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273.
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274.More information
After having explained the role of the "Quebec myth" of "youth, wealth and minority" in the growing interest of European researchers in studying Quebec, the author provides a summary of the current state of Quebec Studies in Belgium. These are concentrated in two principal fields, namely the social and historical sciences on the one hand, and literature on the other. They are also organized along two distinct models. The first model is that of the network and is specific to Literary studies, which are more homogeneous and developed than the other disciplines. This model keeps Belgian, European and Quebec researchers in contact, without the last group always being at the centre, or even involved in the work undertaken. The second model is a star-shaped one whereby Belgian and European researchers never meet each other except at the centre, namely in Quebec. The author also provides an accounting of non-scientific achievements.
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277.More information
We know the fate history reserves for biographical criticism: condemned without appeal since Proust, it is based on the illusion that the work “belongs” to its author, that the man is the work. Now, if there was indeed a large measure of blindness in the work of Sainte-Beuve, we moderns have nonetheless realized, during the last twenty or thirty years, that we have no doubt been too quick to disregard the author and establish in his place a pure “scriptural authority” that is every bit as mythical as the writer himself. Agreeing, along with Alain Brunn, that “writing about an author's life is a way to come to a decision about his work, to choose to root the significance of the text in the author's life” (L'auteur, 2001), the writer of this article focuses on two works by Michel Schneider: Maman (1999), on Proust, and Baudelaire, les années profondes (1994), both of which constitute what may be termed “critical biographies.” The intention is, on one hand, to grasp how in these two biographical works the biographer comes to explain his subject's work and, on the other, to understand how critical discourse within a biographical context is forced to take the author—this “reprobate” of literary modernity—into account.