Présences, résurgences et oublis du religieux dans les littératures française et québécoise by Gilles Dupuis, Klaus-Dieter Ertler et Alessandro Ferraro (review)

This volume brings together the proceedings of an international conference held under the same title at the University of Graz in 2014. It is the third collaboration between three important research groups in Quebec/Canadian studies, two of which are located outside Canada: the Centre de recherche interuniversitaire sur la littérature et la culture québécoises (Montreal), the Zentrum für Kanada-Studien (Graz), and the Centro di cultura canadese (Udine). The collection is divided into three roughly equal sections: ‘Présence du religieux dans les littératures de la Nouvelle-France et l’Ancien Régime’; ‘Rémanence du religieux et résurgence du sacré dans la littérature et la culture québécoises’; and ‘Représentation de la judéité et oubli du religieux dans la fiction contemporaine’. Two unusual editorial decisions orient the choice of articles: first, that the theme of religion should be taken in its longue durée, from the colonial period to the contemporary (which has the odd but by no means uninteresting consequence of bringing together Marie de l’Incarnation and Nelly Arcan within the same volume); and second, that works of Québécois literature should be considered under this light ‘in parallel’ with those of metropolitan France. If this second ambition seems somewhat arbitrary and unconvincing given that only four of the fifteen articles treat French authors, the first—at least in the context of Quebec studies—shows itself to be a promising avenue of research indeed. In a field that tends to be weighted towards the literary production of the latter half of the twentieth century, it is a salutary reminder that, for most of its history, French Canada was inseparable from its Catholicism and that the secular nationalism of the Quiet Revolution that has so over-determined its more recent literature represents a relatively recent shift in the interpretative frameworks available to writers. It is noteworthy, however, that in their discussions of religion the authors do not restrict themselves to Catholicism. The first three articles of the collection, which treat seventeenth-century texts (Klaus-Dieter Ertler on the Jesuit Relations from New France; Alessandro Ferraro on female autobiographical narrative; Nicola Gasbarro on the intercultural relations between Jesuits and indigenous peoples), all enlarge (and problematize) the notion of religious experience to encompass diverse forms of spirituality and the sacred. This etymologically ‘catholic’ approach (katholikos meaning ‘universal’, as Gilles Dupuis reminds us in his fascinating article on Jean Marcel’s Triptyque des temps perdus) is pursued in the second section of the collection, where authors as varied as Réjean Ducharme, Nerée Beauchemin, Anne Hébert, Robert Lalonde, Jean Marcel, Nelly Arcan, and Jocelyne Saucier are all examined from a religious point of view that does not simply express (or repress) the dominant ideology of the Church of Rome. The final section displaces this extension of religion, by focusing on its Jewish expression in both French and Québécois literature. Despite the disparate nature of the literary and historical documents studied, the editors’ choice of religion as a lens through which to focus their analyses pays clear dividends to the reader interested in an important aspect of Québécois literary culture.