French Contributions

This year’s work is as ample as last year’s. Consequently, this chapter offers only a selection of books and articles published during these two years. Not surprisingly, some trends persist, such as a continuing interest in 20th- and 19th-century fiction, with books and collections on Vladimir Nabokov, Philip Roth, Ernest Hemingway, and William Faulkner, among others, while scholarly interest in Edgar Allan Poe wanes, with only a translation and a single article published this year. A cultural dictionary of the United States edited by Daniel Royot deserves mention, since it illustrates the turn of French scholarship to history, ethnicity, gender, and ecological studies. As usual, Southern writers reap a plentiful harvest, with essays on William Gilmore Simms, William Goyen, Walker Percy, Ellen Glasgow, Eudora Welty, Carson McCullers, Flannery O’Connor, and Bobbie Ann Mason.

A new line of inquiry seems to be arising, too, that questions the act of critical interpretation of the literary text and poses the problem of intelligibility. There is, in numerous essays, a claim that the act of interpretation engenders an interpretative remainder—constitutive of the text’s literariness—that is inaccessible to critical approaches. A similar line of inquiry is to be observed in articles devoted to translations. The main idea developed in these essays is that in translation, just as in interpretation, what remains untranslatable is at bottom the only thing to translate. Both lines of inquiry emphasize the fact that the literary text may be dissociated from the act of reading along with the assumption that the language we think of as our own is borrowed from others and that our words are caught up in a discourse that defines our social being.

A. 20th century

Vladimir Nabokov scholars will be pleased with Didier Machu’s Lolita ou le Tyran Confondu (PUL, 2010), a broad study of 443 pages that provides a rare insight into the European narrator Humbert Humbert’s attraction to the 12-year-old Lolita, “the loveliest nymphet.” Machu offers an innovative critical interpretation of a multilayered text with an artistic turn that reduces the distance between the literary text and its cultural context. Opting for complementary perspectives on Lolita’s self-portrait, Machu focuses on the opposition between the metaphor of the deadly demon and that of the fair angel, offering thereby an overview of the attractive surface of adolescent demands and dreams concealing the philistine vulgarity of contemporary life. Moreover, beyond an exploration of the cinematic aspects of the frame and the implicit meanings of subtexts, Machu examines the significance of the body language and captures the skillful linguistic wordplay in the novel, which enables him to deconstruct clichés and view Humbert as a poet. This approach is innovative because it moves from binaries (man/woman, teenager/adult) to a form of hybridity where masculinity and femininity are brought together.

Roth enthusiasts will welcome Philip Roth: American Pastoral (Atlande). In this substantial book, Patrick Badonnel, Derek Parker Royal, and Daniel Royot provide a carefully annotated and fully documented study in which knowledge is introduced through complementary points of view that allow for a fusion of historical, sociological, cultural, aesthetic, philosophical, and psychoanalytical elements. In the first section (pp. 13–77), devoted to the background of Roth’s novel, Royot proceeds to a comprehensive reconstruction of the cultural history that makes up the context of the novel and sheds valuable light on the view of nature as the vehicle of thought, the shift from natural history to supernatural history, and the emergence of heroic figures. After embracing cogent perspectives on U.S. sociological and racial history with a focus on Jewish culture, Royot ends up highlighting the disjunctive revelation of the novelist’s self whose vision and consciousness cross the border between history and fiction, recollection and aesthetic invention. Royal’s second section (pp. 81–109) consists of a contextual overview that considers the significance of Sabbath’s Theater as well as a stimulating exploration of such thematic strands as the case against assimilation with a focus on a contemporary spirit of Jewish self-examination and identity. In the third section (pp. 113–79...