Pleins feux sur le polar par Isabelle-Rachel Casta (review)

Reviews 215 previous lines of research, such as Nicholas Hammond’s description of ‘creative tensions’ characterizing the century. This premise is examined through the concept of the matter of mind in a sampling of the literary and cultural production of seventeenthcentury France. The introductory chapter is devoted to a very close glossing of Descartes’s Méditations. Braider makes the important point that the rational and intelligent subject at the heart of the work is nothing more than an ideal,“an abstract standard to which no actual human being could conform” (64). Having laid down this foundation, a series of works is evoked to demonstrate that Descartes’s ideal of the self-determining subject is often criticized rather than taken for granted. With his agreeable prose, Braider describes this as the“experimental exploration of serio-comic vicissitudes whose prototype is the very book in which Descartes transmitted his ideal to the world in the first place” (65). Some Poussin paintings are analyzed very sensitively and Braider detects a fusion of sensibilities that constitutes an unspoken and decidedly unscientific meditation on life’s mysteries that privileges the quotidian over cogitation. Corneille’s Médée represents a key moment in the playwright’s artistic identity for Braider, a threshold at which Corneille becomes a tragic poet through a drama in which the mind is“an expression rather than an impartial witness or judge” (33). Through the strong tragic vein that runs through his comedies, Molière is the embodiment of an experimental author and Braider interprets his work as a rejection of the Aristotelian juste milieu in favor of a mode of contrary excess. This “experimental critique of virtue” (152) paradoxically results in a restoration of normality rather than subverting normality itself. Nonetheless, a reading of Sganarelle leads Braider to furnish some unexpected, and convincing, commentary on its deep ideological implications, in what is undoubtedly the most engaging argumentation in an engaging study. Braider has an impressive scope of erudition and his localized sweeps of individuals is somewhat more convincing than the overall thread. In arguing that there was not a rigid Cartesian order in the so-called classical period, Braider lets a particularly savage cat among the pigeons and not every scholar will agree with his conclusions. However, in this wide-ranging survey, Braider underscores enough markers to reveal that there was no Cartesian consensus across contemporary society and that experimentation, at least to varying degrees, was a prominent feature. Notwithstanding any reservations about the broader contention of matters of mind, this book is a thought-provoking contribution to early modern French studies. University of Kansas Paul Scott Casta, Isabelle-Rachel. Pleins feux sur le polar. Paris: Klincksieck, 2012. ISBN 9782 -252-03868-0. Pp. 205. 19 a. This volume in the series “50 questions” offers a provocative overview of crime fiction from its nineteenth-century origins to its many manifestations today. The series format allows the author to present dozens of perspectives on the genre, but with fifty short chapters she is only able to touch upon the significance of the genre without pursuing a line of thought in depth. The volume is clearly intended as an introduction to various critical approaches to crime fiction across media. Casta presents an extensive inventory of the ways in which it has appeared in print, film, and television and in hybridization with other genres (historical fiction, spy novels, and children’s literature ). As a transnational genre it exceeds the boundaries of French literature, but that excess is central to the author’s argument. Although some of the earliest examples of crime fiction appeared in France in works by Émile Gaboriau and Ponson du Terrail, the genre has always thrived on intertextual relations without a national bias: Gaston Leroux borrowed names from Conan Doyle, Agatha Christie rendered homage to Leroux, and Maurice Leblanc created “Herlock Sholmès” as a rival for Arsène Lupin. With a narrative structure based on transgression and enigma, crime fiction lends itself to many discourses, including philosophy and politics. The narrative structure places the reader in a perpetual state of captivity. The subject of the narration (i.e., the character who commits the crime) is never clear until...