Narrations d’un nouveau siècle: romans et récits français (2001–2010) éd. par Bruno Blanckeman et Barbara Havercroft (review)

Trauerspiel—the“mourning play”—and tragedy. Recognizing the divide between the genres, and, by extension, the gulf separating the shadowy German Baroque from the brilliance of French Classicism,is of particular importance to the volume’s contributors since they will endeavor to draw out how the Trauerspiel, as a genre, idea, or configuration , resides in celebrated texts of the grand siècle, and especially in the tragedies of Corneille and Racine. The editors gesture toward the imaginary: “We suggest paying attention to things that are not written, to the mourning drama of the unfinished project” (8). Valuing what academia habitually disdains—flights of fancy, blurred chronologies,and unfinished work—the study acknowledges how deducing,surmising, and hypothesizing are elemental practices of literary scholarship. Despite the repeated evocations of the nonexistent text, each contributor is a careful and knowledgeable reader of Benjamin’s existing text and aptly draws on the defining characteristics of the Trauerspiel to illuminate its presence in Pascal (Emma Gilby and Hall Bjornstad), Corneille (Claude Haas, Timothy Hampton, Katharine Ibbett, John D. Lyons, Hélène Merlin-Kajman),and Racine (Christopher Braider,Susan Maslan,and Éric Méchoulan). Although they focus on repetitive elements—“creatureliness,”a vision that“knows no eschatology,” melancholy princes, crooked crowns, intriguers and tyrant-martyrs— the readings are inspiring and innovative; they productively upset the“myth of French national exceptionalism that classicism sustains” (96). It is a pity the volume neglects to consider works that might genuinely have constituted a French Trauerspiel, i.e., the melancholy worlds of Hardy, de Viau, Tristan L’Hermite, or Rotrou. In ignoring these authors in favor of canonical ones,the contributors replicate a vision of the seventeenth century they have condemned. If Benjamin extensively read the“minor”authors of the German baroque, why would he not also have been drawn to the French ones? Still, rather than write off the categories of the baroque and the classical as reductive nonsense, the volume, capped off by Jane O. Newman’s“Afterword,”effectively models how to draw on these divisions to overcome entrenched chauvinistic barriers and envisage valuable correspondences between them. Wellesley College (MA) Hélène Bilis Blanckeman, Bruno, et Barbara Havercroft, éd. Narrations d’un nouveau siècle: romans et récits français (2001–2010). Paris: PSN, 2013. ISBN 978-2-87854-576-0. Pp. 320. 24 a. The 2011 Cerisy colloquium on the early twenty-first-century French novel resulted in this volume of twenty-three essays contributed by academics from Europe, Canada, and the United States. Beyond the editors’prefacing overview of the contributions , the opening essay reminds readers of a generic given of the novel: its inescapable negotiation with the “real.” The essay sets up useful categories in order to measure subtle but real innovations in twenty-first-century French novelistic production: 252 FRENCH REVIEW 89.1 Reviews 253 “le rapport au réel (référentiel, historique), le rapport au réel (autobiographique, biographique) [...] et enfin le rapport aux récits antérieurs, qui aboutit peut-être à une mise en question encore plus radicale du réel et du genre”(17). Five more sections of essays offer numerous examples of these negotiations with the so-called real.A first section, “Au regard du temps,” acknowledges novels with a relationship to history, especially recent history (World War II and Algeria, for instance). But unlike the novels of the 80s and 90s that accepted these histories as orthodoxy or reference, these newer narratives interrogate history, eschewing certainty in favor of ellipsis and even invention. The section titled “L’appel de la cité” stretches its thematic designation in order to accommodate essays on issues of individual and society, of “engagement”— including a more nuanced approach to the political and social responsibilities of the writer, of national identity (for pieds-noirs, for instance), and of human relationship to an increasingly alienated natural world. “Au miroir de soi” drills down on the question of intimacy revealed in autofictions; a polemic against exhibitionism is countered by other appreciations of the transformations of the“récit de soi”as it writes its own body. “Au miroir des livres” looks at quirky and erudite works in which the mind practices encyclop...