The Columbia History of Twentieth-century French Thought

The Columbia History of Twentieth-century French Thought
Author :
Publisher : Columbia University Press
Total Pages : 820
Release :
ISBN-10 : 0231107900
ISBN-13 : 9780231107907
Rating : 4/5 (00 Downloads)

Synopsis The Columbia History of Twentieth-century French Thought by : Lawrence D. Kritzman

This valuable reference is an authoritative guide to 20th century French thought. It considers the intellectual figures, movements and publications that helped define fields as diverse as history, psychoanalysis, film, philosophy, and economics.

Looking for Heroes in Postwar France

Looking for Heroes in Postwar France
Author :
Publisher : Dartmouth
Total Pages : 264
Release :
ISBN-10 : UOM:39015037866228
ISBN-13 :
Rating : 4/5 (28 Downloads)

Synopsis Looking for Heroes in Postwar France by : Neal Oxenhandler

. Oxenhandler begins with his first Atlantic crossing, as a GI in World War II, then recounts his postwar return when traces of these writers were still intact. "I could walk down their streets, read their books, interview their friends." Now from the perspective of five decades he contemplates the contributions of each figure, both to intellectual history and to his own awakening.

Mirrors of Destruction

Mirrors of Destruction
Author :
Publisher : Oxford University Press, USA
Total Pages : 313
Release :
ISBN-10 : 9780195077230
ISBN-13 : 0195077237
Rating : 4/5 (30 Downloads)

Synopsis Mirrors of Destruction by : Omer Bartov

He then examines the pacifist reaction in interwar France to show how it contributed to a climate of collaboration with dictatorship and mass murder.

Political Survivors

Political Survivors
Author :
Publisher : Cornell University Press
Total Pages : 423
Release :
ISBN-10 : 9781501732812
ISBN-13 : 1501732811
Rating : 4/5 (12 Downloads)

Synopsis Political Survivors by : Emma Kuby

In 1949, as Cold War tensions in Europe mounted, French intellectual and former Buchenwald inmate David Rousset called upon fellow concentration camp survivors to denounce the Soviet Gulag as a "hallucinatory repetition" of Nazi Germany's most terrible crime. In Political Survivors, Emma Kuby tells the riveting story of what followed his appeal, as prominent members of the wartime Resistance from throughout Western Europe united to campaign against the continued existence of inhumane internment systems around the world. The International Commission against the Concentration Camp Regime brought together those originally deported for acts of anti-Nazi political activity who believed that their unlikely survival incurred a duty to bear witness for other victims. Over the course of the next decade, these pioneering activists crusaded to expose political imprisonment, forced labor, and other crimes against humanity in Franco's Spain, Maoist China, French Algeria, and beyond. Until now, the CIA's secret funding of Rousset's movement has remained in the shadows. Kuby reveals this clandestine arrangement between European camp survivors and American intelligence agents. She also brings to light how Jewish Holocaust victims were systematically excluded from Commission membership – a choice that fueled the group's rise, but also helped lead to its premature downfall. The history that she unearths provides a striking new vision of how wartime memory shaped European intellectual life and ideological struggle after 1945, showing that the key lessons Western Europeans drew from the war centered on "the camp," imagined first and foremost as a site of political repression rather than ethnic genocide. Political Survivors argues that Cold War dogma and acrimony, tied to a distorted understanding of WWII's chief atrocities, overshadowed the humanitarian possibilities of the nascent anti-concentration camp movement as Europe confronted the violent decolonizing struggles of the 1950s.

Albert Camus

Albert Camus
Author :
Publisher : Cornell University Press
Total Pages : 195
Release :
ISBN-10 : 9780801462375
ISBN-13 : 0801462371
Rating : 4/5 (75 Downloads)

Synopsis Albert Camus by : Robert D. Zaretsky

Like many others of my generation, I first read Camus in high school. I carried him in my backpack while traveling across Europe, I carried him into (and out of) relationships, and I carried him into (and out of) difficult periods of my life. More recently, I have carried him into university classes that I have taught, coming out of them with a renewed appreciation of his art. To be sure, my idea of Camus thirty years ago scarcely resembles my idea of him today. While my admiration and attachment to his writings remain as great as they were long ago, the reasons are more complicated and critical.—Robert Zaretsky On October 16, 1957, Albert Camus was dining in a small restaurant on Paris's Left Bank when a waiter approached him with news: the radio had just announced that Camus had won the Nobel Prize for Literature. Camus insisted that a mistake had been made and that others were far more deserving of the honor than he. Yet Camus was already recognized around the world as the voice of a generation—a status he had achieved with dizzying speed. He published his first novel, The Stranger, in 1942 and emerged from the war as the spokesperson for the Resistance and, although he consistently rejected the label, for existentialism. Subsequent works of fiction (including the novels The Plague and The Fall), philosophy (notably, The Myth of Sisyphus and The Rebel), drama, and social criticism secured his literary and intellectual reputation. And then on January 4, 1960, three years after accepting the Nobel Prize, he was killed in a car accident. In a book distinguished by clarity and passion, Robert Zaretsky considers why Albert Camus mattered in his own lifetime and continues to matter today, focusing on key moments that shaped Camus's development as a writer, a public intellectual, and a man. Each chapter is devoted to a specific event: Camus's visit to Kabylia in 1939 to report on the conditions of the local Berber tribes; his decision in 1945 to sign a petition to commute the death sentence of collaborationist writer Robert Brasillach; his famous quarrel with Jean-Paul Sartre in 1952 over the nature of communism; and his silence about the war in Algeria in 1956. Both engaged and engaging, Albert Camus: Elements of a Life is a searching companion to a profoundly moral and lucid writer whose works provide a guide for those perplexed by the absurdity of the human condition and the world's resistance to meaning.

