Les catalogues d’expositions surréalistes à Paris, 1924-1939 par by Colette Leinman (review)

Reviews 241 Leinman, Colette. Les catalogues d’expositions surréalistes à Paris, 1924–1939. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2015. ISBN 978-90-420-3917-9. Pp. 318. 70 a. This book combines a scholarly study of the Surrealist exposition catalogue with an annex transcribing some example catalogues, some of them important to Leinman’s analysis. Ruth Amossy and Bernard Vouilloux preface this study, situating Leinman’s approach, which combines discourse analysis (with an emphasis, like Amossy, on argumentation ) with Vouilloux’s methods, also heavily inspired by linguistics and stylistics. Discourse analysis describes texts beyond the confines of the single sentence, to which linguistics often limits itself; to make sense of a text beyond the sentence, pragmatic, historical, and sociological factors must be considered. Readers will appreciate Leinman’s rigor and detailed exposition. She takes the reader through a history of the exposition catalogue, which began as a document intended for sales and management of goods, evolved toward didactic, quasi-museological purposes, and then shifted toward a medium where artists and writers could themselves make a statement about the works exhibited (Leinman situates this shift with Gustave Courbet’s 1855 exposition catalogue, containing text by the painter). The surrealist catalogue naturally completes this trajectory, abandoning the didactic and record-keeping dimensions of the catalogue in favor of the manifesto-like qualities that began emerging from Courbet’s time onward. Indeed, Leinman concludes that the surrealist catalogue is best defined as a “performance discursive à dimension manifestaire” (187). The originality of Leinman’s approach, as she states (142), is to approach these quasimanifestos , even those consisting of automatic writing, as part of a project based on argumentation (previous treatments of automatic writing tending to describe them in terms of implicit or emergent narratives). This multiplicitous, group-produced argumentation seeks to affirm the surrealists’ group identity and ideology, and to shift the audiences’ horizons of expectation. In a final chapter, Leinman explains how viewers’ expectations are shifted by this argumentation, which often borrows from the discursively malleable genre of the essay, which can ostensibly accommodate both rational explanation and subjective response. The viewers are thus encouraged through the catalogues to consider life and art as continuous rather than distinct, for instance, or to consider the work of art as an object of active viewer engagement rather than passive contemplation. Following her conclusion, Leinman includes a selection of transcribed catalogues varying in length and importance (and including one brief catalogue from a Max Jacob exposition in spite of the mutual hostility that separated Jacob and the surrealists at least as early as 1919). Typically for surrealist production, the texts range from fascinating patchworks displaying flashes of brilliance, to dull and dated automatic drivel: consistency was never among the group’s qualities. But Leinman’s annex indeed captures the compelling diversity of her corpus, and makes her book at once a reference work for approaches to the surrealist document, and a dry, but always rigorous and thoughtful contextualization of such documents. Virginia Tech Alexander Dickow Meli, Cinthia. Le livre et la chaire: les pratiques d’écriture et de publication de Bossuet. Paris: Champion, 2014. ISBN 978-2-7453-2740-6. Pp. 529. 55 a. This book approaches Bossuet’s practices in writing, preaching and occasionally publishing his sermons with a two-fold purpose. Meli seeks to restore Bossuet to a context in which authorship and publication were understood differently than in the nineteenth century, when he entered the literary canon. But she also argues that the discovery in the late 1700s of the manuscripts of 200 unpublished sermons confronted editors with dilemmas that shaped the emerging discipline of literary criticism. Meli is thus concerned with Bossuet’s sermons and their belated reception, which she views as having been shaped by the Mémoires of the bishop’s secretary Ledieu, omnipresent in this study. The first chapter argues that contemporaries regarded Bossuet more as ecclesiastic than man of letters, an identity that Ledieu perpetuated and modified (35). Chapter two assesses Bossuet’s and Ledieu’s narratives of publication, suggesting that, for Bossuet, authorship served primarily to impose his ecclesiastical authority. Chapter three examines Bossuet’s preaching career and his methods of sermon preparation as depicted by Ledieu who, Meli shows...