French Studies in and for the Twenty-First Century (review)

Philippe Lane and Michael Worton’s volume, with two forewords, twenty-three chapters, and two appendices, does a remarkable (and uniformly excellent) job of presenting both the impressive strengths that currently characterize French Studies in the UK, and the particular challenges the field now faces. The contributors collectively provide a history of the field’s intellectual and sociological development from the late nineteenth century to the present day, and a survey of its current demographics, its topography, and its shifting borders. Many of the contributions, in their rhetorical framing as well as their explicit statements, reveal a good deal about the contours of what is frequently characterized as the present moment of crisis — one that extends in some ways to the entire enterprise of higher education, and in other ways is specific to the project of studying cultures and languages other than English. The volume makes it clear how difficult it has become to assert that members of a society have a right to expect from their state the provision of a rich and diversified set of educational opportunities appropriate to people of all ages and interests, and to contend that a robust provision of education should be part of any well-functioning commonwealth. Also clear throughout the volume are the ways in which governmental policy as well as an array of cultural attitudes have made it difficult (and therefore all the more urgent) to assert the value of being competent in more than one language, and to insist that linguistic competence and cultural competence necessarily go together. The impact of governmental policy on higher education also makes itself felt throughout the volume in the frequent references to the Research Assessment Exercise (RAE) and Research Excellence Framework (REF), which undeniably shape how individual educators and researchers think about and experience their different institutional roles as well as the evolution of their intellectual interests. A study of the impact of events and policies such as the RAE and the REF on a field such as French studies was doubtless beyond the scope of Lane and Worton’s volume, but evidence of that impact is everywhere to be seen or felt in it: in debates about how teaching and research should interact in institutions of higher education, in concerns about the instrumentalization of language learning, in evidence of the competition for scarce resources that risks pitting one language faculty against another, or modernists against those who study earlier periods, or formally inclined literary scholarship against culturalist approaches, or in the way curricular priorities come to be reshaped in response to non-intellectual factors; but also, more positively, in a number of accounts of the establishment of ongoing, vibrant, multi-institutional and transnational research networks, in accounts of the establishment of new journals to help disseminate work in newer areas of inquiry, and in descriptions of the fascinating research of all kinds that is currently under way. In short, this is an exceedingly helpful volume for thinking about the perplexities, but also the potential, of the current moment in the field of French studies.