Modern Language Review

550 Reviews collected byTouret, of reviews contemporary withMoravagine's publication, includ ing those of Barbusse, Larbaud and t'Serstevens. All in all, this is an indispensable collection of consistently thought-provoking and penetrating essays on thenovel that Paul Husson called amodern version ofDante's Inferno (p. 255). UNIVERSITY OF EAST ANGLIA CLIVE SCOTT After Blanchot: Literature, Criticism, Philosophy. Ed. by LESLIE HILL, BRIAN NEL SON, and DIMITRIS VARDOULAKIS. Newark: University ofDelaware Press. 2005. Viii+277pp. $30. ISBN 978-o-874I3-946-4. Maurice Blanchot enjoyed celebrating his birthday. Or at least, in a gesture towhich Christophe Bident, Leslie Hill, and Michael Holland have in particular drawn our attention, he seems to have enjoyed encoding references to its date, or near-misses, in and around his works, sometimes even in the date of their dept lgal. It is then perhaps especially fitting,for all the complexity of his rigorous reflections on the question ofmemory, that the centenary ofBlanchot's birth, celebrated inSeptember 2007, should have produced some notable acts of commemoration, including a Cerisy colloque (held in July2007) and thepublication byGallimard of a volume of his early, and previously uncollected, literarycriticism. If the current volume pre-dates these festivities, it comes nevertheless as a welcome indication of the depth, range, and quality of the critical work towhich Blanchot's writings are now consistently giving rise.The collection has itsorigins in the conference 'Blanchot, theObscure' held in Melbourne inAugust 2004, where a number of itsessays were firstgiven. Featuring many of themost significant established Blanchot critics, it also includes thework of younger researchers; and both constituencies do much to indicate the ability of Blanchot's work to engage a diverse range of referencepoints. A good number of the essays here, taken collectively, demonstrate the detail and force of the intersections between Blanchot and such interlocutors, familiar and more unexpected, as Paul de Man, Baudelaire, Holderlin, Jean Paul, Melville, Kierkegaard, or Giorgio Caproni. In a characteristically incisive account of Blanchot's (non-)concept of the 'neuter', Christophe Bident traces the filiations-acknowledged and otherwise-from Blan chot to Barthes, and sets these compellingly in the context ofwhat he presents as Blanchot's ethical search: for a just way of being in theworld. Robert Antelme is of course, as Bident shows, a decisive figurehere; this essential connection is deve loped further, with the crucial addition of Blanchot's reflections on 'Etre juif', by Christopher Fynsk, in a typically sensitive and tenacious discussion of Blanchot's 'L'Indestructible'. Elsewhere, Leslie Hill unfolds with contagious urgency the ex treme demands made by Blanchot's approach to that strange thing called literature on contemporary literarycriticism (demands which emerge as, to say the least, perti nent to the crisis inwhich thisdiscipline plainly finds itself,but which it isdesperate to ignore); Kevin Hart pursues what isemerging as a truly indispensable enquiry into Blanchot's relation toparticular elements of Judaeo-Christian thought and practice (here, with specific and extremely rich reference to iconoclasm); Michael Holland provides an exemplary reading of the significance of Blanchot's manceuvrings in re lation to dates, bringing out with supreme rigour the intimate connections between tiny textual details and themost imposing historical contexts. The collection closes with theextraordinary reflectionsprovoked in sculptor Elizabeth Presa-whose work features on its cover-by Blanchot, here alongside Rilke and Rodin. Overall, this volume is a rich resource, and strangely heartening. If our time, afterBlanchot, is MLR, I03.2, 2oo8 55 I once more a time of need, the kind of thinking this collection brings within reach nevertheless turns thenecessity toendure it into a kind of good fortune. QUEENS' COLLEGE, CAMBRIDGE MARTIN CROWLEY Provisionality and thePoem: Transition in the Work ofDu Bouchet, Jaccottet and Noell. By EMMAWAGSTAFF. (Faux Titre, 278) Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi. 2006. 244 pp. E48. ISBN 978-90-420-I939-3. In his recently republished Eclisse, Jacques Dupin recalls the solitariness of the emergent post-war poetic voices of his own generation, who, unlike Char, Artaud, Michaux, or Ponge, had littleprospect of being published, doggedly pursuing their artwithout public recognition, in the shadow of the already verymuch moribund formsofResistance and Surrealist writing. Far removed from the limelight, forming no identifiable group, these poets developed highly individual practices...