Le Recueil littéraire: Pratiques et théorie d'une forme (review)

The recueil, or literary collection, is a receptacle within which texts (but also photographs and audio tracks) can jostle for the reader's attention as autonomous pieces in themselves while their juxtaposition can set up further possibilities of interpretation. The recueil offers itself as a metaform that enfolds the disparate. But is this coherence in part an illusion fostered by the materiality of the book and the paratextual elements (such as title and blurb) that offer the horizon of unity? What effects are created when previously autonomous texts are brought together within a collection? In response to these kinds of question the contributors to this volume work with the legacy of Gé rard Genette and Hans Jauss in applying their attention to the recueil: its circumstance, its form, its reception. In doing so, they analyse the relationship between the recueil as receptacle and its contents. The book, itself a recueil of sorts, has articles that range from contemporary works (those of Sophie Calle and Eugè ne Savitzkaya, for example) to the work of Herder and Montesquieu. It is divided into three sections that privilege the dominant focus at play in the chapters. The chapters in the first section concentrate on the question of form; those of the second attend to relations between texts within the recueil; and the chapters in part three concentrate on authorial intentionality and the motivations (social, political or editorial) that inform the content of recueils. Different forms of the recueil such as the anthology, the series, the literary review and privately recorded compilations are analysed. What emerges is that the recueil has a distinctive architecture that can also serve to renew form or to facilitate generic transfers between texts. Alexandre Gefen, for example, looks at collections of lives from Antiquity to contemporary writing and considers the possibilities of generic hybridity in Pierre Michon's Vies minuscules. He describes Michon's text as a 'roman-recueil': one in which the vita of other lives facilitate the author's autobiographical sketchings. In his article on Aloysius Bertrand, Luc Bonenfant argues, convincingly, that the formal possibilities of the recueil were exploited by Bertrand in ways that allow us to distinguish prose poetry from the prose poem. Bertrand's preparation of Gaspard de la Nuit involved a constant reworking of texts such that the book 'n'est donc pas une simple juxtaposition de textes é pars; voulue, son architecture est dé libé ré ment complexe'. The majority of the contributors are linked to either the Centre de Recherche Interuniversitaire sur la Litté rature et la Culture Qué bé coises (CRILCQ, Université de Laval) or the Centre d'É tude des Litté ratures Anciennes et Modernes (CELAM, Rennes II). In turn, these centres support the Groupe de Recherches sur le Recueil that provided the main dynamic for this publication. This volume provides an excellent example of the benefits of collaborative and individual research. Each of these articles merits close consideration in its own right. Each is scrupulously written and bears the marks of careful scholarship. Collectively they draw our attention to the recueil as a critical interlocutor for the solitary literary form.