Actualités d'André Gide: actes du colloque international organisé au Palais Neptune de Toulon et à la Villa Noailles à Hyères les 10, 11 et 12 mars 2011 ed. by Martine Sagaert et Peter Schnyder (review)

This conference gathered established Gideans and graduate students for a broad reflection on the study of Gide ten years after a similar event on the theme of the 'Modernité d'André Gide', a decade marked by very extensive editorial work on his oeuvre. The contributors interpret the theme of actualité in a number of productive ways, but the volume as a whole is unified only as a demonstration of the diversity and vitality of Gidean studies, in the face of a rarely acknowledged fear that 'la perception de Gide en tant qu'écrivain obsolète menace sa pérennité universitaire' (p. 188; admittedly, Victoria Reid is speaking here of British universities). From Part I, a fourre-tout of 'approches contemporaines', I shall comment only on the most notable chapters. Patrick Pollard reveals important intertexts for Le Roi Candaule and Saül; the late Jean Bollack's study draws interesting connections between Baudelaire, Rilke, and Les Poésies d'André Walter; and David Walker's reading of 'la pensée économique' in L'Immoraliste casts new light on this récit. Lise Forment's study of Gide as a 'lecteur des Classiques' is an exception among these first chapters in that it explores an aspect of Gide's actualité, in the form of his complex, 'transhistorique' relation to literary history, which gives a modern relevance to his critical writings. Part II mostly concerns Gide's reception 'en France et à l'étranger'. The accounts of Gide's presence in British and American universities, by Victoria Reid and Frédéric Canovas respectively, are among the most interesting chapters with regard to the current state of Gidean studies (especially for readers in these countries). Gide's complex relations with cultures and literature outside France are explored in Carmen Saggiomo's discussion of the 1950 lecture À Naples, in André-Alain Morello's approach to La Marche turque from the perspective of Turkish Nobel laureate Orhan Pamuk, and (in Part III) in Peter Schnyder's presentation of previously unpublished correspondence with Ernst Robert Curtius. Alain Goulet's collection of mostly unpublished letters from an 'enquête sur l'influence de Gide en 1975' provides a fascinating snapshot of his reception among authors at this time (and the several letters that deny any influence are no less interesting). Part III addresses the recent work of editing and publishing Gide's oeuvre and associated documents. The contributions of Martine Sagaert, Jean-Michel Wittmann, and Pierre Masson explore particularly interesting issues arising from the challenges of producing the new Pléiade editions. A final section of 'variations humoristiques' contains a single chapter, Daniel Bilous's discussion of pastiches of Gide, which does indeed include excerpts from some extremely funny counterfeits, but is also one of the collection's most methodical and revealing analyses of Gide's reception from his lifetime up to the present day. The volume as a whole testifies to the fact that, even if Gide is now almost unknown to French collégiens and lycéens (Marie-Clotilde Rousseau, p. 180), his works continue to respond to the new situations, critical approaches, and especially the more international perspectives with which they are confronted.