21 Scholarship in Languages Other Than English: i French Contributions

It has been a productive year in French scholarship, with an abundance of articles compensating for the scarcity of book-length studies. As always, authors on the syllabus of the nationwide competitive examinations of Agregation and CAPES receive a great deal of attention, but there is also a surprising heterogeneity of areas of research. Several neglected writers, including J. Gordon Coogler, finally receive attention. As in recent years scholarship on Southerners and ethnic literature continues to proliferate. A hiatus of research in biography is matched by a rush to print on Edith Wharton and William Gaddis, both of them on the examination syllabus, while identity politics and ethical engagement are debated in discussions of ethics and aesthetics that reflect French Americanists' growing interest in society and culture.

a. 19th-Century Literature

Volume 10 of QWERTY focuses on the syllabus authors, and particularly Wharton. Two essays are worth mentioning here. Devoting "Creative Finance: Making Money and Making Fiction in Edith Wharton's The Custom of the Country" (pp. 57–65) almost exclusively to Elmer Moffatt, the character who makes money, Claire Preston purports to demonstrate that Wharton was intensely interested in the money subject, proposing that it was for the novelist a constitutive feature of social and authorial landscapes. Opting for a more literary approach, Anne Ullmo in "The Custom of the Country entre Romantisme et Carnaval" (pp. 67–77) explores the mood of satire in Edith Wharton's novel through an examination of its shifting points of view while attempting to trace the translation of acts into aesthetic vocabulary, the writer's ultimate language.

Two additional essays on 19th-century literature attracted my attention. In "The House of the Seven Gables: une tragédie gothique" (Revue Française d'Études Américaines 83: 113–28) Marc Amfreville relies on Aristotle's Poetics and the spirit of Greek tragedy to reexamine the tragic vision that informs the text. Strangely enough, we find in this article an echo of a 1996 essay by Robert Daly on the dialectics of fate and individual freedom, "'We have really no country at all': Hawthorne's Preoccupations of History" (Arachnē 3 [1996]: 66–88), in which Daly reexamined Hawthorne's historicism. Concerned with aesthetic variation Claire Parfait's groundbreaking essay "Le statut d'Uncle Tom's Cabin à travers les variations de son paratexte" (Bulletin de la Société de Stylistique anglaise 21: 163–72) offers a perceptive analysis not only of the variations of the paratext but of its contradictions and interactions with the text as well.

The political implications of Transcendentalism continue to be a predominant concern for scholars, as suggested by Paul Carmignani's readings of Thoreau's ethical and social thought. In "Le verbe des eaux: A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers" (Profils Américains 10: 27–49) he proceeds to an interesting reappraisal of Thoreau's use of the pastoral mode. Carmignani aptly demonstrates the role of ecocriticism in his fine analysis of the river metaphor used as a defining agent in the metamorphosis of colony to republic. Redefining Thoreau's cultural heritage in "'Et in Arcadia Ego': H. D. Thoreau, un transcendentaliste méditerranéen" (Profils Américains 10: 9–25), Carmignani offers an interesting analysis of Thoreau's strategies of cultural self-definition in writing grounded in readings of the classics and Greek mythology.

b. Southerners

In his fine article "Born Again into History" (Études Faulknériennes et Naissances de Faulkner, Presses Universitaires de Rennes, pp. 113–20) Jacques Pothier reexamines Faulkner's perception of the role of history. Building from a close-reading of "Snow" studied as "an early paradigm of the process of re-reading the past," Pothier writes perceptively about three sets of texts: the "Compson Appendix," the three prologues to Requiem for a Nun, and the prelude and interlude to Big Woods. Drawing on his own previous work Pothier in "Imagery and the Making of 'The Hamlet of Snopeses and Cows'" (pp. 113–27 in William Faulkner in Venezia, ed. Rosella Mamoli Zorzi and Pia Masiero Marcolin [Marsilio]) offers a view of Faulkner's process of writing focused...