Histoire de la littérature française: voyage guidé dans les lettres du XIe au XXe siècle par Michel Brix (review)

Reviews 193 Danticat et Laferrière d’une part, et de Naipaul et Kincaid d’autre part: “Is writing about home a cultural obligation or an act of opportunism for the expatriate writer?” (25) et “should publicly criticizing home be necessarily viewed as an act of treason in Caribbean diasporic writing?” (26). Dans le dernier chapitre, l’auteure voit dans la figure du bossale, l’esclave né en Afrique, et la nécessité de la survie dans le système colonial, l’origine de l’individualisme littéraire de ces écrivains. Ce livre aborde, avec expertise et une liberté de ton appréciable, des questions centrales pour la littérature caribéenne et postcoloniale mais aussi pour les critiques. Il aurait été intéressant de lire une auto-analyse de l’auteure sur ces questions qui touchent aussi le critique universitaire“renégat”ou non, pris entre un système universitaire, le marché des livres littéraires et universitaires et ses communautés d’appartenance. University of South Florida, St Petersburg Martine F. Wagner BRIX, MICHEL. Histoire de la littérature française: voyage guidé dans les lettres du XIe au XXe siècle. Louvain-la-Neuve: De Boeck, 2014. ISBN 978-2-80-418930-3. Pp. 375. 19,50 a. French students at the college level rely on survey-type books to supply historical, political, and biographical information for the texts that they read in their courses. However, these surveys are often dryly presented lists of facts and definitions that seem oddly dislocated from the source materials, and frankly dreary and unmemorable to our students. Brix’s book is a welcome alternative, and one that I would urge should be purchased by all French majors and minors in the first semester of studies and used throughout their four years in advanced courses. The book comes with an activation code for the ebook version—unfortunately valid for only one year—allowing for notes in the margins, highlighting of text, and many other interactive features. While the title may suggest that this book is best suited for survey courses alone, it lends itself quite well to courses focused exclusively on one genre (like French theater or poetry), on one particular theme (the“Moi,”for example), on one literary movement, on particular authors or concepts (such as vraisemblance or mise en abîme), or even courses devoted to political, religious or social history. The genius of this book is that Brix provides threads that one can follow throughout the course of French literary history. While these threads can be examined alone within a given time period in this chronological study, taken as a whole after one finishes the book, they weave a tapestry that slowly reveals the back and forth between past and present.While chronology provides helpful guideposts, Brix is not a slave to it. Readers are constantly reminded of the bigger picture, as Brix transports us backward in time to earlier influences, and forward to how point A leads to point B. Throughout, he injects intriguing anecdotes, and fascinating tidbits that together make the authors appear like characters in a novel. The ultimate thread that Brix weaves into the book, yet leaves dangling in the end, involves the slow march through time toward a literature of the Self—with Proust as the greatest model. Brix notes the proliferation of autobiography, memoir, and“autofiction ,”wherein“il est établi que se raconter, c’est non seulement une obligation, mais c’est aussi de l’art: l’écrivain qui se respecte doit mettre en scène son MOI” (355). He leaves us with a provocative question: has this navel-gazing not left French literature bereft of a much-needed return to an other-centeredness? Brix devotes the last few pages to this question, and adds, “Pourquoi lit-on? Pourquoi la littérature existet -elle?” (353). Waxing nostalgic, the enigmatic last line invites the reader to consider that French literature needs to return to a past glory:“On aurait bien besoin,aujourd’hui, d’un nouveau Balzac. Mais si—par bonheur—il existait, qui pourrait l’apercevoir?” (355). Given recent assaults on the humanities, the question concerning the relevance of literature—and his (perhaps...