French Studies: A Quarterly Review最新文献

{"title":"Keith Reader (1945–2022)","authors":"M. Hanrahan","doi":"10.1093/fs/knad040","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/fs/knad040","url":null,"abstract":"The death of Keith Reader in July 2022 is a sad loss for French studies in the UK. Keith was a wonderfully rich and insightful scholar who contributed prolifically to the discipline across an astonishingly diverse range of subjects. He was exceptionally erudite; even more importantly, he was an intellectual in every sense of the word, although he would have been quick to deprecate the application of the term to himself. Keith was himself possessed of an acutely probing mind; moreover, he was keenly convinced both of the value of intellectual enquiry in itself and the importance of the broader social contribution it can make. Born in Tunbridge Wells, Keith grew up in Crawley before going to Cambridge in 1964 to study for a BA in French. However, it was an experience there outside the halls of academia that proved a real watershed in his life. The syllabus that awaited him at university was wholly devoted to language and literature, in line with most modern languages programmes at the time; while he found it somewhat narrow and dreary, albeit less for its content than for how it was taught, the discovery of film in the three independent cinemas then existing in Cambridge was to prove the beginning of a passion that would last throughout his life. That early hunger that drove him to supplement his studies with a field manifestly of relevance to his chosen academic discipline, although with little institutional recognition (let alone legitimation) of the connections between them, found a parallel in his next experience as a student, when he enthusiastically embraced whatever little—mainly anglophone—theory was on offer in the context of the graduate course in General and Comparative Literature in which he enrolled at Oxford. That enthusiasm heralded the determination with which he used the years he spent as a lecteur in Caen and then in Paris to engage with the French variety of theory, becoming one of the very first UK scholars to explore the world peopled by Barthes, Lacan, Foucault, Derrida, and Althusser, this last still a very visible presence in the École normale supérieure during Keith’s period there. Keith returned to the UK armed with this enthusiasm, although it was not until he completed his PhD that he obtained his first academic lectureship, at Kingston, soon to become his first professorship. The gratitude he subsequently expressed towards Kingston was due not only to the security of his first permanent post but above all to the institutional flexibility that allowed him to integrate his non-mainstream interests into his teaching. In his subsequent appointments to Chairs at Newcastle University (in 1995) and then the University of Glasgow (in 2000), he maintained his commitment to integrating areas hitherto confined to the margins of the discipline into both his research and teaching. Indeed, that","PeriodicalId":332929,"journal":{"name":"French Studies: A Quarterly Review","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-04-13","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"131291407","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Gawkers: Art and Audience in Late Nineteenth-Century France by Bridget Alsdorf (review)","authors":"Claire Moran","doi":"10.1093/fs/knad019","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/fs/knad019","url":null,"abstract":"Bridget Alsdorf begins her wide-ranging and impressive study of onlookers in latenineteenth-century France with a discussion of an 1892 woodcut by the Franco-Swiss artist Félix Vallotton, entitled La Foule de Paris. In many respects, this is a book about Vallotton, whose work looms large in each of the four chapters, alongside figures such as Honoré Daumier, Pierre Bonnard, and Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec. The book’s focus on ‘gawkers’ or ‘badauds’ allows a subtle interrogation of the social and cultural dynamics at play in nineteenth-century Paris via a marginal position, which, in turn, allows more marginal artists, such as Vallotton to come to the fore. For Alsdorf ‘the badaud has always been the flâneur’s other side’ (p. 11), and while badauds ‘abound in late nineteenth-century art and literature, [...] they have received only a minute fraction of the attention devoted the flâneur’ (p. 9). Her beautifully illustrated, carefully researched study makes an excellent case for taking this topic, and also the artists who treat it, into the critical mainstream. The first chapter focuses on the ‘Accident’, analysing the faits divers and tragedies which captured the public and artistic imagination, such as, for example, the 1895 train crash which saw a train break through the north façade of the Gare Montparnasse and land on the street below, ironically killing a newspaper seller. The next chapter, ‘Audience’ investigates both theatre and street scenes, looking at artists ‘who not only represented theaters and the crowds who animate them, but who more specifically understood this subject in relationship to the theater of the city and the viewing of art’ (p. 71). For Alsdorf, ‘the trope of the theater audience is at the heart of this book’s larger investigation of badauds as a model of modern subjectivity’ (p. 