Strands of Utopia: Spaces of Poetic Work in Twentieth-Century France by Michael G. Kelly (review)

experience allows Chapman to contribute significant insights into Roy’s fictional and autobiographical narratives, especially those that feature a school teacher. Likewise, the author’s important discussion of La Détresse et l’enchantement, in which she focuses on Roy’s identity as a colonized subject, including her sense of linguistic exclusion (also experienced in Paris), draws on the analysis of the Manitoban formation. Always attentive to the representation of the unequal power relations between languages, Roy brought to her fiction and journalistic writings a clear sympathy for allophone immigrants and native peoples, including the Inuit. As Chapman observes, in Roy’s writing, the characters most marginalized by the dominant language tend to be allophone rather than Francophone. The focus of Roy’s reflection is not primarily the marginalization of French speakers but rather the condition of being in an inferior position within a diglossic context. Chapman undertakes an important review of translation issues relating to the difficulty of conveying context when translating into English passages in which Roy strategically uses English words, phrases, or sentences to represent the problematic nature of linguistic exchange in an urban environment (as in Alexandre Chenevert, for example), and the personal alienation it often entails. In English translations, some of these are naturalized into the translated language without any indication that they were in English in the original text. Attempts, never totally successful, are sometimes made to signal this feature, using various strategies, which Chapman, acquainted with the translation theory that covers such circumstances, discusses ably. Here, a passing allusion to the practical solutions brought by translators in other contexts, for example, by the French translators of Doestoievski and Tolstoy, both of whom used French as cultural markers in their dialogues, might have offered perspective. This study, conversant with the pertinent work on postcolonial theory, merits the attention of all serious readers of Gabrielle Roy. University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign Emile J. Talbot KELLY, MICHAEL G. Strands of Utopia: Spaces of Poetic Work in Twentieth-Century France. Oxford: Legenda, 2008. ISBN 9-781-905981-14-4. Pp. x + 269. $89.50. Michael G. Kelly’s Strands of Utopia offers a wide-ranging and complex analysis of the “‘idea’ of poetry” (143) from the original perspective of “the multidimensional theoretical resource of utopia” (ix). Kelly’s perspective is informed by necessarily brief readings of numerous nineteenth- and twentieth-century French writers, with three receiving special attention: Victor Segalen, René Daumal, and Yves Bonnefoy. As Strands of Utopia intimates throughout, the poets chosen serve to exemplify and modulate Kelly’s reading of the utopian impetus in French poetry and thought, and the analytical model could very well be productively applied to any number of other poets. The introduction to Strands of Utopia offers a thorough and convincing argument for the need to read twentieth-century French poetry from the perspective of utopia, relying on, comparing, and often contrasting a vast array of writers whose work focuses on utopia (Ernst Bloch, Karl Mannheim, Martin Heidegger, Vincent Descombes, Gilles Deleuze, Félix Guattari, Paul Ricoeur, Louis Marin, and Jacques Derrida, among others). One of the great merits of the introduction is 156 FRENCH REVIEW 84.1 that the many varied theoretical perspectives on utopia are balanced with reflections by a number of twentieth-century and contemporary French poets such as Guillevic, Christian Prigent, Denis Roche, Bernard Noël, and Jacques Roubaud. Though these poets are not subject to further analysis, it is clear that their writings can just as well inform or offer new strands for the model developed in Strands of Utopia. In his introduction, Kelly also convincingly develops the threepart structure that guides the book as a whole: 1) the social space of communication ; 2) referential space; 3) textual space. Part 1 of Strands of Utopia, titled “Lieu Commun: Poetic Foundation and the Limit of Community,” is subdivided into five chapters that shift from “the question of the poetic as that of the possibility and limits of a common object” (33) and shared space, to an analysis of the work of Segalen, Daumal and Bonnefoy within which each author expresses, in his own way, the question of poetry as more a process, a pragmatics, or a...