French Contributions

Researching the lineage of but also the fractured lines and the loops that characterize American literature has become much easier this year with the publication of useful volumes and collections of essays that are the starting points for a wide-ranging examination of such topics as modernist fiction and contemporary poetry. Not surprisingly, various essays are devoted to interartistic comparisons. Some are tightly focused on William Faulkner while others are centered on the structural tensions of the fiction of Joyce Carol Oates. It is also important to note that several articles explore the fractured lines that mark modernist writing while book-length studies interrogate the lines of transmission and the element of diachrony introduced by the concept of multilayered historical backdrop in postcolonial literature.

a. 19th-Century Prose

The major offering in this category is Julien Nègre's "From Tracing to Writing: The Maps that Thoreau Copied" (NCP 44: 213–34). In this rich and brilliant essay Nègre outlines an approach to Henry David Thoreau's work that is partly devoted to an artistic comparison between the tracing of maps Thoreau made and his writing. By investigating the various maps, viewed as new ways of understanding Thoreau's complex conception of space, Nègre inspiringly fuses Thoreau's logic of appropriation of space with Jacques Rancière's conception of community as based on the sharing of time and space—which opens on an interesting focus on what Rancière termed "le partage du sensible." Nègre breaks new ground to demonstrate that for Thoreau tracing a map is not just an act of reproduction but also a gesture of appropriation. Definitely inspired by Rancière, Nègre reads Thoreau's tracings as far more than reference materials used to document his excursions since he sees them as the basis of a potentially subversive reinterpretation or rewriting of the distribution of "the sensible."

Faulkner scholars will be pleased with several significant contributions. Several essays in a special issue of Revue Romane (52, i), ed. Steen Bille Jørgensen and Hans Peter Lund, compare Faulkner and Albert Camus. What is at stake in "Appproches d'une modernité: Le questionnement sur le temps et l'humain chez Faulkner et Camus" (pp. 91–101) is Christiane Prioult's exploration of Faulkner's technique in adopting a seeming negation of temporality that leads to speculation regarding the metaphysics of time while raising questions about the conflict between individualistic values and the logic of human identity. In "Tragédie et Psychologie: Camus devant le roman de Faulkner Requiem for a Nun" (pp. 70–79) Brigitte Sändig covers similar ground when dealing with the subject of tragic humanism and discussing the way various strategies used to represent psychological and physical violence intersect in Faulkner's fiction. Related to Faulkner's rhetoric concerning violence is Eugene Kouchkine's "Faulkner and Camus face à Dostoïevski: Pourquoi souffrir?" (pp. 3–19), with a study of Requiem for a Nun foregrounding issues of suffering and identity. A different approach to Faulkner is offered in Clotilde Coquet's "Lyrisme et paysage chez Camus et Faulkner" (pp. 80–90) that considers the geography of Faulkner's Southern landscape and its conversion into fictional space. The emphasis put on the complex relation of Faulkner's literary worlds to the real places that inspired them requires reading. In "Requiem pour une nonne de Camus: Adaptation, variation ou hommage à Faulkner?" (pp. 43–60), making use of theoretical methods to attend to Faulkner's theatrical mode of writing, Virginie Lupo explores literary influences on Faulkner and his premodernity when broaching the subject of spiritual redemption for past deeds through suffering, while Faulkner's appropriation of several influences, notably that of Camus, is brought to the fore in Pierre-Louis Rey's "'Obscur à soi-même,' obscur au lecteur?" (pp. 20–30), which isolates Faulkner's view of language as a treacherous medium and discusses his following the experimental tradition and multiple points of view of European writers.

b. Criticism and Culture-Crossing Figures

Mathieu Duplay's "'We Sat in the Observation Car': La modernité et l'éthique de la distance dans My Ántonia de Willa...