International Scholarship: French Contributions

The year 2013 is central to an era when issues of history as metaphor, memory raised to power, the African American as transcendental signifier, Jewish American characters and themes, multifaceted identities in American literature, genres and tropes, and post colonial and African literature are being addressed in conferences held by various academic disciplines. While the disputes continue over negotiating cultural identity, providing reinterpretations of the textual and cultural history of 19th-century slave narratives such as Thomas Smallwood’s, raising questions about the retrospective concept of inheritance as with the transmission of Mark Twain’s “imagined political community,” Thoreau’s interest in oriental thinkers, or mapping chains of influence in Sui Sin Far’s Chinese American letters, there might be a risk to be “haunted by some sense of loss, some urge to reclaim, to look back, even at the risk of being mutated into pillars of salt,” as writes Salman Rushdie.

Interestingly, this year appears to be concerned with embracing interdisciplinary perspectives, cultural studies, and traditional scholarship but also with the remaking of significant figures of American literature such as Thomas Pynchon, Charles Brockden Brown, Joseph Dennie, Washington Irving, Herman Melville, Philip Roth, and Edgar Allan Poe. It is also to be noted that close-reading techniques have led French scholars to focus on such binaries as politics/ethics, history/story, writing/reading, absence/presence, and drama/fiction. And yet one of the main trends in this year’s scholarship is the testing of new hypotheses. This process of reconstruction, akin to Rushdie’s “Indias of the mind,” privileges the role of imagination in the rapprochement between different contexts. Thus the seemingly contradictory literary perspectives of Shakespeare and American 19th-century writers make for a fruitful analysis of the way experience produces meaning together with the emergence of a new language whose adequacy testifies to a search for the psychological language of the self.

“Meaning,” as Algirdas Julien Greimas puts it, “is nothing but the possibility of interpreting and transcoding.” That is why in critical and literary studies the opening of new territory for a postmodern approach to American literature that would not be ensnared in the epistemological can occupy a decisive position in this year’s scholarship to prepare the reader to wander in a language terrain that remains alien. It seems to be the case with publications on Ben Marcus’s fiction writing that is said to stop all connection with its reader.

a. Renegotiating Cultural Identity in 19th-Century Literature

Ronan Ludot-Vlasak’s book-length study La réinvention de Shakespeare sur la scène littéraire américaine: 1798–1857 (PUL) offers an interesting literary reappraisal of the growth of American cultural identity in 19th-century literature along intellectual and aesthetic but also political lines. Ludot-Vlasak brings together writings by Brown, Dennie, Irving, and Melville that, cumulatively, have formed the basis for a very insightful study of how the emerging American literature has been seeking to interact with the omnipotent canons of William Shakespeare’s literary, linguistic, and aesthetic models, thereby creating new departures for budding American literary identity in the first half of the 20th century. In a year of debate about categories, this innovative textual approach to U.S. literary history offers compelling insights into 19th-century American literature as both a social and a cultural tool. In this engagingly written and well-argued study, Ludot-Vlasak resorts in particular to intertextual readings of Brown’s Wieland and Shakespeare’s Othello, King Lear, and Much Ado about Nothing to demonstrate how 19th-century American literature takes from Shakespearean dramatic imagination to raise questions about the meaning of life. This study also acutely parallels Dennie’s Portfolio or Addison and Steele’s Spectator. It dwells on the theme of Americanism in Irving’s writings and sheds light on the intertextual echoes of A Midsummer Night’s Dream in Moby-Dick, letting the reader understand that Shakespeare’s character is a possible source for Ahab’s monologue. The various parallels that are drawn help reflect the inclination of 19th-century emerging American literature to memorialize the canonical values of the...