Vision et poésie dans l’oeuvre romanesque de Sylvie Germain by Milène Moris-Stefkovic (review)

Reviews 229 and changed over time in relation to each other” (9). He justifies why he chose not to integrate the poetry collections Poèmes nègres sur des airs africains (1948), Graffiti (1952), and Névralgies (1966): it was “not possible to analyze these in terms of a relationship between anti-colonial resistance ideology and generic experimentation” (53). He explains how his argument is at the same time related to and different from the one Jonas Rano proposed in his Créolité: Léon Gontran Damas et la quête d’une identité primordiale (EUE, 2011) which envisages “Damasian Négritude as essentially transcending‘la situation noire’”(15).The first chapter,“Awakening to an Anti-colonial Poetics: The Case of Pigments,” accounts for Damas’s intense anger toward metropolitan assimilation through his anti-colonial poetics (this poetry collection dates from 1937). The second chapter analyzes and interprets Retour de Guyane (commissioned by the Musée du Trocadéro and published in 1938) as an anti-colonial essay. In the third chapter Miller investigates how Damas, through the use of the folk tale in Veillées noires (1943), subtly critiques French colonialism in Guyane.As its title suggests “Drinking to Remember: Pre-histories and Afterlives of Assimilation in Black-Label,” chapter four examines how the alcoholic narrator of this very long poem questions resistance against colonialism and recognizes its limitations. In this chronological study Miller has thus focused on four texts belonging to different genres, which indicate shifts in Damas’s conception of Négritude. While integrating close detailed textual readings to a more general theoretical framework, he guides the reader through his argument by constantly referring to what he has previously demonstrated—the subtitles in each chapter are in this regard helpful. This well-documented, clearly written, and comprehensive book will appeal to a wide range of readers: specialists and students of Damas and the Négritude movement, cultural historians, and more generally to anyone interested in colonial and post-colonial encounters.It is regrettable, however, that none of the quotations have been translated into English for the nonFrancophone reader. Two other books about Damas were published in 2014, that is, two years after his centennial birthday commemoration (which went almost unnoticed): Léon-Gontran Damas: cent ans en noir et blanc (CNRS) and Léon-Gontran Damas: poète, écrivain patrimonial et postcolonial: quels héritiers, quels héritages au seuil du XXIe siècle? (Ibis Rouge).Along with this monograph, they restore the voice of an important critic and fascinating writer, whose work deserves to be better known. University of Utah Thérèse De Raedt Moris-Stefkovic, Milène. Vision et poésie dans l’œuvre romanesque de Sylvie Germain. Paris: Champion, 2014. ISBN 978-2-7453-2790-1. Pp. 311. 55 a. In the introduction, the author maintains that, though the foundation of Germain’s writing is a “questionnement éthique” (11), the fiction writing published between the years 1985–2002 can be understood as a corpus in which there is a progression toward a sort of stripping (“dépouillement”) of writing that mirrors Germain’s own “quête spirituelle” (13) into silence. The aim of this monograph is to expose the progression in Germain’s writing through a focused analysis of associations between vision and poetry. Moris-Stefkovic divides her analysis into three sections: “Voir et savoir,” “Arrêts sur images,” and “Au seuil de l’invisible.” The first section examines early texts that offer an optique that evokes phenomenological and psychological encounters on both large and small scales through tropes of vision, particularly with regard to the ocular organs, senses, and the gaze. Moris-Stefkovic argues that, by exploiting the obsessive motif of the visual—vision in the sense of seeing and being seen—these texts operate on multiple levels in order to deliver knowledge “de soi, d’autrui et de ce qui nous échappe” (19). The second section contends that the next development is the exploration of specific images and how that exploration can extend into an expansive external“vision,”which is to say a way of seeing; through the image, the internal experience is revealed as a poetics of vision (105). The...