Les Patrimoines littéraires à l’école: tensions et débats actuels ed. by Marie-France Bishop, Anissa Belhadjin (review)

Every year since 2000 the ‘chercheurs en didactique de la littérature’ have met to discuss the state of literature in the education system. The 2012 theme was ‘patrimoines littéraires’, a term that arose in French pedagogical circles only in the nineteenth century, when the study of national literature in secondary education gradually replaced Greek and Latin. Today, the increasingly unstable edifice of canonical national texts in France and elsewhere has sustained challenges from postcolonial and world literature, popular culture, and digital media, while students have moved away from literary studies at both the secondary and tertiary levels. In addressing these challenges, most of the conference papers fall into one of three subject areas: the ideology-driven process of ‘patrimonialisation’; innovations in teaching the literary canon; and the emergence of alternatives to traditional literary culture. With almost thirty contributions, it is not surprising to find substantial disagreement over the nature and severity of the crises affecting literary studies, and their possible solutions. For example, Emmanuel Fraisse observes the increasing irrelevance of national canons in an era of globalization, and relates it to the decline of the ideology of art as transcendence of history; whereas Brigitte Louichon uses the example of Proust to show that the fetishizing of a small number of literary texts by the educational establishment remains unabated. Catherine Tauveron uses the Grimm brothers’ fairy tales to argue that canonical literature frequently cannot be ‘inhabited’ in the present without an effort of contextualization that is beyond the power of the school to require; whereas Stéphanie Lemarchand-Thieurmel uses surveys to show that such works ‘peuvent résonner au plus profond des êtres’ (p. 284), even of students in vocational schools, who therefore should not be deprived of the opportunity to read them in class. These conflicting positions are not necessarily irreconcilable: the anthology provides ample evidence from schools in France and elsewhere (Belgium, Poland, Romania, Switzerland, the United Kingdom, the United States) that battles between cultural absolutism and relativism, or nationalism and globalization, inspire successful innovation at least as often as they lead to political paralysis. While the debate on how to teach conventional literary legacies rages on, some of the contributors focus on contemporary media, classroom practices, and genres that challenge the very notion of patrimonial texts: the US discipline of ‘creative writing’ as a means of exploring literature from the ‘inside’ (Anne-Marie Petitjean); ‘bit lit’, referring not to digital platforms, as one might assume, but to the hugely popular category of modern vampire literature (Isabelle Casta); slam poetry competitions (Camille Vorger); and, most daringly, the legitimization of video games as part of a new literary-pedagogical ‘corpus’ (Laetitia Perret and Émilie Rémond). An openness to international perspectives, and an openness to redefinitions of what constitutes ‘literature’ as academic discipline are seen alongside contributions that focus exclusively on France and/or canonical texts. Not very long ago, questioning the pedagogical canon and its traditional methods of transmission was unthinkable; today, as this anthology proves, no national, cultural, or generic boundary is sacred, providing inspiration to those who worry about the future viability of the general education of literature.