Reading Communities: A Dialogical Approach to French and Francophone Literature = Communautés de lecture: pour une approche dialogique des œuvres classiques et contemporaines ed. by Oana Panaïté (review)

These essays, three of which are in English and the remainder in French, derive from a collaborative project involving scholars from the USA and France. As the subtitles indicate between them, the authors are concerned to compare works across periods, cultures, and genres. The partial exception is David Spieser-Landes’s nonetheless informative presentation of the politics of dialogism in the contemporary regional literature of Alsace. The ‘classical’ texts (in one case a film) span a period from 1559 to 1959. The earliest of the contemporary texts is Abdoulaye Sadji’s novel Nini (1954). Six of the essays are each the work of two scholars in collaboration, though speaking with one voice rather than embodying a secondary exploitation of dialogism. In her short Introduction, Oana Panaı¨té helpfully differentiates the contributors’ underlying approach from that of Bakhtin. The collective enterprise raises many questions in relation to methodology, but discussion of method is not allowed to overwhelm the readings themselves. The contributors’ background in francophone literature is evident throughout. It is in especially sharp focus in Lynn Palermo and Gladys Francis’s positing of a dialogue between André Breton’s Martinique, charmeuse de serpents and Gerty Dambury’s novel set in Guadeloupe, Les Rétifs. Alison Rice and Olivier Morel’s essay, notwithstanding their recourse to Michel de Certeau’s notion of déplacement, is less revelatory regarding Zola’s ‘J’accuse!’ than on Alain Mabanckou’s rewriting of it in his novel Verre cassé. Vera Klekovkina reads back into Baudelaire’s ‘L’Invitation au voyage’ a foreshadowing of the warning in Amélie Nothomb’s Le Voyage d’hiver about fantasies of domination, but it is the contemporary work that is her main focus. The same may be said of the comparison by Margaret Gray and Jason Herbeck of passages from Proust’s Combray and Édouard Glissant’s novel La Lézarde. Vlad Dima’s consideration of Les 400 Coups and Ousmane Sembène’s film Xala as examples of meta-cinema is particularly revealing on Sembène, but his authoritative presentation of Truffaut’s theory and practice has its own value. Anne-Marie Petitjean keeps L’Heptaméron and Anne Hébert’s L’Île de la demoiselle continually in play and is perceptive about Marguerite’s sixty-seventh story. Laurent Loty and Véronique Tacquin give equal prominence to both their questions: ‘Kourouma, un Voltaire africain?’ and ‘Voltaire, un Kourouma européen?’, and argue convincingly that Candide has been widely misinterpreted. Flavien Falantin’s elegant discussion of bêtise in Madame Bovary and Sadji’s Nini gives a new complexion to Flaubert’s presentation of Emma. Dominique Licops and Paul Breslin’s lively comparison of The Tempest and Césaire’s Une tempête should commend itself to students of both writers. The complementary expertise of Hall Bjørnstad and Oana Panaïté leads to a powerful consideration of Marie NDiaye and Pascal that is an exemplary justification of the project as a whole and casts fresh light on the celebrated evocation of man as ‘un roseau (pensant)’. Any initial worry that this volume might be a factitious enterprise is quickly dispelled by these innovative essays, all of which have the potential to stimulate considerable further dialogue.