69) and the badaud’s marginal and shifting perspective has clear implications for both artistic form and modern subjecthood. Chapter 3 dives into an exploration of street theatre, drawing links between the theatre of everyday Parisian life and the aesthetic form of works by Vallotton and Bonnard, as well as a fascinating glimpse into early cinema in the analysis of films such as Concours d’automobiles fleuries (1899) and Charmeur d’oiseaux (1896–97) by the Lumière brothers. ‘Attraction’ is the title of the final chapter, which ‘represent[s] badauds in relation to advertising — posters, kiosks, fairground tents, shop windows and department store displays — as a means of questioning the relationship between art and its audience’ (pp. 173–74). Here, Alsdorf discusses a series of images related to consumerism, including Vallotton’s exceptional Le Bon Marché (1898), which captures the world of Zola’s 1883 novel, Au Bonheur des dames. Alsdorf ’s fine monograph allows a fresh perspective on late-nineteenth-century France, on its spectacles and streets, and on the figures which depicted and shaped a rapidly changing world. It is a welcome addition to a gro","PeriodicalId":332929,"journal":{"name":"French Studies: A Quarterly Review","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-04-13","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"125787295","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Literature for all: On Designation and Interpretation in Hugo’s Notre-Dame de Paris","authors":"A. Dubois","doi":"10.1093/fs/knad030","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/fs/knad030","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:This article contends that Victor Hugo’s Notre-Dame de Paris is a novel that follows a democratic principle by opening up its meaning, and that of its titular cathedral, to anyone and everyone. Whereas Hugo’s novel and his famous syntagm ‘ceci tuera cela’ have been extensively studied as an examination of the fall of architecture in favour of the printed book, this article will argue that a semiotic analysis of the syntagm reveals Hugo’s intention to recognize the legitimacy of society’s subjects to experience and talk about (artistic) objects. Through a discussion of the chapters added in the book’s second edition and in which Hugo comments on his own work, this article recontextualizes the spatial, historical, and political components that help clarify the democratic intent at the centre of the novel, but also of its resurgence in popularity in 2019 when Notre-Dame was devastated by fire.Résumé:Cet article affirme que Notre-Dame de Paris est un roman dont les enjeux sont démocratiques car son sens, et celui de la cathédrale à laquelle il réfère, est constamment réceptif à toute interprétation. Tandis que le roman de Victor Hugo et son célèbre syntagme ‘ceci tuera cela’ ont été maintes fois étudiés sous l’angle du déclin de l’architecture au profit du livre imprimé, cet article démontre qu’une analyse sémiotique du syntagme révèle l’intention de Hugo qui est de reconnaître la légitimité des sujets vivant en société à argumenter sur des objets (artistiques). À travers une discussion des chapitres ajoutés à la deuxième édition du livre, dans lesquels Hugo commente son œuvre, cet article recontextualise les éléments spatiaux, historiques et politiques qui aident à comprendre plus avant l’intention démocratique au centre du roman mais aussi de sa résurgence en 2019, lorsque Notre-Dame fut ravagée par les flammes.","PeriodicalId":332929,"journal":{"name":"French Studies: A Quarterly Review","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-02-20","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"126677353","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Maps to the Other: The carte galante Tradition and Émile Zola’s ‘dossiers préparatoires’","authors":"Matthew Yost","doi":"10.1093/fs/knac268","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/fs/knac268","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:The deployment of natural spaces as explicit metaphors for the female body dates, in the western tradition, to Plato’s Timaeus. In French literature, this femino-spatial commonplace is at least as old as the Roman de la rose and endures into the present. Madeleine de Scudéry’s Clélie (1654–60) represents a pivotal moment in this tradition by expanding the novel’s textual metaphor to include a map of the fictional nation of Tendre. The landscape shown on the ‘Carte de Tendre’ resembles an anatomical drawing, a representational feature carried forward into other examples of the carte galante genre. Current scholarship has observed, though not yet thoroughly investigated, the importance graphical representations such as the ‘Carte de Tendre’ held over later authors. This study will demonstrate such influence by examining Émile Zola’s La Faute de l’abbé Mouret (1875), where the garden, Le Paradou, figures as an explicit metaphor for the central female character’s body. The carte galante influence is evident when read in conjunction with the author’s hand-drawn sketches and maps included in the ‘Dossier préparatoire’. Zola’s exploration of gender-coded spaces reaches beyond his literary influences and extends toward the graphical tradition of the carte galante.Résumé:Dans la tradition occidentale, l’espace naturelle déployé comme allégorie explicite du corps