- French Cultural Studies for the Twenty-First Century ed. by Masha Belenky, Kathryn Kleppinger, and Anne O’Neil-Henry
This is a stimulating collection of essays examining a pleasingly wide range of primary francophone sources, described by the editors as non-traditional: journalism of various kinds, vaudeville, menus, postcards, a website, and a film. The authors are all French studies specialists in American universities and the overarching methodology is close textual analysis. Although the quality of the analysis across the nine chapters is a little uneven, each essay is lively, well conceived, and illuminating. Given the book’s title, the chronological coverage is unexpected, in that all but three of the chapters focus on the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the exceptions being those on Marguerite Duras’s controversial intervention in 1985 in the case of Grégory Villemin, the gay porn site Citébeur, and the popular film Intouchables (dir. by Olivier Nakache and Eric Toledano, 2011). This is not a big problem, even though it does add a little to the impression of unevenness. A book of this kind does not need to be exhaustive, since the reader is presumably meant to view the essays as opening up new pathways for future research in French cultural studies, irrespective of period. Hence the use of ‘for’ in the title. But the most complex question the title poses, and which the volume only addresses indirectly, is what exactly we mean—and don’t mean—by French cultural studies: what exactly does the addition of that epithet imply? The book engages only fleetingly with the historical origins and theoretical underpinnings of cultural studies, as that interdiscipline has come to be understood in the anglophone world. And it also passes over the fact that, in the UK particularly, cultural studies long ago abandoned the kind of close textual scrutiny the authors practise here, in favour of more sociological modes of enquiry, covering such concerns as reception, consumption, subcultures, political economy, and so on. [End Page 311] It is true that a few chapters do attempt to look at reception, albeit with no real theoretical underpinning. But the majority could more accurately be labelled ‘studies of culture’ rather than ‘cultural studies’. At first sight, then, the volume confirms the impression already given by earlier books applying cultural studies approaches in a francophone context: that French studies has an awful lot of catching up to do. However, the key to the book’s choice of methodology is revealed in the last chapter, which is also the richest. Here, Rachel Mesch refers to a specifically ‘American Cultural Studies tradition’ (p. 204), which is concerned to focus on popular culture rather than high literature and which does so by means of close semiotic readings loosely informed by Barthes’s Mythologies. And this is the position that all the essays in the volume take for granted. Understood in this way, their interest and usefulness become plainer. As both Mesch and the editors point out, what French studies can and should bring to cultural studies is a re-emphasis on ‘text’ (widely defined), counterbalancing the sociological bias of cultural studies generally and coupled with the rigour of cultural history. That is precisely what the volume achieves and where its value lies.