Genetic Criticism: Texts and Avant-textes (review)

Genetic Criticism: Texts and Avant-textes introduces the French revolution in textual criticism to the English-speaking world. Unlike traditional textual criticism, genetic criticism is not devoted to establishing a stable, published text that strictly follows only the authorial intention as its guiding principle. e book, an historical introduction and eleven translations of previously published essays, represents a new critical movement in France that seeks to discover new interpretive possibilities in the history of a given text, “turning manuscript study,” as the dust jacket tells us, “into a recognized form of literary criticism.” Genetic criticism explores the interpretive possibilities of what they call the “avant-texte,” which, again, the dust-jacket blurb describes as “a critical gathering of a writer’s notes, sketches, drafts, manuscripts, typescripts, proofs, and correspondence.” With the explicit goal of institutionalizing a critical movement, the introduction to the book provides an excellent account of the history or genesis of genetic criticism and the way it co-operates with other forms of literary analysis such as linguistics, psychoanalysis, socio-criticism, and deconstruction. What makes this book such a stimulating read is that it shows the way genetic criticism defers the material closure of a book or work and the effects of that deferral. e critical sophistication of genetic criticism strikes the reader of this book right away: the essays, generally speaking, move back and forth from theoretical discussions of the methodology of genetic criticism to studies of individual authors, like Marcel Proust, Henri-Marie Beyle Stendhal, and Gustave Flaubert. While reading the book, nevertheless, one begins to notice various attempts to avoid the charge of naïve positivism, despite the book’s repeated appeals to science. For instance, Pierre-Marc de Biasi’s essay, “Toward a Science of Literature: Manuscript Analysis,” argues that genetic criticism requires the establishment of a defined object in order for its empirical imperative to be fulfiled. Other essays in the book are similarly haunted by the occasional intrusion of scientific positivism that attends the careful treatment of material objects such as a writer’s notes and manuscripts. Philippe Lejeune’s essay, on the other hand, is the most explicit attempt to restrain the geneticist’s move toward a “science of literature” by appealing to “metaphors of detective investigation, archaeology, and psychological novels for genetic research” (). e