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136 LETI'ERS IN CANADA 1986 schematisation des actants au chapitre II facilite Ie reperage de trois 'spheres de valeur' dans Annibal. L'analyse des sequences de fonctions (d'apres Propp) mene it la juxtaposition d' Arlequin poli par l'amour, La Fausse Suivante, Les Fausses Confidences, et Le Triomphe de l'amour. Le 'retrecissement du lieu scenique' (p 85) dans La Surprise de l'amour conduit aune etude tres fine des deplacements (actions de suivre, fuites) des personnages de I'oeuvre en question. Pour une monographie de 136 pages, l'erudition du Sens et les signes est exemplaire. Quant au depouillement des pieces elles-memes, les exempies presentes par Jean Terrasse temoignent d'une maitrise impressionnante du corpus. D'autre part, on pourrait reprocher it l'auteur lorsqu'il affirme avec T. Kowzan 'que la semiologie explore peu ou mal Ie domaine des arts "specifiquement sceniques", comme les mouvements corporels - mimiques , gestes, attitudes' (p 106), qu'il ne tient pas compte de travaux tels que I'analyse de la gestualite dans Voix et images de la scene: essais de semiologie theatrale (Presses Universitaires de LilJe 1982) du critique marivaudien Patrice Pavis. On aurait voulu aussi une conclusion moins abrupte que I'arret soudain de I'enumeration de classements suggeres ala fin du liVle. Bien que trop schematique parfois, ce livre constitue neanmoins une application prometteuse d'une nouvelle methodologie aun corpus qui ne cesse d'attirer I'interet des specialistes du theatre du dixhuitieme siecle. Le Sens et les signes se situe au carrefour d'une nouvelle theatrologie et de !'immense vague de popularite qui caracterise actuellement Ie theatre de Marivaux en France et ailJeurs. (DAVID TROIT) David Baguley. Critical Essays on EmileZola G.K. Hall. 1<)8. us $35.00 The history of literature is replete with cases of writers who have either been overlooked, misread, or misunderstood in their lifetime. Often, neglect or hostility on the part of the critics reflected attitudes of the reading public. Zola's case is rather different in that this best-selling author - some of his novels passed the hundredth edition shortly after publication - was vilified and dismissed as a smut peddler by many in the critical establishment, while his few admirers rarely expressed their views in print. For a long time he was considered as a coarse, unsophisticated scribbler. Moreover, his involvement in a political controversy that cut deeply into the French national psyche fostered a conspiracy of silence around his monumental oeuvre long after his death. David Baguley's anthology of critical opinion on Zola spans more than a century and reminds us that not all contemporary critics were blind to his genius, showing that beyond the platitudes his work has elicited, and beneath the 'Naturalistic: documentary aspect of his text, there is scope and depth. HUMANITIES 137 Critiml Essays on Emile 20la contains abundant evidence, particularly in the articles by Barthes, Howe, Mitterand, and Butor, that myth, rather than realism, forms the essence of Zola's fiction, and that his text is 'multiply encoded.' This assessment is not a belated discovery; the 'impressionistic ' critic Jules Lemaitre stressed the epic aspect of Zola's fiction in his lifetime. Lemaitre wrote in 1884 that, 'if M. Zola's pictures are far-fetched and conceived according to a system, it is through this that they are imposing, and if they are often horrible, perhaps they are horrible with some force, some grandeur, and some poetry.' Lemaitre concluded: 'M. Zola is an epic poet and a pessimist poet.' Eighty years later Roland Barthes echoed this view: 'Zola is an epic poet, a distorter: he distorts in the direction of an illustrative truth.' The topics dealt with in this collection of articles demonstrate the breadth of Zola's mind. The analyses of aspects of his work include references to ideology, philosophy, Biblical and Freudian echoes, and feminist issues. What Philip Walker has called the theme of world destruction and renewal dominates the Rougon-Macquart series, as well as the Trois Villes and Quatre Evangiles cycles. Zola hardly omits any social, intellectual, or psychological problem perplexing his age. More profoundly than any other writer of fiction of his time he explored the 'metamorphosis' of its 'fundamental principals and symbols' which are reflected in his imagery. As Walker put it aptly, Zola's fiction is a 'vast