Fictions d’histoire littéraire ed. by Jean-Louis Jeannelle (review)

on the compulsive one-to-one correspondence with which many generations associated the form. Freed from the strictures of direct correspondence, modern allegory becomes “a form that allows literary texts to engage with abstract systems, or fragments of abstract systems, so as to generate meanings that bring us into contact with these systems” (23). Thus understood, allegory becomes structurally analogous to the method of the via negativa, in that both become productive means of expressing the unsayable, of finding meaning in what in itself remains, as it were, unnamable. While Uhlmann most explicitly tackles these two paths toward understanding Beckett, many of the volume’s remaining essays might be called implicit examples of what Uhlmann calls “negative allegory” (25), or the production of meaning out of the apparent sign of its absence. Uhlmann’s formulation is remarkable , as such apparent absence of meaning remains, after all, the defining hermeneutic difficulty of Beckett’s work, still so opaque after decades of furious scholarship. And so we have here, to mention the volume’s most provoking instances , James Knowlson’s account of Beckett’s lifelong fascination with seventeenth -century Dutch painting, John Pilling’s eye-opening study of Beckett’s relationship to the fairy tale tradition, Dirk Van Hulle’s article on the structure of chiasmus throughout Beckett, and Angela Moorjani’s wonderful study of the role played by André Gide in shaping Beckett’s fiction of the 1930s. These are highly original essays by some of Beckett’s most formidable critics, unpacking many facets of Beckett’s work as yet unrecognized in existing scholarship. As the journal reflects on its origins, it also, in these essays, gestures toward new and challenging roads yet to be taken in the world of Beckett studies. This volume’s promise of “where never before” comes at precisely the right time, just as the field seemed as if it might be running out of new things to say. Emory University (GA) Jacob Hovind JEANNELLE, JEAN-LOUIS, éd. Fictions d’histoire littéraire. Rennes: PU de Rennes, 2009. ISBN 978-2-7535-0747-0. Pp. 303. 18 a. Begun as a proposal at the Sorbonne in 2004 by Antoine Compagnon for a literary history composed by fiction writers, the project of this volume involves seventeen contributors who posit fiction writing as questioning literary history. Their contributions are organized under four major headings: authorial fictions, critical fictions, “microfictions,” and genre variations. In addition, Jeannelle provides contexts for their essays in the preface with his formulation of the large questions at stake in this metamorphosis of the quarrel of the Ancients and the Moderns. The afterword by Michel Murat is also noteworthy for tracing how fiction theoretically accomplishes modifications to literary history. Four essays comprise the section on authorial fictions. Most interesting is Marie Blaise in her portrayal of Mallarmé’s “crise de Tournon” as “l’une des grandes fictions littéraires du XXe siècle” (46). This “hagiographie sans Dieu” (46) of Mallarmé’s celebrated intellectual moment occurs through his use of a Romantic text ethos composing the author’s personality through a psychological crisis. In turn, Jean-François Jeandillou argues for instating the poetess Clotilde de Surville as a fifteenth-century author instead of the Marquis de Surville who as a late editor Reviews 951 of her work was wrongly credited as author of her poetry. Dominique Rabaté adds a broad-brushed overview repeating literary history as hagiography and its desacralization by subversive writers while Christine Baron, recalling the Barthes-Picard debates as symptomatic of the Ancients-Moderns confrontation, looks at cross-cultural writings representative of the stance toward a history not belonging to the writers sensing themselves trapped by it. Likewise, four essays compose the division on critical fictions. Mathilde Bombart focuses on Furetière’s case for allegory as social commentary, Larry Norman on how the English imported and varied the Quarrel of the Ancients and the Moderns in Swift’s Battle of the Books, Marielle Macé on Sartre’s arguments against the social existence of literature , and Claude Coste on how Chevillard’s novel L’œuvre posthume de Thomas Pilaster reminds us of Nabokov’s Pale Fire, Borges, and Henry James. The essays...