INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE:
"Criticism in the Press and Literary Journals of French Expression, 1920-1945"
November 13 and 14, 2003
University of Franche-Comté (Besançon)
Program
Henri BÉHAR (Sorbonne Nouvelle-Paris 3): "Literary Criticism in Surrealist Journals 1924-1939"
Stéphane CHAUDIER (University of Saint-Étienne): "The Apocalypse in Journals: The Last Days of Emmanuel Berl and Pierre Drieu La Rochelle"
Martyn CORNICK (University of Birmingham): "Political Criticism in the Nouvelle Revue Française during the Interwar Period"
René GODENNE (Catholic University of Louvain-la-Neuve): "Marcel Arland in the NRF (1929-1939)"
Catherine HELBERT (Sorbonne-Paris 4): "The Political-Literary Weekly Marianne"
Jacques LECARME (Sorbonne Nouvelle-Paris 3): "Literary Criticism in the NRF (1940-1943)"
Jean LECLERCQ (Catholic University of Louvain-la-Neuve): "La Nouvelle Journée by Paul Archambault"
Daniel MAGGETTI (University of Lausanne): "Ramuz in the Gazette de Lausanne: The Beginnings of the Artist's Essay"
Anne MATHIEU (University of Nantes): "Paul Nizan, Literary Critic in 1935 in the Journal Monde"
Nicolas MONSEU (Catholic University of Louvain-la-Neuve): "When Criticism Becomes Philosophical: Maxime Chastaing and Letters in Esprit"
Alain SCHAFFNER (University of Picardy, Amiens): "The Rhine Review by Alexandre Vialatte (between 1920 and 1930)"
Nicolas SURLAPIERRE (Matisse Museum Le Cateau-Cambrésis): "La Bête Noire by Tériade (1935-1936): Diptychs versus Serials"
Yves THOMAS (Trent University, Peterborough-Canada): "Louis Aragon and the 'Selected Books' Column in the Journal Littérature"

Organizers:
Bruno Curatolo and Jacques Poirier
Address: University of Franche-Comté (Besançon) - see on a map

Download my contribution PDF

Text also appears in H. Béhar, Ondes de choc, Lausanne, L'Age d'Homme, 2010, pp. 221-234.

When they review literary production, contemporary columnists cultivate a soft consensus and too often avoid "mood criticism." It was not always so. From the "Roaring Twenties" to the turn of 1970, a period when the avant-gardes played a leading role, when literature sparked real debates and journals experienced their golden age, columnists did not hesitate to take sides, in the name of a literary movement (Louis Aragon in La Révolution surréaliste), an ideology (Léon Daudet in L'Action française) or a certain idea of literature (Jean Paulhan in La NRF).

Whereas the critic lets time pass and most often works in sympathy with his subject, the columnist, forced into immediacy, produces an instant—and therefore random—literary history.

Contents:
Reviewing the journals, on the front... of the avant-garde
Aragon and the "Selected Books" column in the journal Littérature
Alexandre Vialatte at La Revue Rhénane (1922-1927)
Literary criticism in surrealist journals (1924-1933)
Literary criticism in L'Action Française through the examination of the "case" of Jean-Jacques Rousseau
Marcel Arland: ten years of criticism at the NRF (1929-1939)
Juste milieu, extrême milieu? Political criticism in the Nouvelle Revue Française in the 1930s
Literary criticism in Marianne
La bête noire: diptychs versus serials
La Nouvelle Journée by Paul Archambault: letters, criticism, politics
Maxime Chastaing and Letters in Esprit: Husserlian cogito and alterity
The apocalypse in journals: The Last Days of Emmanuel Berl and Pierre Drieu La Rochelle
Some newspapers under the Occupation
The invisible hand, the logics of the literary press
The return of prewar writers in the postwar press (1945-1949)
Les Vivants, an ephemeral journal for a necessary literature
A communist critic: Claude Roy's literary column in Libération (1950-1956)
Les Lettres françaises and the publication in France of One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich
Robert Morel, writer, journalist, publisher: "And God in all this?"
Philippe Jacottet, between Newspaper and Semaison
Michel Deguy: the invention of a poetics, first publications in the journals of a writer
André Pieyre de Mandiargues, essayist and critic in the NRF of Jean Paulhan (1953-1967)
Pascal Pia as columnist: between Gustave Lanson and Alphonse Allais
Critical review: Critiques d'un jour (free.fr)

