Postcolonial Hospitality: The Immigrant as Guest (review)

Book Reviews Yves Tadié and an illuminating introduction, "Proust 2000-Sketches for a Profile," by KoIb and Mortimer, this edition provides readers less with the binary indicated in the book's subtitle than with new visions (of the potential for Proust studies in a new century) through many modes of revisioning , reinscribing, and rearticulating thanks to previous research undertaken on Proust. Looking back in order better to look forward, the conference organizers and editors selected a wide array of contributors from the Proustian critical spectrum. The nineteen essays assembled here are then situated within four organizational sections. In section 1, "Writing the Recherche" six authors examine a range of issues and methodologies: Luc Fraisse on Philip Kolb's role in discovering sources on the genesis, construction and meaning of Proust's major work; William C. Carter on Proust's hesitations when faced with the novel as genre; Christine M. Cano on the role that Proust's death played in implicitly imposing editorial decisions on the final volumes of the Recherche; Anthony R. Pugh on questions about another ending, that of Du côté de chez Swann; Nathalie Mauriac Dyer on editorial questions about the "Séjour à Venise" episode; and Alberto Beretta Anguissola reconsidering his earlier interpretation of Proust's distance from the Dreyfus Affair in the Recherche. Section 2, "The Knowledge of Words," shifts the focus to a range of stylistic and thematic reflections, on memory (Geneviève Henrot), musicality and dispersion (Christie McDonald), expression and translation of possible allusions (Antoine Compagnon), Gilberte's gesture in text, comics, and film (Elizabeth Ladenson), eroticism (Volker Roloff), and the problematics of cruising (Lawrence R. Schehr). The third section, "The Words of Art," broadens the critical attention toward issues of aesthetics from different perspectives: Proust's writing and art nouveau (Françoise Leriche), Proust and Ruskin (Diane R. Leonard, Sara Danius), artistic and photographic models for Elstir's portrait of Miss Sacripant (Kazuyoshi Yoshikawa), and song as politics (Jérôme Cornette). As is evident from the preceding lists, this volume fairly explodes with scholarly enrichment and insightful critical analyses. The final section, "Re-Writing the Recherche" consists of only two essays, but both close the volume with brio. Joshua Gidding recasts as hypertext the supposed difficulties in the elaborate editorial apparatus of Jean-Yves Tadié's edition of the Recherche: "The experience of reading through a Proustian simile, analogy, or mnemonic epiphany can be likened to following a multimedia hyperlink" (272). Gidding explores such links with three well chosen examples (Proust's engagement with Ruskin, Bergotte as "reader" of Vermeer, and Proust's revision of the Bergotte passage on the day before his death) to argue for the possibilities for better understanding reading and textuality within (and thanks to) the age of the Internet. Completing this volume is Roger Shattuck's brilliantly conceived pastiche of a meeting between two editors and a vice-president of the fictional publisher Knoll Books and two experts on Proust, a literary journalist and Columbia University professor. The topic of debate-a proposal to produce a 700 page, "manageable" edition of the Recherche-AXovts Shattuck not only to depict clashes between warring interests and critical views, but also to reflect on the still burning topics of betrayal of the Proustian corpus versus creative tributes to his literary achievements. In sum, Professors Mortimer and KoIb, as well as the UIUC institutional resources, are to be congratulated for work well done and especially for furnishing readers, teachers and students of Proust's œuvre the possibility of participating, if only at a textual remove, in the exceptional rencontre celebrated and enunciated in this volume. Charles J. Stivale Wayne State University Mireille Rosello. Postcolonial Hospitality: The Immigrant as Guest. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2001. Pp. ix + 211. Since the publication of Tahar Ben Jelloun's Hospitalité française in 1984, the term "hospitality " has gained a wide currency in French cultural and intellectual life. A seemingly outmoded Vol. XLIV, No. 2 99 L'Esprit Créateur notion, as Ben Jelloun noted at the time, hospitality has lately proven crucial to a diverse set of writings on pressing issues of race, community, immigration, and integration. The recent fortunes of the idea...