Chanson de geste et réécritures by Bernard Guidot (review)

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 “construction around or in respect of” (36) the potential impossibility of a common space for “the accession of a subject to speech” (68). Part 2, titled “Haut Lieu: (Dis)Placing the Scene of the Poetic Experience,” situates the poetic on the second axis of the “utopian dynamic” (110): the question of the referential space or scene of (poetic) experience and the potential for poetry to initiate new sites or “geographies [. . .] from which a poetic speech can be imagined as having yet to report” (112), an image that is rendered more pithily as the potential for poetry to conflate the static “lieu” with a dynamic “voie” (126–27). Similarly, in the case of Kelly’s reading of Bonnefoy, the poetic is said to present “the ongoing work of the utopian dynamic [. . .] rather than a writing of utopia achieved” (161). Part 3, titled “Non Lieu: Formative and Transformational Attributes of Poetic Textuality,” traces the third axis of the utopian dynamic: textual space, where the text is producer of its own space at odds yet bound to pre-existing referentiality—thus a form of non-space or non lieu. Kelly argues this non lieu is also the space in which the “utopian dynamic operates” (185) again to give new form or enchantment to the subject’s accession to speech and to human experience in an ever more disenchanted world. As the title of Kelly’s book indicates well, Strands of Utopia is not meant to dwell on any one writer, reading or ideology, but to present the varying strands of the utopian dynamic at work in a great many writers. As such, Strands of Utopia is an important resource that should open up new means of addressing the ever-changing “‘idea’ of poetry.” Wellesley College (MA) James Petterson GUIDOT, BERNARD. Chanson de geste et réécritures. Medievalia 68. Orléans: Paradigme, 2008. ISBN 978-2-86878-275-5. Pp. 438. 45 a. Bernard Guidot is one of the most prolific and renowned scholars of the chanson de geste working today. In this volume, he has gathered twenty-five essays on the Old French epic and its transformations through the ages. Although all of the articles were published previously (in journals, the proceedings of international congresses and specialized colloquia, and Mélanges), this collection is a remarkably coherent work that traces the author’s principal avenues of research between 1984 and 2001. Recurring themes include the crusading spirit that permeates medieval epic production, the relationship between the chansons de geste Reviews 157 and history, the elaboration of cycles, and processes of adaptation and renewal (Avant-propos 1). The book is divided into six complementary sections: “Monde chrétien et monde sarrasin,” “Familles et Cycles,” “Regard et points de vue,” “Imaginaire et illusion,” “Fantaisie et humour,” and “Réécritures.” Two-thirds of the articles are devoted to the Guillaume and Lorraine cycles, with particular attention to Aliscans, the Siège de Barbastre, Garin le Lorrain, and Gerbert de Metz. Also prominent is the song of Renaut de Montauban (or the Quatre Fils Aymon) in its medieval and modern versions. One of Guidot’s major contributions to the study of Old French epic is...