Jules Verne: un océan tumultueux de mots et de rêves par by Fabrice Boumahdi (review)

Reviews 211 certains auteurs encore peu connus. Il aurait été fructueux de tracer de manière plus approfondie et systématique les liens qui existent entre les poètes au sujet de la question ontologique abordée. Relevons de plus le caractère arbitraire du choix des écrivains en soulignant, comme le fait d’ailleurs lui-même Bishop, que toute la poésie contemporaine traite à divers degrés des tensions ontologiques dont souffre l’individu moderne. On pourra aussi regretter l’abondance de jargon et la verbosité de l’ouvrage, observées dans le titre même, qui rendent la compréhension parfois difficile et font donc probablement obstacle à l’entreprise louable du livre de donner la parole à des auteurs méconnus. Salisbury Univeristy (MD) Aurélie Van de Wiele Boumahdi, Fabrice. Jules Verne: un océan tumultueux de mots et de rêves. Paris: Champion, 2012. ISBN 978-2-7453-2465-8. Pp. 322. 18 a. This volume is the second in a new series, “Passeurs d’idées,” which proposes to focus on non-canonical French writers who nevertheless exercise an outsize influence on the mores and collective memory of French society. The first part of the work devotes fourteen loosely connected chapters to diverse key themes of Verne’s oeuvre, padded with pages-long quotations from several works. The second part offers a chronological list of Verne’s novels and novellas, together with plot summaries and some commentary on each work. In seeking to measure the impact of Verne’s collected works, Boumahdi begins interestingly by defining them in negative terms: the novels do not articulate a political vision; the characters lack psychological depth; history is largely absent, France itself seldom features. However, these absences, Boumahdi argues, give Verne’s oeuvre a universal appeal, which he compares favorably to a more canonical French work, Madame Bovary, characterizing it as a masterwork of national literature, one that speaks to “nos âmes françaises.” This patriotic appeal notwithstanding , Boumahdi finds the charm of Flaubert’s novel limited:“Mais peut-il s’adresser au monde entier,ou plutôt l’héroïne peut-elle séduire et susciter des vocations en dehors du petit monde des prosateurs et des contempteurs de l’écriture fictionnelle?” (16– 17). The issue of presumed readership is key, and not only because Boumahdi imagines his own presumed readers as: a) exclusively French and b) not trained scholars (while downplaying Madame Bovary’s extra-Hexagonal appeal). Boumahdi posits a global audience for Verne’s tales of adventure during the second-wave colonization of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Yet no evidence is put forth to support this claim; “worldwide” readership appears limited to Europeans and Americans, the very groups who were most engaged in this wave of colonization. The“global”outlook of Verne’s works seems to rest on the variety of “exotic”places and peoples encountered by their intrepid, mostly Western heroes. In addressing Verne’s representation of these “exotic” others, Boumahdi acknowledges the flat stereotypes of Verne’s Jewish or African characters, while also noting the novelist’s tendency to echo without question the era’s predominant ideology of the mission civilisatrice. These issues would seem directly pertinent to a discussion of Verne’s role in forming the worldview of fin de siècle France. One would like to see the implications of these questions developed in greater depth, rather than dismissed with offhand comments such as “Ce n’est pas encore le ‘United Colors of Benetton’” (28). The shallowness of Jules Verne: un océan tumultueux de mots et de rêves limits its usefulness. Yet the book’s second section, “Résumé commenté,” is rather fun. It showcases Boumahdi’s strength (descriptive breadth rather than analytic depth), and it gives the reader a sense of the cumulative weight of Verne’s nearly eighty works of fiction. It may serve as an encyclopedic (or Wikipedic) reference tool. Arcadia University (PA) Kate M. Bonin Brozgal, Lia Nicole. Against Autobiography: Albert Memmi and the Production of Theory. Lincoln: UP of Nebraska, 2013. ISBN 978-0-8032-4042-1. Pp. xxvi + 223. $50. À partir du postulat selon lequel les œuvres francophones du...