BRÉE, Germaine

Born 2 October 1907, Lasalle, France

Daughter of Walter and Loïs Andrault Brée

Teacher and critic of French language, literature, and culture, Germaine Brée was the first of six children born to her French Protestant mother and the third of eight children born to her British clergyman father. Both Brée's parents were bilingual so she grew up fluent in both languages. She studied at the Jersey Ladies College on the island of Jersey (1917-22), the Ecole Normale at Nîmes (1922-26), the Faculty of Letters at the Sorbonne (1926-31), and Bryn Mawr College (1931-32).

Brée began her teaching career at the Lycée of Oran in Algeria (1932-36) and then returned to Bryn Mawr, where she taught from 1936 to 1953. During World War II, Brée served in the French army as an ambulance driver in North Africa and as an intelligence officer in France. From 1953 to 1960 she was chairperson of the Department of French and head of the Romance Languages Department at New York University, and from 1960 to 1973 she was Vilas Professor of French and a permanent member of the Institute for Research in the Humanities at the University of Wisconsin at Madison. In 1973 she accepted a Kenan professorship in the humanities at Wake Forest University. Brée has received over two dozen honorary degrees and has lectured widely in the U.S., Europe, and Australia. She has been appointed to a large number of national academic and scholarly committees and was president of the Modern Language Association of America in 1975. Brée is the author of numerous books, major anthologies, innumerable articles, introductions, prefaces, and book reviews. Many of her doctoral students have become the leading teacher-scholars of their generation.

What is most characteristic of Brée's criticism is her suspicion that systems tend to mystify rather than clarify. Although she is well versed in all the "isms" that have informed 20th-century French culture, she does not expound a single truth. Rather, she invites her readers and students to remain open to the richness of competing discourses in literary studies. Her books on Proust (1950, 1966), Gide (1953), and Camus (1959) are exemplary introductory studies to the major texts of these writers. Brée always situates the literary text in its cultural context and gives particular attention to its intellectual and ethical preoccupations, but her emphasis is on the text as a literary construct, as a piece of fiction. She insists on the pleasures of reading, the sensuous aspect of literary discourse, and the intellectual reward found in discovering relationships between parts. Her book on Women Writers in France (1973) was one of the first attempts in English to trace the main lines of the feminist debate in France and the position of French women writers vis-á-vis the debate and their craft.

Brée's most impressive published work, Le XXe siécle II, 1920-1970 (1978), is a synthesis of the French cultural scene. It ranges from linguistics and the cinema to cybernetics and molecular biology. The volume is divided into five parts: history, politics, social climate, intellectual currents, and literary movements. The last part is the most original. Brée chooses two figures to illustrate each decade: for the 1940s she chooses Simone de Beauvoir and Albert Camus; for 1950-70 she chooses Marguerite Duras and Claude Simon. Very infrequently does an academic critic who is not explicitly feminist select women writers as part of the mainstream of contemporary literature. It is a sign of Brée's commitment to her own point of view, as well as a sign of her sense of timing. As she did in her study of Camus and Sartre: Crisis and Commitment (1972), Brée reformulates contemporary problems by demystifying them. She is one of the rare literary critics who present both text and context; she views literature both as a game of words and as a human document. Brée is an outstanding representative of the humanist tradition in academic criticism and in teaching.

By the beginning of the 1980s, Brée had established a firm position for herself in the field of French literature. She holds membership in nearly a dozen academic and writing associations, including the Writer's Guild and PEN, and received a National Book Award nomination for Camus and Sartre: Crisis and Commitment. Although retired since 1984 from her position as the Kenan Professor of Humanities at Wake Forest University, Brée has continued to make important contributions to this field. In 1983 she updated and revised her 1978 work, Literature Française, 1920-1970, published in English as Twentieth Century French Literature. This "nimble, if promiscuous, study of literary history," as one critic called it, covers a vast amount of territory. Brée is at her strongest when speaking of the writers she knows well, such as Sartre, Camus, de Beauvoir, and Duras.

In 1990, at the age of eighty-three, Brée published Le Monde Fabuleux de J. M. G. Le Clézio, a study of the French author and his works. Bettina Knapp commented: "Clarity and cogency, two of Germaine Brée's many remarkable characteristics as a critic, serve her well in her latest volume…. The novels…are all explored by Brée in her typically scrupulous manner, underscoring their thematic significance, artistic value, and fascination for young and old."

Brée continued editing and penning forewords and introductions to scholarly volumes into the 1990s, as well as editing a series of translated French poetry books for Wake Forest University Press. As a critic whose reviews and critical essays remained in demand, Brée is in little danger of falling into obscurity. Her early contributions to the field, such as her works on Proust and Gide, are still considered among the most comprehensive and clearly written books on these much discussed authors. Truly a grande dame of French literary study, Brée has continued to provide the academic world with fresh work and to tackle new problems, for which the scholars in her field can be truly grateful.

Other Works:

Du temps perdu au temps retrouvé: Introduction á l'oeuvre de Marcel Proust (1950). Marcel Proust and Deliverance from Time (trans. by C. J. Richards and A. D. Truitt, 1956). André Gide, l'insaisissable Protée: Etude critique de l'oeuvre d'André Gide (1953). An Age of Fiction: The French Novel from Gide to Camus (with M. Guiton, 1957). Camus (1959). Contes et nouvelles: 1950-1960 (with Georges Markow-Totevy, 1961, revised edition published as Contes et nouvelles: 1950-1970). Gide (1963). Albert Camus (1964). Voix d'aujourd'hui (with Micheline Dufau, 1964). The World of Marcel Proust (1966). Essays in Honor of David Lyall Patrick (1971). Women Writers in France: Variations on a Theme (1973)

Bibliography:

Lesage, L., and A.Yon, eds., Dictionnaire des critiques littéraires: Guide de la critique française du XXe siécle (1969). Marks, E., "Germaine Brée: A Partial Portrait," in University Women (1979). Stambolian, G., ed., Twentieth Century French Fiction: Essays for Germaine Brée (1975). Wakeman, J., ed., World Authors (1975).

Reference Works:

CA (1981, 1992). CANR (1981).

Other reference:

NYT (31 July 1983, 9 Dec. 1984). NYTBR (5 Apr. 1959). "Retired Professor a Renaissance Woman," Knight-Ridder/Tribune News Service (1995). Poirot-Delpech, B., "Littérature française 1920-1970," in Le Monde (30 June 1978). Virginia Quarterly Review (Winter 1984). World Literature Today (Autumn 1991).

—ELAINE MARKS

UPDATED BY LISI SCHOENBACH

LEAH J. SPARKS