Teaching Seventeenth- and Eighteenth-Century French Women Writers ed. by Faith E. Beasley (review)

“teuf”(126)! Ces contes ont une morale: la langue française doit être défendue, comme elle a été défendue au temps de la Renaissance: les mots peuvent se venger “de notre indifférence et des mauvais traitements que nous lui infligeons” (137). Cet univers fantastique vient à l’aide de l’étude de la langue et de sa grammaire prouvant que celleci peut-être ludique, plus douce qu’amère. Randolph College (VA) Françoise Watts Methods and Materials edited by Sarah Jourdain Beasley, Faith E., ed. Teaching Seventeenth- and Eighteenth-Century French Women Writers. New York: MLA, 2011. ISBN 978-1-60329-096-8. Pp. xi + 379. $25. The art of conversation has been well established as a leading aesthetic value in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century France. Contributors to this volume in the MLA’s Options for Teaching series extend current conversations about the women who wrote in French during these centuries to include many of their contemporaries— writing in French and other languages—and they provide clear, concrete suggestions for bringing twenty-first-century students into these conversations as well. The first part of the collection is devoted to“Cultural and Literary Contexts”and includes essays that consider specific venues (salon, convent), genres (letters, plays, fairy tales), and topics (mother-daughter relationships, domestic violence, Marie Antoinette); essays that read women writers in the contexts of the history of emotions, the history of sexuality, landscape studies, the history of the book, and reception studies; and other essays that examine both word and image across modern disciplinary boundaries. In the second part, “Teaching Specific Texts,” which is also richly interdisciplinary, contributors read Marie de Rabutin-Chantal, marquise de Sévigné, in a tradition of personal inquiry stretching from Cicero to Jean-Jacques Rousseau,and Marie-Madeleine Pioche de la Vergne, comtesse de Lafayette, for her Cartesian philosophy and her political analysis of La Fronde. Other essays in this part highlight women’s attempts to claim, or invent, their own stories; still others underscore how reading these women writers in their original contexts brings back a forgotten plurality of voices, allowing us to hear from the Protestant diaspora created after the revocation of the Edict of Nantes, from French classical poets, and from novelists and playwrights who challenged French colonialism, slavery, and conceptions of race. The third and final part, “Teaching Specific Courses,” offers the most fully developed recommendations for teaching, as contributors explain how they have incorporated these writers into complete courses or course modules. In all cases, the strongest essays include practical strategies for the classroom, such as the specific, manageable tasks that Claire Goldstein 232 FRENCH REVIEW 87.3 Reviews 233 devises for teaching the otherwise unwieldy Madeleine de Scudéry; Harriet Stone’s intriguing use of paintings by Nicolas Poussin for teaching Lafayette’s Princesse de Clèves and by François Boucher for teaching Françoise de Graffigny’s Lettres d’une Péruvienne; and Deborah Steinberger’s simulation of a salon. Equally useful are the groupings of texts proposed by contributors, who often pair French and English writers, such as Marie-Catherine Desjardins, Madame de Villedieu, and Delarivier Manley. Suggested assignments for papers and projects, many of which involve authentic tasks for scholars, such as presenting a ‘new’ writer or preparing an edition or translation of a text, are also valuable. This masterful volume, which includes a thoughtful introduction, a substantial bibliography, and numerous cross-references, is clearly a coherent project and not simply a loose collection of essays, and it is successful in creating what editor Faith Beasley calls“a conversation between early modern culture and twenty-first-century students” (3). As is often the case, contributions are mostly from scholars working in North America. It would be useful to expand the conversation even further, but that is, perhaps, a project for another volume. DePauw University (IN) Carrie F. Klaus Mitchke, Cherie. Rêvez: le français sans frontières. Boston: Vista, 2012. ISBN 978-160576 -887-8. Pp. IEA-14 + xvii + 343. $97.20. The key descriptors for this intermediate French textbook are variety and flexibility. Rêvez offers a magazine-like presentation of attractive images as well as authentic realia from...