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L ’E spr it C réa te u r impassioned plea for the need to “ return to the text,” to listen to the unique voice of each individual work and to appreciate its ability to reorient our conceptualization of art and life and the problematic interplay between them. In short, eclecticism in the field of literary criticism is not vice but virtue for Brombert. While the essays contained in this collection do generally relate to the problematics of reading (Sartre reading Hugo, Stendhal reading Rousseau, T. S. Eliot misreading Baude­ laire, etc.), the title “ The Hidden Reader” more often serves as a convenient pretext for uniting a number of essays which are linked more by a common line of approach—thematic criticism—than by the specific question of any imbedded reader. Whatever one’s critical bent, it is impossible not to admire Brombert’s intellectual integ­ rity as a staunch adherent to “ thematic” criticism amid the shifting currents of structural­ ism, post-structuralism and post-post-structuralism. An outstanding stylist, both in English and in French, and a critic of rare erudition, he is at his best, as in these essays, when he weaves a brilliant critical tapestry pulling together often subtle strands from the text of literature, the text of the author’s life and the text of history itself, while at the same time allowing paradoxical patterns to emerge in all their problematic truth. Although they span four decades, the essays in this collection all maintain their critical edge in that they demon­ strate that there is no substitute for close familiarity with the text and a mind ever open to the surprises to be found in life and art. If there is a major defect in the book, it is to be found in the blindness which marks Brombert’s failure to read his own reading of the authors in question. Regardless of the author involved (Stendhal, Flaubert, Baudelaire, even Sartre), his readings tend to focus on the paradoxical relationship between “ le livre du monde” and “ le monde des livres,” between the fragmentary truth of the lived experience and the unified illusion of the aesthetic—a preoccupation which implicates the critic perhaps as much as the author(s), a paradox, mirrored, for example, in Brombert’s own hesitation between the uniqueness of the individual reader’s response to the text and the belief in a still possible “ totalization” of all readers’ experiences with the text. Ja m e s J . Ba r a n Marquette University Dorothy Kelly. F ic t io n a l G e n d e r s : R o le a n d R e p r e s e n t a t i o n in N i n e t e e n t h - C e n t u r y F r e n c h N a r r a t i v e . Lincoln & London: University of Nebraska Press, 1989. Pp. 216. Price $25.00. In Fictional Genders, Dorothy Kelly calls into question the nature of masculinity and femininity. In her Introduction, she analyzes theories of gender identity by Sigmund Freud, Jacques Lacan, and Jacques Derrida as texts (e.g., Lacan’s theory joins sexuality to textuality ). She applies these theories to her analyses of nineteenth-century French realist, deca­ dent and fantastic fiction, examining three literary issues: the role of social institutions such as class and family structures in the formation of gender identity, in Chapter One; the linguistic, rhetorical problem that contributes to the definition of gender identity, in Chapter Two; and the phenomenon of the nonreferentiality of gender identity, in Chapter Three. Kelly begins her treatment of the relation of gender to class and family structures in Balzac. She explains the aporia of feminine men and masculine women within a dynamic that moves from the point when both genders resemble each other to a “ repositioning” of the genders into their conventional definitions. Exploring the connection between family, power and gender identity in Balzac’s world where, legally, the father has the power and the 94 F a l l 1991 B o o k R ev iew s mother and children...

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