Simone Weil

Simone Weil
Author :
Publisher : SUNY Press
Total Pages : 164
Release :
ISBN-10 : 0791442241
ISBN-13 : 9780791442241
Rating : 4/5 (41 Downloads)

Synopsis Simone Weil by : Joan Dargan

Situates Weil’s writing within the French literary tradition, and recognizes her as a master stylist.

Encyclopedia of Modern Jewish Culture

Encyclopedia of Modern Jewish Culture
Author :
Publisher : Routledge
Total Pages : 128
Release :
ISBN-10 : 9781134428649
ISBN-13 : 1134428642
Rating : 4/5 (49 Downloads)

Synopsis Encyclopedia of Modern Jewish Culture by : Glenda Abramson

The Encyclopedia of Modern Jewish Culture is an extensively updated revision of the very successful Companion to Jewish Culture published in 1989 and has now been updated throughout. Experts from all over the world contribute entries ranging from 200 to 1000 words broadly, covering the humanities, arts, social sciences, sport and popular culture, and 5000-word essays contextualize the shorter entries, and provide overviews to aspects of culture in the Jewish world. Ideal for student and general readers, the articles and biographies have been written by scholars and academics, musicians, artists and writers, and the book now contains up-to-date bibliographies, suggestions for further reading, comprehensive cross referencing, and a full index. This is a resource, no student of Jewish history will want to go without.

Character

Character
Author :
Publisher : University of Chicago Press
Total Pages : 177
Release :
ISBN-10 : 9780226658667
ISBN-13 : 022665866X
Rating : 4/5 (67 Downloads)

Synopsis Character by : Amanda Anderson

Over the last few decades, character-based criticism has been seen as either naive or obsolete. But now questions of character are attracting renewed interest. Making the case for a broad-based revision of our understanding of character, Character rethinks these questions from the ground up. Is it really necessary to remind literary critics that characters are made up of words? Must we forbid identification with characters? Does character-discussion force critics to embrace humanism and outmoded theories of the subject? Across three chapters, leading scholars Amanda Anderson, Rita Felski, and Toril Moi reimagine and renew literary studies by engaging in a conversation about character. Moi returns to the fundamental theoretical assumptions that convinced literary scholars to stop doing character-criticism, and shows that they cannot hold. Felski turns to the question of identification and draws out its diverse strands, as well as its persistence in academic criticism. Anderson shows that character-criticism illuminates both the moral life of characters, and our understanding of literary form. In offering new perspectives on the question of fictional character, this thought-provoking book makes an important intervention in literary studies.

Modigliani

Modigliani
Author :
Publisher : HMH
Total Pages : 309
Release :
ISBN-10 : 9780544391215
ISBN-13 : 0544391217
Rating : 4/5 (15 Downloads)

Synopsis Modigliani by : Jeffrey Meyers

A biographer explores the artist’s tragic life, and transcendent work, in early twentieth-century Paris—“a vibrant portrait of a deeply unhappy man” (Publishers Weekly). In 1920, at the age of thirty-five, Amedeo Modigliani died in poverty and neglect in Paris, much like a figure out of La Bohéme. His life had been as dramatic as his death. An Italian Jew from a bourgeois family, “Modi” had a weakness for drink, hashish, and the many women—including the Russian poet Anna Akhmatova—who were drawn to his good looks. His painting thrived on chaos, but his bohemian lifestyle, combined with a youthful case of tuberculosis, eventually took a fatal toll. His friends included Picasso, Utrillo, Soutine, and other important artists of his day, yet his own work stood apart, generating little interest while he lived. Today’s art world, however, acknowledges him as a master whose limited oeuvre—sculptures, portraits, and some of the most appealing nudes in the whole of modern art—cannot satisfy collectors’ demand. With a lively but judicious hand, biographer Jeffrey Meyers sketches Modigliani and the art he produced, illuminating not only this little-known figure but also the painters, writers, lovers, and others who inhabited early twentieth-century Paris with him.

The Mystery and the World

The Mystery and the World
Author :
Publisher : Lutterworth Press
Total Pages : 392
Release :
ISBN-10 : 9780718844530
ISBN-13 : 071884453X
Rating : 4/5 (30 Downloads)

Synopsis The Mystery and the World by : Maria Clara Bingemer

In The Mystery and the World, Maria Clara Bingemer explores how the place of religion in society has dramatically shifted since the Enlightenment. The modern era is characterised by a major change in humanity's fundamental desires that means that reason has taken the place of faith. Human beings, in their ongoing search for a scientific understanding of the world, have drifted away from seeking any essence of transcendence in their lives. Bingemer examines this transition and how, especially inthe postmodern era, it has led to technology and superficial happiness becoming all-important as opposed to the more sacred sense of contentment that governed us for centuries prior to the Enlightenment. In her discussion, however, Bingemer demonstrates that we as humans have not lost our innate desire to believe in a higher power and that, even in our world of instant satisfaction, we still need to fill the void left by religion. Through well-researched analysis of the modern era and discussion of some of the mystics of more recent times, she reveals to readers how our religious belief, whilst changed, is not dead and is still an important aspect of our existence.