Content area
Full Text
Jan Miernowski (ed.). Le Sublime et le Grotesque. Geneva: Droz, 2014. Pp. 344.
This book gathers contributions from a conference that took place at the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 2012 about the sublime and the grotesque or rather, to be more precise, about certain problematic moments at which these two notions collide or collapse. The volume builds indirectly on Hugo's comment in the "Préface de Cromwell," quoted by Baldine Saint Girons as an epigraph to her chapter, that in modern poetry "le sublime représentera l'âme," while "[le grotesque] jouera le rôle de la bête humaine" (42). It is this oscillation (to take up Christian Biet's term [122-24]) that the book's eleven extremely rich chapters explore, animated across the centuries by authors as different as Longinus, Montaigne, Flaubert, Nothomb, and (briefly) 2izek.
Although summarizing such a book is always a risk and destined to be unfairly uneven in its selections, the best way to signal this volume's value is to highlight some of its key twists and turns. In the first chapter, "Au-delà du beau: le sublime et le grotesque," the volume's editor defines-without limiting-the scope of the question being asked by studying, in some depth, what the two notions mean for Kant and Baudelaire. He is careful to point out that if "le voyage au-delà du beau, vers les régions où le sublime et le grotesque se frôlent et s'unissent, est une entreprise tentante, mais risquée," the two notions "ne partagent point les mêmes racines" (22), which is a good indication of the value of a conference and a book that bring together specialists of different periods. The second chapter, by Baldine Saint Girons, studies different modes (combat, alliance, fusion intime) by which the grotesque might be thought of...