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author they had thought they knew, Mérimée’s jarring narrative revelations occasion a “second look” and a reevaluation of “clues” (94). Although Cropper sets out to shed light on Mérimée through the lens of the hoax, his article is a particularly worthy contribution to the collection because of the applicability of its analysis to literary hoaxes in general, which question conventional values and literature on a larger scale. Another strong essay, by Nora Cottille-Foley, addresses Marie NDiaye’s claim that her writing was ‘singé’ by Marie Darrieussecq. Much has been written in recent years about Darrieussecq’s alleged plagiarism of Camille Laurens, and a return to the earlier accusation provides a welcome broadening of perspective. While Cottille-Foley is careful to insist that her investigation is not intended to judge whether or not a plagiarism has occurred, her examples tend to highlight the differences between Darrieussecq’s work and NDiaye’s. The Darrieussecq case has attracted considerable media attention and scandal, and it is in turning to these phenomena that the article is particularly edifying. Opinion pieces have attacked both NDiaye and Laurens for making frivolous accusations, an ire that Cottille-Foley reads as symptomatic of a larger media aversion to considering literature’s production. Focusing on texts’ relationship to what precedes them, she argues, brings up the gritty details of writing, thereby undercutting the “universal ,” “timeless,” “transcendental” qualities often ascribed to high art (131). By analyzing media responses to plagiarism, Cottille-Foley advances our understanding of popular discourse on originality, as does Stealing the Fire in its entirety. Be it in Awa C. Sarr’s essay on the importance of the African literature’s relationship to French institutions in understanding cases of African plagiarism or in Trae DeLellis’s study of Irma Vep (“a film about a film crew remaking yet another film” [143]), these texts redefine authenticity, and may go so far as to suggest that the accusation of plagiarism is as fit a topic for study as the act. Columbia University (NY) Andrew Branch DEMAULES, MIREILLE. La corne et l’ivoire: étude sur le récit de rêve dans la littérature romanesque des XIIe et XIIIe siècles. Paris: Champion, 2010. ISBN 978-2-7453-2101-5. Pp. 707. 125 a. Dreams are a frequent if enigmatic fact of medieval romance, found in nearly every type of narrative from the most philosophical to the most marvelous. What these dreams mean in terms of the formal structure of the work in which they appear , and to our understanding of the character who does the dreaming, requires meticulous interpretative work, which Demaules’s exhaustive study provides. Because there is no dearth of dreams in medieval French romance, Demaules examines a representative sampling chiefly in Old French (including, among others, the Lancelot-Graal cycle, Cligès, Bel Inconnu, Roman de Brut and the Roman de la Rose), but also in Occitan (Flamenca). Demaules’s study stems from a paradox upon which she insists: dreams, with their enigmatic focus on individual subjectivity , appear within a literary world that provides no psychological explanation for the behavior of the characters who people the universe of the literary work. As one might imagine, psychoanalysis provides the hermeneutic touchstone for her analysis, and particularly Freud’s Interpretation of Dreams. Happily, Demaules Reviews 1165 focuses less on the application of psychoanalysis to literature, or the psychoanalytical interpretation of the characters, than on the poetics of dreams: “L’écriture du rêve se laisse concevoir comme le miroir grossissant de l’activité créatrice et fantasmatique de l’écrivain” (19). The author begins with a formal, rhetorical study of the composition of dreams, and then, over the course of four chapters, presents a diachronic examination of the literary motif of the dream in the romans antiques and courtly romance . She focuses on the overarching theme of dream in terms of truth or falsehood: first, associated with myth; second, as religious truth; third, on interpreters and interpretation; and finally, as courtly truths, centering on interpersonal relations and family conflicts. She concludes with a reading of the Roman de la Rose as an innovative (Guillaume de Lorris) and ultimately ironic (Jean de...

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