Figures of Alterity: French Realism and Its Others (review)

In his latest book, Lawrence Schehr returns to the canon of French realism to examine discourses of alterity—what he defines as “the other” or “the previously unrepresented”—in the works of Balzac, Flaubert, Zola, Mirbeau, Proust and Gide (13). Following Lyotard, Schehr defines the “figure” as “the mark of the other that has not settled into a fixed textual structure,” and examines various figures of alterity (women, Jews, homosexuals, among others) in selected works by these nineteenth- and twentieth-century French writers (30). In this study, Schehr illustrates how the realist project aims to incorporate figures of alterity into the dominant narrative fold, thereby normalizing them through a pre-existing representational system and literary convention. However, he [End Page 183] convincingly demonstrates throughout the book how these figures enter into the narrative space in ways that constantly destabilize the “male-centered…white, Christian, Western and straight” world of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries (ix-x).