Dumas critique éd. par Julie Anselmini (review)

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 scope of Dumas’s work as a critic and its significance. Section one lays the foundation by examining Dumas’s self-proclaimed pretensions as author, drama critic, and critic of critics. Section two looks at the critical persona he constructed. By stressing the importance of emotions and the heart, Dumas engaged directly with the public and established a pact of sincerity and complicity linking artist, critic, and audience. His use of the personal as aesthetic principle, structuring mechanism, and ethical basis for his criticism sought to legitimate his writing, the public’s taste, and the sociopolitical role of the writer. Dumas conceptualized the artist-critic as a privileged interlocutor uniquely suited to teaching and guiding the audience. Section three probes Dumas’s vision of the artist as reader, critic, and prose writer. It retraces Dumas’s exploration of the imagination, vraisemblance, and truth at a thematic and a theoretical level, analyzing his insistence that the supplementary nature of fiction renders it more efficient in touching and educating the public. Section four returns to the relationship between criticism and innutrition in order to study Dumas’s use of sources. Herein, Charles Grivel’s essay sounds the one jarring note. It begins by suggesting that the critic functions as a second 246 FRENCH REVIEW 89.1 Reviews 247 author, but rather than considering how this intriguing model might further our understanding of Dumas’s artistic project and legacy, it recycles stale commonplaces regarding Dumas’s predatory appropriation of other people’s work. These depart little from Mirecourt’s denunciations dating from the mid-1800s and add little to the field beyond another dose of vitriol. By contrast, Patricia Victorin, Christine Prevost, and Claude Schopp interrogate far more fruitfully Dumas’s self-positioning and use of sources.They show how Dumas interwove critical stance with autobiographical persona in order to posit a two-part paradigm for literary innovation that includes both imitation and emancipation. Their studies of Dumas as critic/corrector illuminate his process of artistic fertilization rather than dismissing it as misappropriation. University of Massachusetts, Dartmouth Michelle S. Cheyne Aubert, Nathalie, ed. Proust and the Visual. Cardiff: UP of Wales, 2013. ISBN 9780 -7083-2548-3. Pp. 245. 116 a. In his masterpiece À la recherche du temps perdu Proust systematically endeavored to delineate the conditions of possibility of all visibility and this particular task constitutes an integral part of both the progression of the narrator’s journey toward becoming a writer and the unfolding of the novel itself. Indeed, Proust’s unique intuition was to connect the aesthetics of the visual to the ontological aesthetics of the event of looking...