Apollinaire: le renouvellement de l’écriture poétique du XXe siècle by Mario Richter (review)

and, as the ideal student of life must undergo a gradual spiritual conversion to remember man’s natural state.Likewise,Rousseau himself tries to reawaken his Vincennes epiphany concerning la bonté naturelle through the act of writing. Les confessions represents a similar exercise: exposing how man’s naturally virtuous nature can be subverted through his relationship to the world. Here, too, the act of remembrance through resuscitation is equally important. Replete with Latinate terms and detailed phonemic analysis, this impressive essay is intended for an audience with a very specialized knowledge of Rousseau’s work. Regardless, it is a colossal contribution to Rousseau studies. Christopher Newport University (VA) Michael J. Mulryan Richter, Mario. Apollinaire: le renouvellement de l’écriture poétique du XXe siècle. Paris: Garnier, 2014. ISBN 978-2-8124-2045-0. Pp. 362. 39 a. This book collects nearly forty years of scholarship on Apollinaire’s poetry. As do many scholars of his generation, Richter presents a series of scrupulous and often insightful micro-readings of poems by Apollinaire. Richter’s enterprise, however, shows more courage than others, attempting readings of challenging and apparently opaque passages often assumed to be aleatory.For instance,Richter attacks Apollinaire’s most enigmatic calligrammes,“Lettre-Océan”and“Loin du pigeonnier”in two exhaustive studies which are a highlight of his collection. In his study of “Lettre-Océan” Richter lends particular significance to the poem’s introductory statement,“je traverse la ville nez en avant et je la coupe en 2.”He eventually extrapolates from this statement and from other details of “Lettre-Océan” that the poem as a whole is structured as a “unité divisée en deux” or “unité double,” which Richter associates with the sun, according to him a central emblem in Apollinaire’s work (102–03, 138–39). While many details of Richter’s reading of this poem are as intriguing as they are subtle, his observation of the poem’s structure ultimately fails to yield substantial keys to significance of the poet’s work, because Richter’s “unité double” is described as emblematic of a series of extremely vague and confusing dualities (139). On the one hand, Richter’s subtle thought sometimes leads him to excessively tenuous ground—and he admits as much on at least one occasion (119). On the other, as in the case of his conclusions regarding “Lettre-Océan,” Richter often fails to draw solid broader conclusions from his micro-readings. Emblematic of this problem is the unifying figure to which Richter returns again and again to tie his readings together, that of Orpheus. For Richter, Apollinaire’s texts are “guidés par une idée centrale et unificatrice,” that of a “conception orphique du monde”according to which the artist is an exceptional being uniquely able to create what Apollinaire calls “nouvelles joies” (9). But this “conception of the world”(evidently an exaggeration, given the conceptually hollow nature of this notion 234 FRENCH REVIEW 89.4 Reviews 235 as Richter deploys it) is never discussed at any length, and is generally mentioned as though it went nearly without saying; its connections to, or difference from past or present notions of artistic genius is unfortunately never discussed. Readers will appreciate that Richter devotes his close readings to neglected texts, and particularly to the war poems of Calligrammes, which is a rare case in Apollinaire scholarship (only two of the book’s readings are devoted to texts from Alcools). Several literary historical excursions (on Ardengo Soffici, de Chirico and Remy de Gourmont in relation to Apollinaire) form a welcome appendix. Readers will certainly delight in Richter’s capacity for detecting the most subtle and interesting textual details. But his difficulty connecting to broader theoretical or ideological issues makes the stakes of his readings often unclear, a disconnect symptomatic of unfortunate, longstanding trends in Apollinaire studies. Virginia Tech Alexander Dickow Siess, Jürgen, Matthijs Engelberts, and Angela Moorjani, eds. Beckett in the Cultural Field/Beckett dans le champ culturel.Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2013. ISBN 97890 -420-3776-2. Pp. 282. $96. While each year’s appearance of Samuel Beckett Today/Aujourd’hui marks the series as one of the consistently most valuable forums...