féminin remonte au moins au Timée de Platon. Dans la littérature française, ce lieu commun liant corps et l’espace existe au moins depuis Le Roman de la rose et persiste jusqu’à présent. La Clélie (1654–60) de Madeleine de Scudéry élargit cette tradition, en ajoutant au texte une représentation cartographique d’un espace métaphorique, le pays de Tendre. Le paysage présenté sur la carte ressemble fortement à un dessein anatomique, un aspect figuratif rendu visible dans d’autres exemples du genre de la carte galante. La réflexion courante observe, sans tout à fait expliquer, la manière dont cette tradition graphique influence les romanciers des siècles suivantes, qui explorent ce lieu commun de corps-espace. En examinant La Faute de l’abbé Mouret (1875) d’Émile Zola, cette étude montrera de quelle manière la tradition graphique établie par Clélie affecte la représentation textuelle du jardin du Paradou, qui figure comme métaphore explicite du corps d’Albine, la protagoniste du roman. Lu en conjonction avec les esquisses dans le ‘Dossier préparatoire’ de Zola, la liaison carte–corps devient évidente, car les dessins de Zola inscrivent une topographie corporelle sur Le Paradou de façon similaire aux exemples antérieurs. Grâce à cette lecture croisée, je propose que, chez Zola, la conception de l’espace genré s’étend bien au-delà des influences littéraires, et plie vers la tradition de la carte galante.","PeriodicalId":332929,"journal":{"name":"French Studies: A Quarterly Review","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-02-20","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"127711143","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Travel, Translation and Transmedia Aesthetics: Franco-Chinese Literature and Visual Arts in a Global Age by Shuangyi Li (review)","authors":"Benjamin Hiramatsu Ireland","doi":"10.1093/fs/knad022","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/fs/knad022","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":332929,"journal":{"name":"French Studies: A Quarterly Review","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-02-13","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"126802435","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Domestic Georgic: Labors of Preservation from Rabelais to Milton by Katie Kadue (review)","authors":"Vittoria Fallanca","doi":"10.1093/fs/knad024","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/fs/knad024","url":null,"abstract":"Domestic Georgic is one of the most irritating works of scholarship I have read in some time. I mean this in the sense mobilized by Catherine Brown in her expression ‘hermeneutic irritants’ — conceptual objects akin to chemicals secreted by molluscs to create a pearl: things that galvanize the imagination, and provoke dense, luminous forms of thinking (Contrary Things: Exegesis, Dialectic, and the Poetics of Didacticism (Stanford: CA, Stanford University Press, 1998)). For irritation, as Kadue herself proposes in her chapter on Montaigne, is what might sustain us in the often painful processes of self-preservation that both writing and embodied existence require. Caught between a rock and a hard place (the life of the mind and that of the body), irritation (from irrito, to stimulate, provoke, excite, instigate) is what keeps us attuned to things that matter, even if those things are small-scale, local, even mundane. At the heart of Kadue’s study is the claim that the poetics of Rabelais, Montaigne, Spenser, Marvell, and Milton had more in common with the ‘mundane maintenance work of [...] domestic laborers’ than the large-scale projects of systemor world-building, epic narrative, or digressive expansion with which they are often associated. On Kadue’s reading, Montaigne is not a sorcerous stylist forging a new genre through alchemical experiments with words, but a writer who knows that at best writing constitutes a form of self-management whose effects are often slow and excruciating, like drawing blood out of a stone, or stones out of a kidney. Similarly, in situating Rabelais’s œuvre between a coherent ‘grand design’ elicited by a reader like Edwin Duval and the infinite generation conjured by postmodern readers such as Michel Jeanneret, Kadue allows us to suspend commonplace interpretative strategies to consider what might hang in the in-between. While many of Kadue’s arguments rest on such tempering proclivities, an erring towards conservativism is itself tempered by the constellation of theorists interpolated throughout the book’s close readings. From Hannah Arendt to Silvia Federici to Sianne Ngai, it traverses a spectrum of political thought at the intersections of labour, gender, affect, and (re)production. Kadue encourages readers more or less complacent in their safe postures of early modern historicism to perform mental frottage between texts and time periods, and proves that analysing canonical early modern texts under the microscope of theory is enlivening, rewarding intellectual labour. In all this, Kadue eschews grand political gestures, proposing instead that the domestic is not just political, but might be where political theorizing is most at home. If Kadue’s razor-sharp prose focuses our attention on the affinities between writing and housework, I found myself thinking about the absence of the aleatory promenades of distraction in the picture she delivers of these early modern