SubStance

SubStance 32.3 (2003) 19-28

The Politics of French Literary History In the US and France Today

Richard J. Golsan

The study of French Literature in American universities has undergone tremendous changes over the past two decades, as everyone involved in its teaching is aware. These changes are in part attributable to "internal" pressures, such as the impact of new theoretical paradigms and critical approaches (cultural studies, post-colonial studies, gender studies, queer theory, to name the major ones). But they are also the result of practical, "external" considerations, including declining enrollments in many foreign languages, and other curricular pressures linked to "globalization." Most important, they reflect historical and cultural developments of extraordinary magnitude: the increased visibility of post-colonial cultures and societies; the end of the Cold War with its Manichean dichotomy of "East" and "West," ongoing efforts to achieve gender equality, and other, emerging issues.

As a result of these and other changes, national literatures and the political, social and cultural forces that shape them have experienced seismic shifts, to the point that in many instances they can no longer be labeled "national," in the traditional sense. New authors and cultural artifacts are studied; "canonical figures" are relegated to the "dustbin of history" or, conversely, enjoy a comeback for reasons that may have little to do with their initial notoriety; forgotten or marginal writers achieve prominence because their writings are newly relevant; and figures not even "literary" assume central roles because their works or actions are considered crucial to the illumination of significant moments in the past or places in the present.

Under these conditions, the writing of literary history as well as the politics that shape it need to be reconsidered, as many literary historians and critics have recognized. Among the "progressives" or modernes, the changes described above require nothing less than a radical reconceptualization of literary history, on a global scale. Deterministic or "evolutionary" logics must be rejected, national boundaries need to be erased and even exploded, and the cultural, linguistic, and even metaphysical implications of borders—real and imagined—need to be examined. Stephen Greenblatt has articulated these imperatives in a recent article in PMLA entitled "Racial Memory and Literary History": [End Page 19]

To write literary history, we need more an awareness of accidental judgments than a theory of the organic; more an account of purposes mistook than a narrative of gradual emergence; more a chronicle of carnal, bloody, and unnatural acts than a story of inevitable progress from traceable origins. We need to understand colonization, exile, emigration, wandering, contamination, and unexpected consequences, along with the fierce compulsions of greed, longing, and restlessness, for it is these disruptive forces, not a sense of cultural legitimacy, that principally shape the history and diffusion of languages. (62)

Among the "traditionalists" or anciens, a very different series of perspectives has been articulated. Some traditionalists simply lament the passing of the "good old days" when the classics were national treasures and writing literary history entailed the meticulous study of the writer's life and its impact on his or her work ("tel arbre, tel fruit"), the exploration and articulation of one writer's influence on another, and the categorizing of writers and works according to schools, movements, etc. Others take a grimmer view, equating what they see as the demise of literary history with the "death of literature," the corruption and impoverishment of the canon, and the destruction of humanistic values that subtend both. For many anciens, the culprit often blamed for this state of affairs is "theory," and the different critical perspectives it privileges.

In its various permutations," theory" (identified as a series of dominant, faddish-and often imported "-isms") has been held accountable for the perceived intellectual shrinkage and/or moral vacuity of literary studies. As an example of the latter, at the height of the "culture wars" of the 1980s, Ortwin de Graaf's discovery of politically unsavory articles that Paul de Man wrote for the Belgian collaborationist daily newspaper Le Soir during WWII revealed de Man's collaborationist past and generated...