Bridging National Fields: Nineteenth-Century French Scholarship in French and American Perspectives

Given the importance of nationalist rhetoric in the 1991-92 polemic that opposed two distinguished nineteenth-century French scholars, Antoine Compagnon and Naomi Schor, a study on the current state of relations between French and American NCFS scholars seemed indicated. The comparative study of two literary journals, NCFS and Romantisme to which the first part of this paper is devoted, was therefore originally intended to refute their pessimistic views on current relations between French and American NCFS scholars. The results of this study, however, led to an unexpected conclusion: the international field of NCFS was actually less likely to provide clues about the stakes of such polemics than the national one. The second part of my paper is therefore devoted to the American academic literary field, or more specifically, to an examination of the function of scholars' pronouncements on their field. (M-PLH)