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Reviews 227 s’interrogeant sur l’histoire culturelle propre aux voyages ou sur les frontières parfois poreuses entre littérature et science, vérité et fiction, ethnographie et autobiographie. University of South Carolina Alexandre Bonafos Leichman, Jeffrey M. Acting Up: Staging the Subject in Enlightenment France. Lewisburg: Bucknell UP, 2016. ISBN 978-1-61148-724-4. Pp. xxiii + 261. The centrality and importance of theater in the cultural landscape of ancien régime France are familiar themes for students of French literature. But that is only part of the story, proposes Jeffrey Leichman. What has been missing, he argues, is an appreciation of the esthetic, moral, and political aspects of an actor’s status and influence. Placing his research under the rubric of performance studies, Leichman endeavors to demonstrate how acting contributed to the formation of the modern notion of the subject. This new way of conceptualizing subjectivity of individuals and their social interaction can therefore be seen as “the culmination of a long tradition of theoretical and practical exploration of stage performance in France” (162). The actor’s status and art are particularly revealing in this regard because he “embodied many of the tensions of a society whose traditional structures were increasingly unable to accommodate its new social circumstances”(xvi). Thus, in the seventeenth century, the performance and the condition of actors are symptomatic of the growing conflict between church and state. On the one hand, actors are subject to a de facto excommunication ; on the other, their prestige and influence produce“the glaring contradiction between the persecution of theater and the highly theatrical mode of preaching that made the pulpit into a competitor in the growing entertainment market” (12). What was at issue was the sincerity of the performance and its power of seduction—themes that became particularly acute and controversial in the following century as theater grew ever more popular and—with the creation of new genres—more emotionally charged. The new comédie larmoyante, reflecting a changing society, announced “a revolution in the hierarchy of values that has dominated French theater until this time” (41). The philosophes were inevitably drawn into the debates surrounding the stage. Rousseau was concerned about the seductive danger theater posed for his beloved Geneva. He was especially troubled by the potential harm actresses could inflict on male spectators and denounced “the perverse effects of performance on the natural gender divisions that guarantee both personal and public virtue” (79). Rétif de la Bretonne took Rousseau’s misogyny one step further and called for a “thorough debasement of the actress”in an effort to“save the vulnerable men in the audience, and thus masculine virtue of society as a whole”(143). Diderot’s concept of the drame gave theater a political purpose, an idea further exploited by Beaumarchais who “defends a dramatic conception that always engages the social order” (148). The end of the ancien régime marks the emergence of the modern subject “as a self-authenticating person released from political and religious precedents,”a subject for whom“acting is always‘acting up,’ an infraction against the established order” (163). Of course, in the twentieth century the modern subject did not fare as well as a participant in the theater of political indoctrination. In this regard, Leichman’s insightful study of the past could also be read as an invitation to reflect on present-day political uses of theatrical performance. Ohio State University, emeritus Karlis Racevskis Pears, Pamela A. Front Cover Iconography and Algerian Women’s Writing: Heuristic Implications of the Recto-Verso Effect. Lanham: Lexington, 2015. ISBN 978-0-73919836 -0. Pp. 177. Cet ouvrage passionnant et original se penche sur le rôle que les procédés paratextuels (illustration de couverture, jaquette, bandeau, description promotionnelle, indications biographiques, etc.) jouent dans l’interprétation des œuvres produites par des écrivaines algériennes, d’origine algérienne ou ayant un lien particulier avec l’Algérie. En se basant sur le travail de Jonathan Gray et de Gérard Genette, Pears montre comment le paratexte constitue un sas d’entrée sur l’œuvre qui colore dès le premier abord l’appréhension du texte par le lecteur...

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