Passages et ancrages en France: dictionnaire des écrivains migrants de langue française (1981–2011) ed. by Ursula Mathis-Moser, Birgit Mertz-Baumgartner (review)

emergence of the figure of the poet or creative artist, charged with the task of inventing forms that throw light on our connection to the world. The section “Réalités du roman” sketches the history of the novel from the medieval romanz to the twentiethcentury Nouveau Roman, with an emphasis on the relation between the individual subject and the continuous time of history.“Notes pour une poétique du roman”uses narrative examples as a springboard for a reflection on the novelist’s subject matter, the shaping of temporal experience, and the novel’s ethical focus on the individual. Lang also describes the syntactic techniques developed in his own fiction to create a sense of accelerated narrative time. The book concludes with a series of polemics aimed at several targets: the critical relegation of the novel to the realm of the non-referential and the false (a position that Lang identifies,surprisingly,with the narratology of Dorrit Cohn); the infatuation with the first-person singular as the source of authenticity; the fashion for‘autofiction’; and the rejection of the novel by contemporary authors (here Lang engages thoughtfully with Annie Ernaux’s denunciation of fiction). Lang reviews theories of fiction with a light touch, providing not an exhaustive overview but rather a novelist’s appreciation for the insights of Paul Ricœur and Jean-Marie Schaeffer. If he tends to elide the distinction between narrative, fiction, and literature, this is because he refuses to classify the literary field in terms of fiction and non-fiction (strikingly, his examples of quintessential narrative situations tend to be drawn from real events, such as the 9/11 attacks). Particularly thought-provoking is the book’s argument on narrative and subjectivity, which contrasts the contemporary ideology of the authorial subject with the novel’s creation of unpredictable and uncontrollable moments and movements of subjectification (161). Délit de fiction elucidates an important phenomenon in contemporary French culture,and offers a compelling challenge to reductive understandings of fiction. Lang has given us a refreshing contribution to the enduring debate on the future of the novel. University of Chicago Alison James Mathis-Moser, Ursula, et Birgit Mertz-Baumgartner, éd. Passages et ancrages en France: dictionnaire des écrivains migrants de langue française (1981–2011). Paris: Champion, 2012. ISBN 978-2-7453-2400-9. Pp. 968. 160 a. This illuminating text presents nearly three hundred entries evoking the works of “écrivains migrants” from more than fifty countries who have impacted the literary scene in France between 1981 and 2011, including such well known authors as Anne Hébert, Nancy Huston, Albert Memmi, and Jean Métellus, and such lesser known authors as Ghania Hammadou, Rodica Iulian, Elizabeth Tchoungui, and Joaquim Vital. As Mathis-Moser and Mertz-Baumgartner observe in their introduction, a primary aim of the dictionary is to examine“des phénomènes de la mondialisation et de la migration qui marquent l’époque actuelle et influencent profondément le champ 272 FRENCH REVIEW 87.3 Reviews 273 littéraire français” (7). Charles Bonn, Jacques Chevrier, Dominique Combe, Paul Dirkx, Susanne Gehrmann, Pierre Halen, and Julia Pröll, along with the two editors, were responsible for the introduction to and entries within regions, such as “Europe/ Pays francophones”and“Les Afriques/Le Maghreb,”and more than 150 literary experts contributed to this enterprise. The objective is to illustrate the extent to which “tout exil et toute (im-)migration” can serve as “un catalyseur de la création littéraire” and, concomitantly, to show how these individual acts of creation have impacted “non seulement le champ littéraire franco-parisien mais aussi la représentation de la nation” (8). According to editorial guidelines, authors could not have been born in France or to French parents living outside of French national territory, they must have emigrated as young adults or older, and the experience of living in France must have clearly influenced their work in some way. These writers are considered either as “figures d’ancrage”or as“figures de passage,”depending on whether they settled definitively in France or whether they later moved to another country. Each entry is constructed in similar fashion, beginning with biographical...