- International Scholarship
i French Contributions: Françoise Clary
a. General
A trend toward visual art, Romanticism, and emotion is clearly marked in this year's critical production in which American scholarship is also dominated by historical and philosophical approaches. Underlying most of the essays and book-length studies under consideration in this chapter is also the desire to examine a way of writing associated with ideals of revolt, resistance, contestation, and transgression, along with a scholarly wish to enlist one's stylistic stamina in translations—as is often the case with French contributions. Globally, if the approach has often been theoretical, with a preoccupation with the linguistic and textual strategies, the intricacies of the aesthetic discourse have sparked French scholars' interest, too. Another, lighter side of innovation shows up in some essays that have ventured outside the ground of literature to explore the fields of cinema and music, making the combination of music and words the most welcome subject for a crossing over outside the realm of pure literature.
This year will also be remembered for the publication of collective works probing into the issues of race and gender as critical interest in ethnic literature and gender studies continues to increase. While in a variety of essays the notions of transgression, imagination, illness, and otherness have become an important focus for critical analyses, the intricacies of the aesthetic discourse have sparked French scholars' interest and enticed them to ponder possible analyses of an author's artistry by embracing his or her various facets from both historical and literary angles. [End Page 393]
b. Literature and History
The organizing principle behind Daniel Royot's James Fenimore Cooper: "The Last of the Mohicans" (Atlande) is a mapping of the Indian world, la nouvelle France, and the Middle Colonies through methodical scrutiny of Indian history, regionalism, environmental debates, and a probing into colonial experience that enables the reader to grasp the message of the dissenting voices denouncing the founding myth of the "noble savage," a natural man living without elaborate societal structures. Attention is also usefully drawn to the full significance of the Revolutionary war and the political philosophy of both "the Frontier" and "the Wilderness," which, as the author intimates, helped shape the construction of American identity. Central to Royot's study of The Last of the Mohicans is the perception of the frontier as a major way to reach national definition and the reimagining of nature and culture as a challenging way to reach acceptance of the other. The idea of a cognitive aesthetic correlated to geographical location as a site of memory is a key element in this study that, most interestingly, claims to outline the significance of the frontier as an organic whole and conflict as a basic element of the frontier in the novel. With a strange balance between literary analysis and historical perspectives, the author succeeds in highlighting the fruitful relationship between territory, literature, and politics. Royot insightfully shows that through Cooper's voice the frontier is gradually made to become part of a historical process by which the struggle for identity is fulfilled. Such interpretive processes of literary history bring light to the geographic descent into the past of American Indian policy and account for my singling out this book here.
The field of literary history is notorious for its heterogeneity, as illustrated by Royot and Vera Guenova. While writing from historical documents often entails turning to an academic field that combines general intellectual history and academic scholarship in the social sciences and the humanities, it may also enable the development of the imaginary fictional way of dealing with full documents. This is what the reader meets with in Royot and Guenova's Les aventuriers du Missouri: Sacagawea, Lewis et Clark, à la découverte d'un nouveau monde (Paris: Vendémiaire). In what comes very close to a travelogue, the approach to the history of the Meriwether Lewis and William Clark expedition is interestingly illustrated by the clandestine histories of the bilingual Shoshone teenage girl Sacagawea, who accompanied the Lewis and Clark...