French Global: A New Approach to Literary History (review)

This collective work authored by twenty-nine scholars primarily from the US, with the participation of a few contributors from the UK, France, and Canada, sets out to offer a global, transactional, and multipolar approach to the history of French literature. As the editors’ Introduction, ‘The National and the Global’, indicates, the volume lays claim to the same methodological principles pioneered by the groundbreaking work published in 1989 under the editorship of Denis Hollier, while also expanding its analytical scope by including the transnational, mainly non-Hexagonal, literary production of the last two decades, which has succeeded in challenging ‘French literature’s national borders as well as France’s traditional self-image — that of a republic where “all citizens are equal” with no attention paid to ethnic or other differences’ (p. xi). Hence the essays are organized according to the tripartition of ‘overlapping categories’: spaces, mobilities, multiplicities. While this methodological choice frees French Global from the chronological determinism of more conventional literary histories, each section follows a temporal logic, delving into a diverse array of issues and examining a large number of authors and texts from the Middle Ages to the twenty-first century. The twenty-eight essays provide as many illustrations of the guiding principle expressed by the editors: ‘While we challenge the notion of a seamless unity between French as language, French as literature, and French as nation (let alone French as “universal spirit”), we do maintain the idea of literatures in French’ (p. xix). Both the insistence on a non-monolithical idea of writing in French and the concern for a relational or transactional reading of texts separated by geopolitical borders resurface in all contributions, which range from the recontextualization of thirteenth-century literature in French as ‘the interface between “medieval Europe” of the textbooks and that of the reterritorialized Mediterranean’ (p. 6) by Sharon Kinoshita to Lawrence D. Kritzman’s investigation of the political, philosophical, and ethical struggle with the identity in the works of twentieth- and twenty-first-century intellectuals; and from Jérôme Brillaud’s study of the interconnectedness between architecture and aesthetics in the theatre of the ancien régime, through the analysis by Emily Apter of xenophobia in the nineteenth-century business novel, to Christopher L. Miller’s examination of the slave trade origins and the enduring political power of the ‘Françafrique’. The volume’s thematic scope is further enhanced by its methodological heterogeneity, which ranges from philological, archival, and historical investigations, through postcolonial, feminist, and gender studies readings, to sociological, economic, political, and philosophical approaches. The very notions of ‘global’ and ‘globalization’ are emancipated from their often trivial uses and connotations as each analysis strives to reveal yet another potential, often unfamiliar, facet. Without exhibiting the traditional attributes and pitfalls of a Lansonian summa, French Global masterfully combines the theoretical and thematic diversity of its contributions with an epistemological consistency that enables it to offer a powerful and persuasive revision of the monumental and monolithic idea of French literature, redefined as a multifaceted process fraught with differences and contradictions and bearing the stamp of transnational movements.