French Global. A New Approach to Literary History ed. by Christie McDonald and Susan Rubin Suleiman (review)

At the time of omnipresent globalization, of crossing limits, and being without borders, the discipline of literary studies also seeks to move away from the extreme pigeonholing of scholarly research to seeing and presenting a bigger picture, from the analyses of twists and turns in one work to the interaction between texts, authors, and cultures. An attempt to do so is at the heart of French Global. A New Approach to Literary History, a recent publication that opens with the question “Is it possible to reread the whole sweep of French literature in world perspective?” (ix). The book intends to provide a variety of ways in which to consider literary production in French throughout time, rather than to present yet another account of the entire history of French literature from the Chanson de Roland to Edouard Glissant and beyond. Thus, the present volume does not claim to be a reincarnation of A New History of French Literature (ed. D. Hollier, Harvard UP, 1989), which the editors Christie McDonald and Susan Rubin Suleiman recognize as an important precedent. Like the gigantic multi-authored collection of 1989, French Global includes contributions from a large number of literary scholars and covers the time period from the Middle Ages to contemporary works in the French language. However, the volume does not demonstrate the extreme adherence to dates and the rigorously orderly progression through history that characterize A New History. Instead of being organized by years, the work contains three large general sections that present the concept of “global” as a series of varying attempts to define and challenge different sorts of boundaries. While articles in each section are organized in a generally chronological order, the editors remark that the distribution of the essays among the three parts remains largely arbitrary and that there is no particular reason why a given article could not be successfully placed in a different part. Far from being an admission of the volume’s organizational weakness, this frank statement is an explanation of the book’s mechanism. Suleiman and McDonald open with an effective metaphor of the present work as a GPS device that allows users to navigate through the history of French language and literature. The volume provides possible approaches to reading works of literature and invites the reader to choose his or her own route by rearranging the book’s collection of essays “according to his or her own imagination and interest” (xx).

Part I “Spaces” focuses, as the title suggests, on spaces, “taken in their physical, geographical, geopolitical, or even geometric sense” (xix). This group consists of ten contributions that faithfully follow the historical order. It opens with an essay by Sharon Kinoshita, who studies some less known medieval romances in order to show the “complex networks of contact and exchange” (18) in which the Medieval Francophone world was involved. Speaking for the Renaissance, Tom Conley offers a study of Oronce Finé’s heart-shaped map where “the unknown is recognized as such” (28), and links it to his reading of Alcofrybas’s voyage into Pantagruel’s mouth, seen as a staging of a Frenchman encountering the New World. Jacob Vance contributes an examination of globe imagery in humanist writing and shows that the globe acquires special significance due to its simultaneously rotational and stationary nature that thus “unites the finite and the infinite” (43). Éric Méchoulan presents the Classical period and concentrates on seventeenth-century moral codes that provided general, global forms of speech and behavior. In a more literal approach to “spaces,” Jérôme Brillaud contributes a brief excursion into the history of the changing form of the theater, from the rectangular jeu de paumme to the Comédie Française, and argues that circularity of the theater building reflects the political environment. Speaking from the scientific point of view dear to the Enlightenment, Natasha Lee asks what it means to be human and presents humans...