Le dialogue à la Renaissance: Histoire et poétique by Eva KushnerReview by: Bernd RennerThe Sixteenth Century Journal, Vol. 37, No. 3 (Fall, 2006), pp. 959-960Published by: The Sixteenth Century JournalStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/20478119 .

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Book Reviews 959

away, but hopefully (in a day of ever more straitened institutional budgets) will not curtail library acquisition of this useful and welcome resource.

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Le dialogue a la Renaissance: Histoire et poetique. Eva Kushner. Geneva: Droz, 2004. 312 pp. SF 60.00. ISBN 2-600-00906-X.

REVIEWED BY: Bernd Renner, Brooklyn College and The Graduate Center, CUNY

Eva Kushner is one of the major critics whose work on the Renaissance dialogue over the last three decades (mostly but not exclusively in the field of French literature) has immensely contributed to the renewed interest that this highly complex and intriguing genre has enjoyed lately. It seems only fitting then to gather nineteen of Kushner's most important essays on the dialogue in a volume that constitutes an exemplary overview of scholarship on the genre spanning the last thirty-five years. The nineteen articles are divided into five sec tions ("Aspects historiques;" "Tentatives de periodisation;" "Pour une Poetique et une Esthetique du Dialogue;" "Auteurs;" "Syntheses"), which lends a quite remarkable unity to the collection, a unity that nevertheless does not make up for the lack of a book-length study of the topic that the author herself regrets never having written (7).

The dialogue, as Kushner argues convincingly, was tailor-made for early modern sensi bilities bent on expanding intellectual horizons and thus on questioning the dogmatic truths that dominated late medieval scholastic thought. Even though confrontation of ideas was not entirely absent from these immediate predecessors of Renaissance dialogue (for example, the disputatio), there was a clear lack of dynamic exchange between confronting viewpoints and therefore of any possible synthesis that would illustrate intellectual progress, a synthesis that, in Renaissance dialogue, was left to the reader to achieve. Such was the monologic nature of purely didactic dialogues that more closely resembled treatises with interlocutors being relegated to the role of submissive students. Renaissance man, "situated at the meeting point of pagan antiquity and of Christianity" was almost inevitably thrust into a situation where there was no choice but to adopt "an epistemology of confrontation and quite often of rec onciliation of viewpoints" (112), a situation that naturally favored dialogical thinking and consequently the blossoming of the dialogue as a genre, technique, and attitude. One should also take into account another practical aspect of the open-ended dialogue. In a period as troubled as the sixteenth century, this technique conferred a fair amount of protection on the author as conclusions were to be drawn by the readers. The most subversive dialogues were usually truly dialogical, as for instance the 1537 Cymbalum mundi. It was precisely that open-endedness that made possible the fragmentation of authority, a major characteristic of Renaissance dialogue.

It is the 1550s that Kushner identifies as the climax of the genre. An unprecedented list of masterpieces from authors such as Louis Le Caron, Claude de Taillemont, Pontus de Tyard, Etienne Pasquier, Jacques Peletier du Mans, Guy de Brues, orJacques Tahureau attests to the rich production of the decade in our field. Moreover, the three great classical direc tions of the dialogue-platonic, ciceronian, and lucianesque-are represented (which by itself underlines the wide range of the dialogic metagenre), and all the other main criteria of the genre are respected: concern for mimesis, presentation and confrontation of diverse ideas, opening towards and representation of the Other, as well as multiple dialogic levels (dialogue with fictional interlocutors, readers, classical masters, and the interior sel). This

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960 Sixteenth CenturyJournal XXXVII/3 (2006)

last level shows the importance of the dialogue for the development of the much discussed "subjectivity," since such "inner plurality" (as exemplified by the later Pontus de Tyard for example) stresses a process of growing self-awareness that favors constant change and evolu tion rather than the pursuit of dogmatic and unquestionable truths (297). Despite the impos ing presence of Michel de Montaigne, who is the topic of two of the volume's articles ("Montaigne et le dialogue" and "Monologue et dialogue dans les deux premiers livres des Essais de Montaigne"), it is not surprising then that dialogism is on the retreat in the second half of the sixteenth century, a period which is dominated by the wars of religion in France. Religious dialogue, for example, is descending into the arena of polemic and war (102) and therefore reverts to a role of monologic tool. Openness, exchange, and polyphony (the latter

without anachronistically following Bakhtin's groundbreaking model to the letter, however), those key notions of dialogism are less prominent after 1580. With the exception of Mon taigne, the writers discussed in the section "Auteurs" (Erasmus, Bonaventure Des Periers, Pontus de Tyard, and Pierre de Ronsard) wrote prior to that "decline." The list of famous names, which could also have included Clement Marot, Fran,ois Rabelais, Louise Lab&, and others, underlines once more the attraction that the dialogue in particular and dialogism in general had for the century's authors. This collection of Eva Kushner's articles, along with a rather complete primary and secondary bibliography, will certainly be a useful tool for any one interested in pursuing the study of Renaissance dialogue.

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