cosmogony.' Another remarkable aspect of Zola's literary career is that it throve in an atmosphere of extreme hostility (aimed both at the author and his work). He was hounded by critics and jealous colleagues and at times even by alleged admirers. The authors of the 'Manifeste des Cinq,' a denunciation of La Terre by five young writers claiming to be his disciples, accused him ofbetraying his work, of indecency (of having an 'illness in his loins'), and of transforming his famous artistic credo, 'a comer of nature seen through a temperament,' into 'a comer of nature seen through a morbid sensory apparatus.' Yet, except for occasional bouts of depreSSion, Zola seemed unaffected by the hatred, and at times almost welcomed it. He wrote to his Dutch translator: 'only indifference kills. You have to be execrated to be loved.' Irving Howe is right to point out that Zola is not totally blameless, that his implausible scientific theories on fiction, his half-baked postulates on heredity and physiological determinism provided grist to the mill of his detractors. Yet, as Howe notes, in voicing his naive explanations Zola was grappling with the challenges of the scientific age and attempting to confront urgent problems of his time. Howe could have added that in Zola's mythiC universe, which in the final analysis embodies the essence of his art, the use of the scientific myth represented another means of explaining and ordering a world that appeared increasingly chaotic. This 138 LEITERS IN CANADA 1986 modern myth was intimately linked to the ancient ones and to the epic dimensions of 2ola's artistic imagination. (HENRY H. WEINBERG) Evelyn Hinz, editor. 'For Better or Worse': Attitudes toward Marriage in Literature. Introduction by Coral Lansbury Mosaic, University of Manitob. Press 1985. xvti, 282. $20.95, $14.95 paper It is a truth universally acknowledged that the marriage plot (in both its literary and personal senses) has long served creative writers. The marriage plot (in its social sense) has also long been served by creative writers, including those resistant to its ideology - as feminist critics have more recently pointed out in discussing, for instance, the power of the doublesuitor convention in fiction. Nineteen critics discuss this intersection of the social and the literary in 'For Better or Worse':Attitudes toward Marriage in Literature. Not surprisingly, the feminist awareness of marriage as a patriarchal design informs most of the articles, at least superficially. Having just coedited The Native in Literature, a collection growing outof the proceedings of a conference, I can attest to the dual challenge of comprehensiveness and unity posed by such undertakings. 'For Better or Worse: originally published as two consecutive issues of the journal Mosaic (and with the Notes on Contributors still, oddly, placed after each of the two parts rather than together at the end), meets at least the first of these challenges fairly well. Chronologically organized and predictably dominated by modern and contemporary fiction (including novelists of several nations, races, and sexual orientations, and works of popular as well as of high culture), the collection also contains individual articles on Chaucer, Shakespeare, seventeenth-century writers, Milton, the Victorians , George Meredith, Ibsen and his successors, and Kate Chopin. The sophistication of the analysis and of the implied audience varies. Introductory overview is more justified when placing Elena Quiroga's Algo pasa en la calle, a novel on divorce in Franco's Spain, in its historical and legal context (Phyllis Zatlin) or surveying Barbara Pym's entire oeuvre for its female types and attitudes towards singleness (Robert j. Graham), than when cursorily summarizing attitudes towards marriage in the better-known works of Henry james, Thomas Hardy, and Ford Madox Ford (Peter Buitenhuis). One might argue that the non-specialist would benefit from jan de Bruyn's overview of misogyny in the early seventeenth century and of subsequent rational arguments for more equitable values, although much of this is not new (and I was inclined not so much to deplore the excoriations as to speculate hopefully on what female irrepressibility might have been provoking them). Similarly, the large and only partially explored field of science fiction invites surveys of alternative models of the gamos (to use Patricia Monk's less emotionally and ...

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