Prendergast Christopher - A History of Modern French Literature

A History of Modern French Literature

A History of Modern French Literature

FROM THE SIXTEENTH CENTURY TO THE TWENTIETH CENTURY

Edited by Christopher Prendergast

Princeton University Press
Princeton & Oxford

Copyright 2017 by Princeton University Press

Published by Princeton University Press, 41 William Street, Princeton, New Jersey 08540

In the United Kingdom: Princeton University Press, 6 Oxford Street, Woodstock, Oxfordshire OX20 1TR

press.princeton.edu

All Rights Reserved

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Prendergast, Christopher, editor.

Title: A history of modern French literature : from the sixteenth century to the twentieth century / edited by Christopher Prendergast.

Description: Princeton, New Jersey : Princeton University Press, 2016. | Includes index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2016009876 | ISBN 9780691157726 (hardcover : alk. paper)

Subjects: LCSH: French literatureHistory and criticism.

Classification: LCC PQ103 .H57 2016 | DDC 840.9dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016009876

British Library Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available

This book has been composed in Janson Text LT Std

Printed on acid-free paper.

Printed in the United States of America

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

CONTENTS

CHRISTOPHER PRENDERGAST

DAVID COWARD

EDWIN M. DUVAL

RAYMOND GEUSS

WES WILLIAMS

TIMOTHY J. REISS

HASSAN MELEHY

TIMOTHY HAMPTON

CHRISTOPHER BRAIDER

NICHOLAS PAIGE

KATHERINE IBBETT

ERIC MCHOULAN

JUDITH SRIBNAI

LARRY F. NORMAN

NICHOLAS CRONK

PIERRE SAINT-AMAND

CATRIONA SETH

SUSAN MASLAN

KATE E. TUNSTALL

JOANNA STALNAKER

ALEKSANDAR STEVI

SARAH ROCHEVILLE AND ETIENNE BEAULIEU

PETER BROOKS

CLIVE SCOTT

ROGER PEARSON

MICHAEL LUCEY

STEVEN UNGAR

MARY ANN CAWS

MARY GALLAGHER

CHRISTOPHER PRENDERGAST

JEAN-MICHEL RABAT

NICHOLAS HARRISON

CONTRIBUTORS

Etienne Beaulieu, Cgep de Drummondville, Canada

Christopher Braider, University of ColoradoBoulder

Peter Brooks, Princeton University

Mary Ann Caws, City University of New York Graduate Center

David Coward, University of Leeds

Nicholas Cronk, University of Oxford

Edwin M. Duval, Yale University

Mary Gallagher, University College Dublin

Raymond Geuss, Cambridge University

Timothy Hampton, University of CaliforniaBerkeley

Nicholas Harrison, Kings College London

Katherine Ibbett, University College, London

Michael Lucey, University of CaliforniaBerkeley

Susan Maslan, University of CaliforniaBerkeley

Eric Mchoulan, Universit de Montral

Hassan Melehy, University of North Carolina

Larry F. Norman, University of Chicago

Nicholas Paige, University of CaliforniaBerkeley

Roger Pearson, University of Oxford

Christopher Prendergast, Kings College, Cambridge

Jean-Michel Rabat, University of Pennsylvania

Timothy J. Reiss, New York University

Sarah Rocheville, University of Sherbrooke, Canada

Pierre Saint-Amand, Yale University

Clive Scott, University of East Anglia

Catriona Seth, University of Oxford

Judith Sribnai, Universit du Qubec Montral

Joanna Stalnaker, Columbia University

Aleksandar Stevi, Kings College, Cambridge

Kate E. Tunstall, University of Oxford

Steven Ungar, University of Iowa

Wes Williams, University of Oxford

Introduction (1)

Aims, Methods, Stories

CHRISTOPHER PRENDERGAST

All the main terms of our title call for some clarification (history, modern, French, literature), and the introductory chapter that follows this one, by David Coward, is in part devoted to providing that. But, in explaining the basic aims of the book, it is also important to highlight what might otherwise go unnoticed, the normally anodyne indefinite article; it is in fact meant to do quite a lot of indicative work. The initial a has a dual purpose. It is designed, first, to avoid the imperiousness of the definite article and thus to mark the fact this is but a history, modestly taking its place as just one among many other English-language histories, with no claim whatsoever on being definitive; on the contrary, it is highly selective in its choice of authors and texts, and very specific in its mode of address. This in turn connects with a second purpose: the indefinite article is also meant to highlight a history that is primarily intended for a particular readership. In the sphere of scholarly publication, the general reader (or common reader, in the term made famous by Dr. Johnson in the eighteenth century and Virginia Woolf in the twentieth) is often invoked, but less often actually or effectively addressed. We take the term seriously, while of course remaining cognizant of the fact that conditions of readership and reading have changed hugely since Virginia Woolfs time, let alone Dr. Johnsons. While we naturally hope the book will prove useful in the more specialized worlds of study inhabited by the student and the teacher, the readers we principally envision are those with an active but nonspecialist interest in French literature, whether read in the original or in translation, and on a spectrum from the sustained to the sporadic (one version of Woolfs common reader is someone guided by whatever odds or ends he can come by, a nontrivial category when one bears in mind that a collection of Samuel Beckett texts goes under the title of Ends and Odds).

This has various consequences for the books character as a history. The first concerns what it does not attempt: what is often referred to, unappetizingly, as coverage, the panoramic view that sweeps across centuries in the attempt to say something about everything. We too sweep across centuries (five of them), but more in the form of picking out selected landmarks, to resurrect the term used by Virginia Woolfs contemporary, Lytton Strachey, in his Landmarks of French Literature, a book also written for the general reader, if from within the conditions and assumptions of another time and another world. One point of departure adopted for the direction of travel has been to work out from what is most likely to be familiar to our readership. There are dangers as well as advantages to this trajectory. The familiar will be for the most part what is historically closest, which in turn can color interests and expectations in ways that distort understanding of what is not close. One name for this is presentism, whereby we read history backward, approaching the past through the frame of the present or the more distant past through the frame of the recent past. In some respects, this is inevitable, a natural feature of the culture of reading, and in some cases it is even enabling as a check to imaginative inertia (what in his essay Tradition and the Individual Talent, T. S. Eliot described as the desirable practice of interpreting a past writer from a point of view that will not find it preposterous that the past should be altered by the present as much as the present is directed by the past). Eliots contemporary, Paul Valry famously claimed that a reader in 1912 taking pleasure in a work from 1612 is very largely a matter of chance, but one obvious source of the pleasure we take in the remoter past is viewing it through our own cultural spectacles (Valry reading 1612 via his own historical location in 1912, for instance). The risk, however, is the loss of the historical sense as that which demands that we try to understand and appreciate the past (here the literary past) on its terms rather than our own, while remaining aware that we can never fully see the past from the point of view of the past. On the other hand, if the past is another country, it is not another planet, nor are its literary and other idioms, for us, an unintelligible babble. One of the implicit invitations of this book is for the reader to use the familiar as a steering device for journeys to places unknown or underexplored, while not confusing the ships wheel with the design of the ship itself or the nature of the places to which it takes us. Indeed the literature itself provides examples and models for just this approach, most notably the genre of travel writing, both documentary and fictional, from the Renaissance onward, a complex literary phenomenon at once freighted with the preconceptions (and prejudices) of the society in which it is produced, but also often urging its readers to try to see other cultures through other, indigenous, eyes (think Montaignes essay, Des Cannibales or Diderots