The Crosscurrents Series is designed to foreground comparative studies in
European art and thought, particularly the intersections of literature and phi-
losophy, aesthetics and culture. Without abandoning traditional comparative
methodology, the series is receptive to the latest currents in critical, compara-
tive, and performative theory, especially that generated by the renewed intel-
lectual energy in post-Marxist Europe. It will as well take full cognizance of
the cultural and political realignments of what for the better part of the twenti-
eth century have been two separated and isolated Europes. While Western
Europe is now moving aggressively toward unification in the European Com-
munity, with the breakup of the twentieth century's last colonial empire, the
former Soviet Union, Eastern Europe is subdividing into nationalistic and re-
ligious enclaves with the collapse of the Communist hegemony. The intellec-
tual, cultural, and literary significance of such profound restructuring, how
history will finally rewrite itself, is difficult to anticipate. Having had a fertile
period of modernism snuffed out in an ideological coup not long after the 1917
revolution, the nations of the former Soviet Union have, for instance, been
denied (or spared) the age of Freud, most modernist experiments, and post-
modern fragmentation. While Western Europe continues reaching beyond
Modernism, Eastern Europe may be struggling to reclaim it. Whether a new
art can emerge in the absence--or from the absence--of such forces as shaped
Modernism is one of the intriguing questions of post-Cold War aesthetics.

The series follows Michel Butor's intellectual biography, Transformation in
Writing, with another examination of writing (and so genre) in transforma-
tion, writing reaching beyond the teleology of Modernism, Raylene Ramsay's
The French New Autobiographies: Sarraute, Duras, and Robbe-Grillet. Ramsay
focuses on six "intergeneric rewritings": Nathalie Sarraute's Enfance (Child-
hood) and Tu ne t'aimes pas (You Lack Self-Love), Marguerite Duras' Emily
L. and L'Amant de la Chine du nord, and Alain Robbe-Grillet's Le Miroir qui
revient (The Returning Mirror) and Angélique ou l'enchantement. These post-
modern writers, for whom the Second World War is "the central historical

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