Qu’est-ce qu’un espace littéraire? (review)

No mere set of loosely related essays, this useful collaborative volume offers a well-balanced collection of responses to the question posed by its title. The definitions of literary space put forward cover a wide range of literary texts and cultural documents – from Classical Rome (Juvenal) or Gabon (the mvett epics), through French literature of the 17th, 19th and 20th centuries, up to works by the Mexican writers Fuentes and Aguilar, or contemporary novels from South Africa, Mauritius, and Japan. The ten contributors all underscore the aptness of Blanchot’s expression “literary space” for understanding the ways in which literature questions the foundations of social space, whether political or cultural. Several contributors also examine the ways in which writers engage their readers in collaborative projects whose range exceeds the rule-governed “fields” of activity studied by sociology, thus giving literary space its own cohesion. The volume is carefully structured around a set of questions, serving as sub-headings to its three sections: 1. Do individual texts give rise to a space of literature that is independent from them? 2. What links literary space to the spaces defined by geography, politics, sociology, or a people’s imaginary? 3. Can literary space be conceived as a borderline between the aforementioned zones and thus as a way of bringing these into new working partnerships?