Extract Oxford Univ.
In this survey of literary columns, the editors distinguish between literary critics and literary columnists. The latter are demonstrably subject to the vagaries of social mores, political movements and events, as well as to their own "moods" and passions: the former, described as "classical literary criticism, of the university type [...]", are characterized by greater "neutrality". Yet this book demonstrates that the plethora of literary reviews ("this second-rate writing") that regularly produced columns in the press of the interwar era and beyond displayed a wide range of reactions to the books of the day, from ideologically motivated appreciations (Surrealist reviews, L'Action française) to more considered, objective accounts (Marcel Arland in La Nouvelle Revue Française — René Godenne). In the first contribution, it is contended that the Golden Age of reviews was the era of the avant-gardes. According to Patrice Allain and Gabriel Parnet, the "Bretonian Surrealists" emerged from this period of short-lived (and some longer-lived) journals as the dominant force. Aragon's ideologically biased column, "Selected Books" in Littérature, launched a generation of Surrealist poets (Yves Thomas). In the area of French and German literature, Alexandre Vialatte's work has been unjustly forgotten (Alain Schaffner).

Henri Béhar provides an overview of the approach, methods, and ideological motivations of Surrealist literary criticism in the 1920s. Moving into the 1930s, Paul Renard examines literary criticism in L'Action française in the light of its somewhat ambivalent, but consistent ideological opposition to Rousseau as "public enemy no. 1". In competition with L'Action française, La Bête noire (Nicolas Surlapierre) and Nouvelle Journée (Jean Leclercq) are presented as antifascist reviews, and Martyn Cornick reveals the extent to which the NRF became an ideological battleground, hovering occasionally between "the juste milieu" and "the extrême milieu".

Catherine Helbert analyses the authors, reviewers and critics of Marianne. Nicolas Monseu expounds lucidly on the complex relationship between the Husserlian philosophy of alterity and literary criticism in a brief examination of Maxime Chastaing's column in Esprit. There follows the uneasy alliance between Emmanuel Berl and Pierre Drieu la Rochelle in Les Derniers Jours (Stéphane Chaudier), four journals of the Occupation (Bruno Curatolo), a general analysis of the literary press of 1944–1954 (Paul Dirkx), and Blaise Cendrars as a writer of the older generation who emerges at the Liberation at odds with the current of "committed literature" (Laurence Guyon). Grégory Singal and Michèle Touret deal respectively with Claude Roy's columns and Les Vivants, a review founded at the Liberation. Hervé Bismuth investigates the reception in French reviews of Solzhenitsyn's One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich. There follow Robert Morel (Jean-François Seron), the work of poet-reviewers Philippe Jaccottet and Michel Deguy (Alain Paire and Stéphane Baquey), and André Pieyre de Mandiargues's criticism in the NRF (Ivona Tokarska). Jacques Poirier concludes the collection with a portrait of Pascal Pia. This book makes a singular contribution to the study of literary columns. One of its strengths is that it makes an implicit comparison between the "consensual" objectivity of today's literary columns with those examined here, which exhibit a greater partisanship and susceptibility to the external forces of history and of the "moment", and aroused a livelier, if unstable and transient, reaction in readers. It is simply a pity that the typos are numerous and that there is no index.

Further reading: B. Curatolo & A. Schaffner (eds.), La Chronique journalistique des écrivains (1880-2000)