Avez-vous lu Racine? Mise au point polémique (review)

Book Reviews overarching theme of die "slipknot" This concept conflates die notion of collision and reversal, of negotiating between cultures, wiúi diat of negotiating the socioculturel snares of assimilation, identity and displacement. In diese terms, Walker argues, Francophone literature was able to surpass die delimiting binaries of die modernist tradition, reconceptualizing and modulating both themes and techniques. From here, Walker's approach hews a primarily chronological line. Starting witii the award of die Prix Concourt to René Maran for Batouala in 1921, Walker links die auuior's denunciatory analysis of colonialism in die book's preface to die "slipknot," and tiius to Aimé Césaire's themes of Négritude, alienation, displacement, uprootedness, and survival. Tahar ben Jelloun's The Sand Child is read as an integral part of a larger countermodemist whole that interrogates competing nationalisms and patriarchies widiin a Moroccan context of sexual and ideological tyranny. In contrast, Manama Bâ's So Long a Letter highlights issues of writing, epistolarity and parthenogenesis that posit the power of language for African women. Each auuior's work thus becomes a variant of die "slipknot" as countermodemist discourse, die deliberate breaking down of European binaries through strategies of doubling, appropriation, and difference mat channel patterns of cultural displacement and collision into representations of liminality and hybridity. It is in elaborating Francophone literary production as paradigmatic of a sense of identity generated from strategies of discursive and cultural resistance diat Walker's claims are most convincing. Yet, in such an approach, the key issues diat remain unaddressed are the extent to which Francophone literature defines itself through its own discursive and thematic patterns and parameters, radier Úian remaining a stylistic scion of Europe's literary values and practices, and whedier its literary countermodernism is a monolitiuc construct diat remains unchanged despite die many varying intersections of colonialism and Third World cultures. While die paradox of writing in the colonizer's language remains a vexed question for postcolonial literatures , auuiors like Patrick Chamoiseau have shown the myriad padis by which such linguistic and stylistic strictures may be appropriated and redefined. But by locating diese discourses under the rubric of countermodernism, tfieir texts become responses to die prejudices and absences embedded in die texts of colonialism in terms defined by colonialism itself, which does nodiing to dismantle any resulting hierarchies of signification. Radier, die basic tenets of such a problematic must be refused if true discursive independence, reflective of individual differences in die colonial experience, is to be articulated outside of colonial binaries. Despite diese caveats, Countermodernism and Francophone Literary Culture provides rich and varied analyses of die heterogeneity of Francophone literary discourses, and forms a coherent picture of the forces undergirding diese intersections of francophonie and postcolonialism. Walker's complex readings aptly demonstrate the key role of these discourses in shaping Francophone cultural identity. By demonstrating wiui appropriate complexity die wide range of what the "canon" still considers a "minority" literature, the challenge of dismantling such institutionalized forms of reading is effectively articulated. H. Adlai Murdtjch University oflllinois-Urbana Jean Rohou. Avez-vous Iu Racine? Mise au point polémique. Paris: L'Harmattan, 2000. Pp. 408. The subtitle of this book reveals its thrust. Destined for die general public—but not widiout sound lessons for the specialist, like die "composition régressive de l'œuvre" (eh. 3)—Avez-vous lu Racine? is at once a detailed review of how to approach a fictional work in a professional way and, even more appealing for die connoisseur, a delicious corrective of a number of wrongheaded and often self-serving dieories about Racine die man and his art. Those who know die previous, abundant scholarship of Jean Rohou will not be surprised to find a volume diat is high on historical context married to a vision of Racine's plays as die exprèsVol . XLI, No. 4 115 L'Esprit Créateur sion of a Jansenist sense of die tragedy of human existence. In the years surrounding die bicentennial celebrations of Racine's deadi, Rohou was perhaps the most prominent spokesman for reconsidering Racine's œuvre as bom λ forme and, just as important, as a philosophical and the ological/oiui in the face of a...