works. My own mental wanderings, made possible thro","PeriodicalId":332929,"journal":{"name":"French Studies: A Quarterly Review","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-02-13","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"132876949","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Rewilding with the cri in Medieval French Texts: Yvain and Mélusine","authors":"Liam Lewis","doi":"10.1093/fs/knac272","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/fs/knac272","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:Focusing on two medieval narratives about identity transformation, Yvain and Mélusine, this article explores areas of dialogue between medieval literary studies and current perspectives on sound and rewilding the environment. Sound studies have in recent times enabled a more expansive philosophical reflection on the intersections between language, ecology, and identity. This article uses a friction between philosophical perspectives on the French cri and ecological ‘acoustemology’ to illustrate such reflection. If, as contemporary ecologists suggest, rewilding is a process underscored by careful human management in order to restore landscapes back to a state of wilderness, the same can be said of moments of narrative transformation in medieval texts that are revealed through sound. How might such interpretations of texts offer ways of linking textual modes of rewilding to the transformation of human and nonhuman subjects? To conclude, the article suggests how listening to medieval texts, to their narrative pivots and the changes in the sounds they depict, modifies the way nonhuman identity is discussed in connection with medieval (and non-medieval) literature.Résumé:Cet article explore les possibilités de dialogue entre les études littéraires médiévales et certaines perspectives actuelles sur le son et le réensauvagement de l’environnement, en se concentrant sur deux récits de la transformation d’identité: Yvain et Mélusine. Les études du son ont récemment rendu possible une réflexion philosophique plus large sur les intersections entre le langage, l’écologie et l’identité. Cet article exploite une friction entre les perspectives philosophiques sur le ‘cri’ français et une ‘acoustémologie’ de l’écologie pour illustrer cette réflexion. Si, comme le suggèrent certains écologistes contemporains, le réensauvagement est un processus souligné par une gestion prudente de la part de l’humain afin de restaurer le sauvage dans le paysage, nous pouvons dire la même chose pour des moments de transformation narrative révélés par le son dans les textes médiévaux. Comment ce genre d’interprétation textuelle offrirait-il d’autres possibilités de faire le lien entre le réensauvagement textuel et la transformation des sujets hu-mains et non-humains? Pour conclure, l’article suggère comment l’écoute des textes médiévaux, y compris leurs pivots narratifs et les changements des phénomènes sonores, modifie la façon dont nous considérons l’identité non-humaine dans la littérature médiévale (et non-médiévale).","PeriodicalId":332929,"journal":{"name":"French Studies: A Quarterly Review","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-02-07","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"114998914","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Dividing Paris: Urban Renewal and Social Inequality, 1852–1870 by Esther Da Costa Meyer (review)","authors":"Steven Wilson","doi":"10.1093/fs/knad007","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/fs/knad007","url":null,"abstract":"Drawing on a rich collection of archival materials, photographs, illustrations, newspaper reports, memoirs, and literary sources, Esther da Costa Meyer asks: ‘How [...] can one do justice to the terrifying complexity of the urban transformation of Second Empire Paris — a city that, like all others, does not exist outside representations and thus exceeds any single author or methodology?’ (p. 9). The book’s striking cover hints at its critical approach. Eugène Moreau’s illustration of Paris’s new Boulevard de la Reine Hortense, embellished with gardens and fountains, is juxtaposed with detail taken from Félix Thorigny’s 1858 depiction of demolitions on the Left Bank. While urban reform in nineteenth-century Paris is often examined for its effects on dichotomized social and political categories (men/women; the affluent/ the proletariat; those living in the centre/ those displaced to the periphery; municipal authority/ the private sector), da Costa Meyer’s extensive study approaches Haussmannization as an act of ‘tense syncretism’ (p. 305), in which multiple identities, perspectives, and cultures are to be understood in relation to each other. Venturing beyond a focus on individual Parisian monuments and biographical scholarship, da Costa Meyer considers the dynamic interactions of class, age, gender, national origin, and language in the reconstruction of urban space. The book’s scope is vast, with urban renewal analysed in the context of saturation, revolutions, and epidemics in the first chapter alone. While the needs of the bourgeoisie are presented as one of the major driving forces of Paris’s transformation and the effects of segregation and marginalization are clearly underlined throughout, the book points to the need to avoid totalizing views and binaries if we are to apprehend the complex consequences of