Figurations of France: Literary Nation-Building in Times of Crisis (1550–1650) by Marcus Keller (review)

Reviews 231 devait ainsi s’intituler Une mauvaise mère) et la présentation des écrits les moins connus est particulièrement utile. C’est d’ailleurs l’immense mérite de l’ouvrage que de nous livrer de longues citations tirées de livres dont certains ne sont plus lus mais qui démontrent le sens critique et la créativité de Ségur. L’Évangile d’une grand-mère ou la Bible d’une grand-mère en disent parfois bien plus que les romans. L’ouvrage de Legrain rejoint alors l’étude de Heywood, ce que n’aurait pas manqué d’apprécier la comtesse. Pennsylvania State University Bénédicte Monicat Keller, Marcus. Figurations of France: Literary Nation-Building in Times of Crisis (1550–1650). Newark: UP of Delaware, 2011. ISBN 978-1-61149-048-0. Pp. 211. $80. Many twentieth-century philosophers have explored the ways that certain‘natural’ ideas—gender, race, God—are constructed through discourse, relying on narrative devices and rhetorical tropes to gain allegiance. Keller is interested in how the idea of ‘nation’is similarly discursive. He uses the theories of Étienne Balibar to examine how French writers employ specific figures of speech to construct an ‘imaginary’ national community. Keller argues that each writer faces dilemmas in the logic of his terms; these dilemmas reveal present-day contradictions in our relationship to the nationstate . Keller begins with Du Bellay’s Défense, which defines the nation as a group sharing a common language. Through the use of horticultural metaphors, Du Bellay suggests that the French language, and thus the nation, is a product of both human and divine wills; but the trope of the‘language-plant’also means that national community depends upon the‘grafting’of foreign elements, which undermines the myth of cultural purity. Ronsard (in his Discours) and d’Aubigné (in Les tragiques) use the metaphor of family to describe the French nation during the Wars of Religion. Keller shows that d’Aubigné has the harder task, since he wishes to defend a Protestant identity while maintaining that Catholics and Protestants are all part of the same French family. For Ronsard, Catholicity defines the French family, and thus the Huguenots must recant in order to return to Mother France. But both writers have difficulty explaining how this metaphorical mother relates to God, and Keller effectively demonstrates that these overtly religious writings create the basis for a more secular definition of nationhood. Malherbe, in his Odes, tries to avoid these problems by describing France as a metaphysical ‘spirit’ that guides Louis XIII in annihilating the Protestants of La Rochelle. This figure, however, plays havoc with Malherbe’s portrait of monarchic power, since the king effectively cedes some of his authority to the ‘spirit.’ Corneille shows the danger of believing too strongly in the fiction of nationhood. In Le Cid, Rodrigue transforms his ‘blood’ from a metonymy for the aristocracy into a metonymy for the nation, but in the process he alienates Chimène. In Horace, the hero’s belief in Roman‘virtue’paradoxically leads to his estrangement from the national community. Montaigne (discussed by Keller in the middle of the book) seems to emerge as the most modern writer in the study; in describing nationhood as a series of customs, Montaigne espouses the cultural relativity and tolerance that characterize twentiethcentury ‘social construction’ theory. Each chapter stands on its own, with fine close readings of each text, but they are more like variations on a theme than a sequence building toward a synthesis. Thus the book lends itself to scholars wishing to dip into its pages to see how Keller approaches an individual author. Grinnell College (IA) David Harrison Lagrée, Marie-Clarté. “C’est moy que je peins”: figures de soi à l’automne de la Renaissance. Paris: PU de Paris-Sorbonne, 2012. ISBN 978-2-84050-774-1. Pp. 594. 24 a. “Car c’est moy que je peins”: la célèbre phrase de Montaigne est le point de départ de la réflexion sur l’imaginaire et l’histoire de l’intériorité proposée par Lagrée dans cet ouvrage captivant, qui offre au lecteur une...