French Global: A New Approach to Literary History ed. by Christie McDonald and Susan Rubin Suleiman (review)

French Global: A New Approach to Literary History successfully casts itself as the innovative successor to A New History of French Literature (1989), edited by Denis Hollier. Like that earlier work, French Global: A New Approach to Literary History breaks with traditional models of French literary historiography such as the one championed by Gustave Lanson's Histoire de la littérature française (1895), by questioning a single historical narrative canonically arranged by "great authors" who would reflect a national, and even universalist "esprit français."

As Christie McDonald and Susan Rubin Suleiman explain in their introduction to the volume, Lanson's predominant vision of French literature as a reflection of the French national ethos

coincided almost exactly with the consolidation of the French public education system under the Third Republic [1870-1940], a system designed to inculcate civic virtue and love of country in every schoolchild . . . Lanson's Histoire . . . was as much an enterprise of defining national identity as it was of teaching students how to explicate the great works of the national literature.

(xii)

Lanson's vision consequently ignored literatures in French from places like Belgium, Switzerland, and the Americas, whose conquest was begun in the 1600's. It is important to note as well that French was being imposed through conquest in the Maghreb, Sub-Saharan Africa and in Indochina from the 1830's, at the very moment when the ideologues of the Third Republic were in the process of consolidating the French nation. This consolidation also occurred to the detriment of the "other" languages spoken within France, such as Alsatian, Basque, Breton, Catalan, Corsican, Flemish, and Occitan (these "regional" languages of France were not "officially recognized" by law until 2008), while the French defeat in the Franco-Prussian war in 1870 and the loss of Alsace-Lorraine (a region that did not return to France until after WWI), incidentally led many from that area to resettle in the colony of Algeria. (See Alison Rice's "All Over the Place: Global Women Writers and the Maghreb," which examines Assia Djebar's treatment of this fact in Les nuits de Strasbourg).

In defining the intent of their volume to view "French" literature differently, Suleiman and McDonald cite Homi Bhabha's notion of the "barred nation" (from his essay "Dissemi/Nation: Time, Narrative, and the Margins of the Modern Nation") which recognizes two tendencies: the "pedagogical" tendency to define the nation as stable and homogenous, and the "performative" tendency that sees it as a fluid entity composed of people in movement, such that the nation is in fact a "space that is internally marked by cultural difference and the heterogeneous histories of contending peoples, antagonistic authorities, and tense cultural locations" (xv). Suleiman and McDonald link this view of the "barred nation" to contemporary definitions of comparative literature and world literature as the recognition and celebration of ethnic, literary, and linguistic pluralism. Hence French Global is more about a way of reading "literary traditions in French, inside and outside the country today known as France" (xvii) than about identifying and forming a canon.

To this end, the editors maintain a chronological ordering while also dividing the essays into three overlapping categories: "Spaces," (ten chapters): "Worlding Medieval French" (Sharon Kinoshita); "'There's a New World Here': Pantagruel via Oronce Finé" (Tom Conley); "The Global and the Figural: Early Modern Reflections on Boundary Crossing" (Jacob Vance); "Globality and Classicism: The Moralists Encounter the Self " (Eric Méchoulan); "From the Rectangle to the Globe: Theater in the Ancien Régime" (Jérôme Brillaud); "Planetary Perspectives in Enlightenment Fiction and Science" (Natasha Lee); "Homesickness in an Expanding World: The Case of the Nineteenth-Century Lyric" (Evelyne Ender); "Critical Conventions, Literary Landscapes, and Postcolonial Ecocriticism" (Françoise Lionnet); "Literature, Space, and the French Nation-State after the 1950's" (Vera Andermatt-Conley); and "All Over the Place: Global Women Writers and the Maghreb" (Alison Rice...