Spectacles of Realism: Gender, Body, Genre ed. by Margaret Cohen and Christopher Prendergast (review)

Book Reviews183 enthusiastic efforts of the journalist Julian Schmidt in Leipzig after 1846 for the new genre. With the upheavals of the Revolutionsjahr of 1848, the social conditions became so bleak that German authors appropriated the Scandinavian model as the only suitable form of aesthetic expression for the sober circumstances of the time. Bernd then concludes with brief analyses of selected works by the major German writers of Poetic Realism: Otto Ludwig, Theodor Storm, Gottfried Keller, Conrad Ferdinand Meyer, Klaus Groth, Wilhelm Raabe, and Theodor Fontane. An important theme underlying Bernd's book is a plea for a greater awareness ofthe complex interplay between the literatures of Germany and Scandinavia which has yet to be fully addressed by scholars. His achievement here is to define the cross-cultural dynamics, proving beyond question the existence of a Scandinavian Poetic Realism prior to 1848 and documenting its transmission into Germany and its influence on German authors. By exploding the myth of Poetic Realism as a peculiarly German phenomenon, Bernd has succeeded in upsetting the traditional view of German literary hegemony and uniqueness in the nineteenth century and has set the stage for a future work devoted to a closer investigation of the nature of the various culturally determined expressions of Poetic Realism. MICHAEL SCHMELZLE Yale University MARGARET COHEN and CHRISTOPHER PRENDERGAST, eds. Spectacles ofRealism: Gender, Body, Genre. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1995. 363 p.¡Spectacles of Realism: Gender, Body, Genre, the tenth volume in a series from the Social Text Collective, Cultural Politics, aims at acquainting a broad interdisciplinary audience with an analysis of political, historical, and socioeconomic questions applied to nineteenth-century French realism. Besides the informative preface by Margaret Cohen and the detailed introduction by Christopher Prendergast, who redefines the parameters of realism with its various forms of representation, relations to body, language, and social knowledge, the volume contains sixteen strongly articulated essays . Presented in chronological order, they have a broad scope which should encourage a fresh approach to French literary criticism and French cultural studies. In the preface, Margaret Cohen points out that realism in France corresponds with what can be called the invention of modernity. She shows that French realism can serve as a good example, when viewed through social, political, and cultural factors. This text succeeds in looking at French realism within the convergence of literary theory and history. Looking here means gazing. In that sense, the text implies an act ofvoyeurism on famous French novels, and illustrates Foucault's theory of the gaze in a "panoptic society." Stressed are forms of representation in literary texts, in the arts such as painting or caricatures, in popular spectacles such as wax 184Rocky Mountain Review museums. Inquiries on the meaning of looking examine the function of real spectacles: lorgnettes, binoculars or telescopes, for example, are considered in the article by Jann Matlock, called "Censoring the Realist Gaze." Hidden or open displays of the human body, often the woman's body, give subtle interpretations of French society in the nineteenth century with reactions to the medical gaze and popular viewing, from the morgue to the Musée Grévin (article written by Vanessa Schartz) and the World's Fair of 1900 with its technological realism (article penned by Rhonda Garelick). Illustrations as well known as those by Granville who favored hybrid female victims (with animal heads and human comportment) or Gavarni's prints of nonchalant beauties are used to support the theory of mirror images in situation , enhancing the social factors implied in the sexual difference. Judith Goldstein's analysis of lithographs makes a good case for displacements as seen through totemic representations. Examples of illustrations and caricatures are included in the volume, giving added significance to the specifically visual articles. Anne Higonnet draws textual meanings from visual clues. Entitled Daus L'atelier (1862), the photograph of the two seamstresses by M. de Charly, used on the cover of the book, intentionaly deceives . The seamstresses are dressed for posterity like the ladies for whom they sew. Higonnet comments also on fashion plates and "les petits métiers" to conceptualizing empirical data and enhance the start of the blurring of classes. Many of the interpretations in the essays have a...