The Republic of Letters: A Cultural History of the French Enlightenment by Dena Goodman (review)

Book Reviews83 While the examples do succeed in illustrating the theoretical points, the book would have fallen short of its aim had the author not applied the interpretive strategies of El canon by reviewing Pérez de Ayala's criticism on Benavente. Gonzalez del Valle emphasizes the importance of the criticism of Pérez de Ayala not only with respect to the evaluation of Benavente as a playwright, but also because his commentaries have negatively predisposed the readers/spectators of Benavente's theatrical works. In summary, one can object only to the brevity ofEl canon: the text itself is comprised of seventy pages, supplemented by a chapter of "Notes" and a corresponding bibliography. What the reader concludes is, first, that today's non-academic theatre critics have ceased to be passive recipients of the criticism of professors and have converted themselves into active creators of evaluation; and, second, that it has become necessary to revise the concept of canon because the loss of global meaning has made it vulnerable and exposed to multiple manipulations. L. TERESA VALDIVIESO Trans. Angela Félix Arizona State University DENA GOODMAN. The Republic ofLetters: A Cultural History ofthe French Enlightenment. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1994. 338 p. 1 he purpose of Dena Goodman, in this first major reinterpretation of the French Enlightenment in twenty years, is to explain the Republic of Letters as a set of social and discursive practices and, in particular, to examine the specific roles played by men and women in it. In the eighteenth century, French men of letters identified French culture with sociability and sociability with the polite society of men and women. Gender equality was the sign of a civilized milieu; thus, the French Enlightenment was grounded in a female-centered mixed-gender sociability, and a cultural history of the time must also be (my emphasis) a feminist history. Also is a key word, for though Goodman does not underestimate the role played by men, she suggests that feminine virtues had to compensate for masculine vices to create an ideal whole. "The French Enlightenment was built on the complementarity of 'feminine' sensibility and 'masculine' reason on the compensation of female selflessness for male ego" (9). Diderot's Encyclopédie provided a center of unity and contributed to the establishment of the Republic of Letters as an association, a real society of men of letters, with Paris as its capital, but also with the conscious notion of added broad international intellectual cooperation. Historians have so far viewed salonnières through Rousseau's eyes, as unqualified judges of male cultural performance and production, as underminers of seriousness, when in fact, under the guidance of Marie-Thérèse 84Rocky Mountain Review Geoffrin, Julie de Lespinasse, and Suzanne Necker, Parisian salons became the working space of the project of Enlightenment. The function of salonni ères was to maintain order in the Republic of Letters by enforcing the rules of polite conversation. From 1765 to 1776, men of letters could meet in Parisian salons every day of the week, and some did. It is not a coincidence that these years correspond to the height of the Enlightenment, when the philosophes were both highly productive and highly visible. By 1777, however , with the death of Julie de Lespinasse and the paralysis of Thérèse Geoffrin, men were forced to admit that disorder and anarchy reigned in the Republic of Letters since it had lost two of its leading salonnières. Goodman describes the challenges to natural harmony which developed after Enlightenment discourse escaped the regulated bonds of the salon. But first she discusses epistolary commerce in the Republic of Letters. Conversation shaped the discursive space within the boundaries of the salon, but it is writing that reached the expanding reading public. Letters and manuscripts were widely circulated and supplied substance for conversation . They soon gave birth to newsletters through which people in the provinces could keep in touch with the capital, the court, and the Republic of Letters. Those who reported from Paris and Versailles were called nouvelles à la main, while those that reported from Paris as the center of the Republic of Letters were called correspondences littéraires. These two forms of...