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Reviews 223 of Blanchot and his context that would analyze the complex relationship between a writer’s work and his historical circumstances, and that would do justice to a corpus so deliberately paradoxical and self-contradictory as Blanchot’s. Buclin’s study fails to do this. Its virtues lie rather in its presentation of the post-war literary scene in Paris and of the “rapports de force” (13) that determined the landscape in which Blanchot found himself confronted with a delicate situation. The focus on the 1940s brings into relief Blanchot’s shifting political and literary positions, as he moves from right-wing journalism of the 1930s into literary criticism, and as accounts are settled in postOccupation Paris. Blanchot was not among the most compromised writers then, but he did write for a collaborationist journal, and his pre-war stances and alliances on the right were well known. Buclin explains how Blanchot, as a representative of ‘autonomie littéraire,’ had to negotiate the suspicions falling on such a position in the age of ‘engagement’espoused by Sartre and Beauvoir in Les Temps Modernes, while nonetheless vindicating this position, in part, as a way to disengage from his own previous political involvement in right-wing politics. The book gives a good sense of this dilemma and of the players involved, including the Comité national des écrivains (CNE), founded in 1943, and its journal Les Lettres françaises, which published the infamous blacklists of collaborationist writers (Blanchot was never included among them). But the readings of Blanchot’s literary criticism and fiction, such as Le trèshaut and L’arrêt de mort (1948), are unfortunately rather superficial and somewhat repetitive. In that respect, this is an informative book for anyone unfamiliar with this history, but a frustrating one for the reader familiar with Blanchot’s work. University of California, Davis Jeff Fort Cellard, Karine, et Martine-Emmanuelle Lapointe, éd. Transmission et héritages de la littérature québécoise. Montréal: PU Montréal, 2011. ISBN 978-2-7606-2276-0. Pp. 265. $34,95 Can. Cellard, Karine. Leçons de littérature: un siècle de manuels scolaires au Québec. Montréal: PU Montréal, 2011. ISBN 978-2-7606-2256-2. Pp. 387. $34,95 Can. These two texts focus on a subject of great interest to both high school and college instructors of French: they examine the history of what we teach, how we teach, and why we teach our students literature, and specifically literature from Quebec. Lucie Robert explains the original goals of literary history for both France and Quebec:“Se faisant pédagogie, voire didactique, l’histoire littéraire va devoir se raccorder à un programme de formation scolaire et s’organiser selon des niveaux d’enseignement [...] Le fondateur de la discipline au Québec, Camille Roy, est aussi le fondateur de l’École normale de l’Université Laval” (Transmission 18). Robert’s description is accurate, yet, as both these texts demonstrate, the pedagogical element is now only one out of many different purposes that the field of literary history serves. Transmission, which developed from a 2009 Université de Montréal conference, is a collection of fifteen essays that focuses on three main topics: institutions, transmissions, and descendants .“Institutions,”for example, includes essays on the changes in the definition of what constitutes a literary canon (Robert), on the question of anglo-québécois literature from the past century (Moyes), and on the development of Camille Roy’s project to nationalize French Canadian literature in the first half of the twentieth century (Doyon). Part two,“Transmissions,” in contrast, explores the changing reception of literature from Québec, including texts and movements that have been forgotten (Cambron), ignored by academics (Caumartin), or ‘ossified’ (Jubinville). The final section,“Filiations,”looks at the ways that writers in Québec today connect with their ancestors—for example, how writers produce biographies of other writers (Dion). The authors and texts studied thus cover a wide range of periods and styles.We found very little about littérature ‘migrante’ or minority voices, perhaps a reflection of literary history in Québec. The articles throughout are of a very high quality, accessible...

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