Roman et engagement: le laboratoire des années 1930 by Aurore Peyroles (review)

Reviews 265 emotions, she challenges Foucault’s focus on discourse at the expense of those less apprehensible elements. The numerous occurrences of the expression of loss of bodily control are signs that link text, body, and self in various works such as the Princesse de Clèves or Montaigne’s Essays. The main thrust of this study pertinently highlights the tension between coded discourse and the negotiation of a sense of self at odds with the dominant culture, but that cannot quite come to terms with another, clear identity in the context of the Ancien Régime. By being careful to acknowledge that body and self are, in this study, always mediated by a text, Peterson makes clear that literary works reveal negotiations of the self that may differ from their authors’ personal beliefs, as in Marguerite de Navarre’s Heptameron. This research, along with other recent scholarship , moves away from an overwhelmingly rationalistic approach and explores the challenging issues of suppression (and resurgence) of that which is more experiential. Each part of the book is balanced: the selection of cultural texts is as large and appropriate as the literary pieces. They are all discussed with equal sophistication and nuanced analyses, based on agreeing with, but also adding to, the viewpoints of many American and European scholars. The style is clear, straightforward, and matches the coherence of the analysis. This study has abundant and substantial commentary notes at the end of each chapter that enhance the implications of the conclusions drawn. It has a bibliography of primary and secondary sources, and a general index. This book represents a rich reading of well-known and less known texts in illuminating ways that provoke the desire to engage in further discussions, based on the originality of the connection between self, body, and text. Wichita State University (KS) Brigitte Roussel Peyroles,Aurore. Roman et engagement: le laboratoire des années 1930. Paris: Garnier, 2016. ISBN 978-2-8124-4762-4. Pp. 667. Peyroles offers a detailed analysis of politically engaged literature produced immediately before the Second World War. She focuses on works by three authors: Alfred Döblin (the November 1918 tetralogy), John Dos Passos (the U.S.A. trilogy), and Louis Aragon (Les cloches de Bâle, Les beaux quartiers, and Les voyageurs de l’impériale). Unlike the roman à thèse, which advances a particular point of view on an ideological conflict, the roman engagé of the 1930s attempts to represent conflict in its historical moment with a call for immediate political action that begins with writing. Peyroles examines this engagement from three perspectives. First, the selected authors write for a particular historical moment, responding to the struggles that shape political movements. Their writing serves as an intervention in these struggles, trying to make change happen by revealing what is taking place socially and educating others about the injustice of their condition. Second, the authors write against the discourses of the ruling classes who “engineer consent” through the manipulation of language. The authors’novels seek to dismantle the dishonest use of language and restore it to a common and transparent state.Writing against linguistic domination involves challenging the fictions promoted by the dominant class through its false narratives and escapist theatrics in the media. Third, the authors write with the reader, drawing her or him into the struggles of the time by presenting narratives as puzzles requiring attention to detail and critical thinking to reassemble the pieces and construct a whole. The reader turns into a detective investigating a myriad of evidence for satisfactory explanations of complex social interaction and in doing so participates actively in the historical moment. The act of reading thus becomes political. This final perspective on the roman engagé, which depends on the notion of Wolfgang Iser’s implied reader, undermines Peyroles’s claim that reading the text is a political act. She does not explain how a form of writing that invented itself in a particular historical context can connect with an implied reader who is by definition removed from that context. An implied reader seeks verisimilitude in how history is presented instead of truthfulness in the claims and evidence presented in the narrative. Peyroles relies...