGE Blaise Cendrars 6: Sous le signe deMoravagine. Ed. by JEAN-CARLOFLUYCKIGER and CLAUDE LEROY. (La Revue des Lettres Modernes) Caen: Lettres Modernes Mi nard. 2oo6. 274pp. EI5. ISBN 978-2-256-9iI05-7. This collection of essays is an important one, not least...

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