Being Contemporary: French Literature, Culture and Politics Today ed. by Lia Brozgal, Sara Kippur (review)

à l’ère de l’anthropocène avec l’analyse de Laura Call sur la question du recyclage de rebuts à travers le regard cinématographique de la cinéaste Agnès Varda dans Les glaneurs et la glaneuse (2000) et la plume du romancier Jean Rolin dans La clôture (2002). En élargissant cette approche environnementale aux études françaises et francophones, cet ouvrage creuse une brèche en faveur d’une écocritique comparée. Huston-Tillotson University (TX) Anne Cirella-Urrutia Brozgal, Lia, and Sara Kippur, eds. Being Contemporary: French Literature, Culture and Politics Today. Liverpool: Liverpool UP, 2016. ISBN 978-1-78138-263-9. Pp. 411. This is a collection of essays dedicated to and engaging with the thought of Susan Rubin Suleiman. The central question that this volume asks is that of how—over twenty years after the publication of Suleiman’s Risking Who One Is: Encounters with Contemporary Art and Literature (1994)—we might understand what it means to “be contemporary.”The fact that some of the most respected scholars of French literature, art, history, and political theory have written for this volume suggests both the enduring relevance of this question and the enduring cross-disciplinary relevance of Suleiman’s work. The essays presented touch on a wide variety of subjects: trauma, memory, historicity and periodization, cultural politics, xenophobia and racism (particularly antisemitism), nationalism and national identity. As such, Being Contemporary has something to offer almost any scholar of the contemporary period in France, and a great deal to offer scholars working outside the strict temporal boundaries of that period. Indeed, as a book exploring how Suleiman’s thought continues to orient and inspire research in a number of disciplines,Being Contemporary is nothing short of excellent. As a book about the contemporary, it is, however, necessarily somewhat slanted towards particular subjects at the expense of others. Much is written about the Second World War and its legacy in Being Contemporary; much less is written about the First World War or the Algerian War and their legacies. Likewise, terrorism and immigration receive fairly little attention relative to their actual importance in French cultural and political discourse. Finally, the introduction to the volume could have said more about habitual definitions of the contemporary period, and about the range of work being done on the subject. Significant contributions to the field of contemporary literary studies by scholars like Bruno Blanckeman, Barbara Havercroft, Marc Dambre, Aline Mura-Brunel, and Warren Motte, to name just a few, surely warranted at the very least a footnote. And while it is refreshing to see contemporary French literature discussed without recourse to the habitual affirmation that it is a period defined grosso modo by the rejection of the poetics of the Nouveau Roman and Tel Quel groups, by the weakening of avant-gardist aesthetics, and by a return to novelistic norms, some reference to the importance of this narrative to the 194 FRENCH REVIEW 91.3 Reviews 195 very constitution of the notion of a “contemporary” (as opposed to “modern” or “modernist”) period in French letters would be apposite. Indeed, the editors’assertion that there is a“clear historical periodization”(4) permitting a distinction between the contemporary and the modern is perhaps too sanguine, for the French contemporary is habitually defined not in relation to a tidy post-Middle Ages modern period, but in relation to what we might call a“shallower”modern corresponding to what are already highly contested notions of modernity or modernism. These are, however, ultimately rather minor critiques that should in no way overshadow the serious scholarly work that has been done by the editors and contributors to this volume. Dartmouth College (NH) Lucas Hollister Butor, Michel. Hugo. Paris: Buchet-Chastel, 2016. ISBN 978-2-283-02885-8. Pp. 165. Romancier, poète, essayiste, traducteur, critique d’art, Butor a laissé une œuvre considérable dont ce petit livre paru quelques mois avant sa mort. Fallait-il un autre ouvrage sur Hugo alors que depuis sa disparition prolifèrent anthologies, biographies, analyses érudites et éditions critiques? D’autant plus que ce géant des lettres en irrite plus d’un: on le trouve envahissant, trop prolixe, trop moralisateur. On a...