Comment la littérature nous arrive by Roger Fayolle (review)

poetry thus mystifies the reader through an intricate system of signs and hidden meanings. In the final essay, “Des traces et des spectres: une lecture de Pompes funèbres de Jean Genet,” Melina Balcazar Moreno considers the literariness of Genet’s novel in order to show the relationship between ethics, poetics, and the political. She describes Pompes funèbres as privileging the intersection of the themes of death, memory, and history. The theoretical texts found within this issue of Études françaises provide a fascinating platform of discussion and analysis of the history, the limitations, and the very nature of littérature engagée. I recommend this volume to scholars of twentieth- and twenty-first-century studies whose research interests focus on literary theory and the relationship between literature and political activism. University of North Dakota Sarah E. Mosher FAYOLLE, ROGER. Comment la littérature nous arrive. Paris: Sorbonne Nouvelle, 2009. ISBN 978-2-87854-447-3. Pp. 313. 26,50 a. This volume is a collection of essays by the late Sorbonne professor Roger Fayolle, brought together by four of his former students who are now professors themselves. The texts they have gathered deal with a wide range of topics. The principal unifying theme is how to study and teach literature. Fayolle himself was an avowed communist whose own approach to literature was based on Marxist economic theories about the production of wealth and class antagonism. Despite this acknowledged ideological orientation, Fayolle was remarkably open-minded in his approach to literature and his recommendations about the ways of teaching it. Several essays deal with the critical writings of Sainte-Beuve, the subject of Fayolle’s thesis and his major area of expertise. He analyzes that critic’s method of studying literature in order to discover the personality of the author in her/his works. Fayolle also shows that in spite of his close association with the conservative regime of Napoleon III, Sainte-Beuve was a liberal when it came to defending the rights of free speech and freedom of the press. Another subject dealt with at length is the development of literary history as the means of teaching literature to students in the French academic system. The most influential advocate of this approach was Gustave Lanson, and this method prevailed for many years before being challenged by structuralist approaches. Fayolle suggests that the historical approach to literary studies was rife with inner contradictions from the start. Literary history could never really be scientific like political history so it only pretended to emulate the latter’s methods. The reason for this difference is that literature is in the realm of the esthetic, and even Lanson had to admit that there is an indefinable quality in the arts which cannot be explained by biographical and social factors. Since the other essays deal with diverse topics, mention of the more interesting highlights will have to suffice. For example, Fayolle perceptively demonstrates the complexity of the political stances of Stendhal and Balzac. The former could be quite conservative in his ideas and critical of other liberals despite his professed liberal ideals. Balzac proclaimed his conservative allegiance to monarchy and church. Yet his novels glorify the triumph of individualism and materialism in his society. He was able to discern the inner economic workings of the France of his time with the insight of a later Marxist analyst. Other essays of interest include a Reviews 357 study of the late nineteenth-century socialist critic Paul Lafargue and one on the socialist theater that developed in France between 1880 and World War I. Lafargue was very critical of the career of Victor Hugo, whom he viewed as a pseudosocialist . He found in that author’s writings an underlying advocacy of the capitalist system. In the socialist plays, the illegitimate child was frequently used as a symbol of the dispossessed proletariat. In the final essays, Fayolle looks at the blossoming of Francophone literature in France’s former colonies. As with literary history, he finds an inner conflict, in this case between the effort to capture and preserve in literature traditional native cultures and the use of the language of the colonizer. If works are written in French...