Haussmann’s reforms. Thus, working women, who often took jobs as domestic servants in the affluent western half of Paris, were ‘more highly sought where they were most poorly represented’ (p. 103), while those economically displaced to the periphery were nonetheless some of the most active participants in the physical construction of the new city. One of the most significant aspects of the study is the attention it devotes to the relationship between urban reform and geopolitics: imported works of colonial art in Parisian museums, new parks filled with exotic plants from across France’s empire, migrant labour, and the quelling of insurrection by the généraux africains are all discussed comprehensively, as is the annexation of Paris’s peripheral communities, itself a ‘brutal act of colonization’ (p. 305). Da Costa Meyer persuasively argues that if the renewal of Paris is to be understood in relation to the Second Empire, the very influences that shape and underpin it simultaneously undermine Eurocentric myths about the city’s status as ‘capital of the nineteenth century’ or ‘capital of modernity’. This landmark book, brimming with detailed an","PeriodicalId":332929,"journal":{"name":"French Studies: A Quarterly Review","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-02-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"129651929","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Psychoanalysis and the Family in Twentieth-Century France: Françoise Dolto and Her Legacy by Richard Bates (review)","authors":"P. ffrench","doi":"10.1093/fs/knad016","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/fs/knad016","url":null,"abstract":"Françoise Dolto (1908–1988) was a French psychoanalyst specializing in children and parenting who, as Richard Bates makes clear in this thorough and important account of her life, work, and influence, was also a ‘cultural phenomenon’ (p. 17). Contrasting Dolto’s place in French culture with that of Jacques Lacan, Bates argues that while the latter’s impact was restricted to theory and he addressed the ‘avant-garde elite’, Dolto’s work was directed towards the ‘everyday experience of ordinary French people’ (p. 8). Accordingly, Bates approaches Dolto through the lens of a cultural historian and situates his work alongside other (relatively rare) historical accounts of psychoanalysis as a social and cultural phenomenon. This wide-angle approach enables Bates to demonstrate the ways in which, in contrast to the left-oriented theoretical thrust of Lacan’s work, Dolto was a ‘thoroughly political’ and ‘nostalgically conservative’ figure (p. 13), whose work embodied a ‘ruralist nostalgia’ which reinforced ‘classic heteronormative assumptions’ and assumed an ‘overwhelmingly white and culturally Catholic audience’ (pp. 10, 12). One might suggest then that in the already fraught territory of the politics of the family and parenting, Dolto and ‘Doltomania’ have the status of a Barthesian myth, an allusion justified by Bates’s highlighting of Dolto’s ‘reassuring’ effect on her audience (p. 3). Bates offers a compelling analysis of this myth through meticulous and thoroughly documented research. He tracks the influence on Dolto of the 1930s psychoanalytic authorities, René Laforgue and Édouard Pichon. Their radically heteronormative concepts (for example, Laforgue’s ‘névrose familiale’) and defence of the Oedipal family unit, extending to Pichon’s rabid pathologization of homosexuality and insistence on the traditional division of gender roles, remained ‘cornerstones of Dolto’s later thinking’ (p. 38). A second chapter, ‘Dutiful Daughters’, discusses Dolto’s Catholic and anti-Dreyfusard background, evoking Simone de Beauvoir’s autobiographical memoir in comparison. Moving forward chronologically into the Occupation and its aftermath, Bates shows himself to be particularly adept at disentangling the ways in which Dolto’s barely ambivalent Pétainism played into the rifts in the institutional politics of psychoanalysis that led to her exclusion from the International Psychoanalytical Association in 1953. In the later chapters Bates focuses, with the same perspicacity and measured tone, on Dolto’s championing of the cause of children (as long as the family unit stood firm) and her startling ascription of autism to the ‘pathogenic family’; before a final chapter, which analyses Dolto’s move beyond the terrain of psychoanalysis as such and occupation of the role of media star, through the extremely popular daily radio broadcasts she made from the mid-1970s on. If Bates succeeds in his aim ‘not so much to judge Dolto’s work as to historicise it’ (p. 232), the pernic","PeriodicalId":332929,"journal":{"name":"French Studies: A Quarterly Review","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-02-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"130208042","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"The Beauty of Baudelaire: The Poet as Alternative Lawgiver by Roger Pearson (review)","authors":"Julien Zanetta","doi":"10.1093/fs/knad006","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/fs/knad006","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":332929,"journal":{"name":"French Studies: A Quarterly Review","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-02-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"128030362","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}