Racine à l’école républicaine par Ralph Albanese (review)

Reviews 245 flourishing yet economically-embattled cinema culture than Henri Langlois, Louis Delluc, or André Bazin. Retrospectively, in light of this groundbreaking, generously documented study, it is perhaps their achievements that should be compared to hers. Johns Hopkins University (MD) Derek Schilling Literary History and Criticism edited by Marion Geiger Albanese, Ralph. Racine à l’école républicaine. Paris: L’Harmattan, 2013. ISBN 9782 -343-01839-3. Pp. 285. 29 a. Albanese explores the same question that he posed in earlier monographs on Molière, La Fontaine, and Corneille: how did the French educational system after the Revolution appropriate and nationalize a seventeenth-century writer, in this case Racine? Racine would appear to be the most difficult classical author to assimilate into “l’école républicaine,” given the tragedian’s association with monarchist and religious values, precisely the opposite of what a democratic and secular school system should inculcate.Yet Albanese shows a remarkable plasticity to Racine’s works, which can serve a variety of moral purposes depending on the particular value that the pedagogue wishes to highlight—e.g., maternal virtue (Andromaque), the dangers of autocracy (Britannicus), the ravages of unchecked passion (Phèdre), etc. Beginning with the early nineteenth century and ending with the “nouvelle critique,” Albanese discusses nearly one hundred different individuals—public intellectuals, university and lycée professors or administrators, and authors of manuels scolaires—who wrote about Racine. Within this list, he finds a diversity of views. Some promote the formal beauty of Racine’s poetry, others the psychological insight of his plays. For the left, Racine is a paragon of national grandeur; for the right, he represents the continued importance of Christianity and the primacy of the“race française.”The play that provokes the most political debate is Athalie, since it can stand for religious transcendence or fanaticism . The structure of the volume works especially well for the reader seeking the comments of a particular critic—Brunetière or Lanson, for example. However, it also promotes repetition, as many of the critics express the same views. Furthermore, the reader sometimes wants Albanese to introduce other cultural or historical material to flesh out what he calls “les enjeux socio-politiques de la tragédie classique.” For example , given the vast number of educators who glorify Andromaque as the perfect mother, it would be interesting to situate their comments within the discourse on motherhood during the Third Republic. All but one of the critics featured in the volume are men, and thus Albanese reveals the absence of women’s voices in French academic publications of the nineteenth and most of the twentieth centuries. The transformation of women’s roles in the French professoriate—at both university and high school levels—mitigates Albanese’s pessimistic conclusion about the decline of Racine within the contemporary French educational system, since this transformation has given students access to vital, new perspectives on the plays. Grinnell College (IA) David Harrison Anselmini, Julie, éd. Dumas critique. Limoges: PU de Limoges, 2013. ISBN 978-284287 -600-5. Pp. 264. 23 a. This volume publishes the proceedings of the Université de Caen’s 2012 conference on the polymorphous figure of the critic as articulated by one of France’s most prolific dramatists, novelists, and journalists. It maps the various modalities Dumas père used in his literary and theatrical criticism and foregrounds his active involvement in the theorization and practice of artistic creation, demonstrating how, both as author subject to external evaluation and as professional critic in his own right, Dumas participated in coeval debates over the value of dramatic and literary works produced in a liberalized cultural field that incorporated new media and networks of production/ distribution to reach an increasingly heterogeneous public. The growing commercialization and technological innovations that reshaped the landscape of publishing, journalism, and the stage tended to polarize reception. Dumas’s credibility has long suffered from the highly-charged partisan rhetoric that resulted. This volume provides a noteworthy scientific contribution that advances our understanding of nineteenthcentury culture by taking Dumas’s work seriously rather than rejecting it as plagiarism and piracy. Grounded in rigorous textual analysis and nuanced by historical contextualization , this four-part volume highlights the diversity and...