French Lessons
Title | French Lessons PDF eBook |
Author | Alice Kaplan |
Publisher | University of Chicago Press |
Pages | 239 |
Release | 2018-04-19 |
Genre | Biography & Autobiography |
ISBN | 022656648X |
“[A] cultural odyssey, a brave attempt to articulate the compulsions that drove [Kaplan] to embrace foreignness in order to become truly herself.” —The Washington Post Book World Brilliantly uniting the personal and the critical, French Lessons is a powerful autobiographical experiment. It tells the story of an American woman escaping into the French language and of a scholar and teacher coming to grips with her history of learning. In spare, midwestern prose, by turns intimate and wry, Kaplan describes how, as a student in a Swiss boarding school and later in a junior year abroad in Bordeaux, she passionately sought the French “r,” attentively honed her accent, and learned the idioms of her French lover. When, as a graduate student, her passion for French culture turned to the elegance and sophistication of its intellectual life, she found herself drawn to the language and style of the novelist Louis-Ferdinand Celine. At the same time, she was repulsed by his anti-Semitism. At Yale in the late 70s, during the heyday of deconstruction she chose to transgress its apolitical purity and work on a subject “that made history impossible to ignore”: French fascist intellectuals. Kaplan’s discussion of the “de Man affair” —the discovery that her brilliant and charismatic Yale professor had written compromising articles for the pro-Nazi Belgian press—and her personal account of the paradoxes of deconstruction are among the most compelling available on this subject. French Lessons belongs in the company of Sartre’s Words and the memoirs of Nathalie Sarraute, Annie Ernaux, and Eva Hoffman. No book so engrossingly conveys both the excitement of learning and the moral dilemmas of the intellectual life.
2000 Lectures and Memoirs
Title | 2000 Lectures and Memoirs PDF eBook |
Author | British Academy |
Publisher | Proceedings of the British Aca |
Pages | 736 |
Release | 2001 |
Genre | Biography & Autobiography |
ISBN | 9780197262597 |
Volume 111 of the Proceedings of the British Academy contains 12 British Academy lectures and 17 obituaries of Fellows of the British Academy.
Memoir of a Race Traitor
Title | Memoir of a Race Traitor PDF eBook |
Author | Mab Segrest |
Publisher | South End Press |
Pages | 294 |
Release | 1994 |
Genre | Civil rights movements |
ISBN | 9780896084742 |
'Courageous and daring, this work documents the reality that political solidarity, forged in struggle, can exist across difference.' bell hooks
Biographical Memoirs of Fellows
Title | Biographical Memoirs of Fellows PDF eBook |
Author | British Academy |
Publisher | Proceedings of the British Aca |
Pages | 406 |
Release | 2004 |
Genre | Great Britain |
ISBN | 9780197263204 |
Volume 124 of the 'Proceedings of the British Academy' contains 19 obituaries of recently deceased Fellows of the British Academy.
The Anglo-Saxon State
Title | The Anglo-Saxon State PDF eBook |
Author | James Campbell |
Publisher | A&C Black |
Pages | 340 |
Release | 2000-01-01 |
Genre | History |
ISBN | 9781852851767 |
These essays make a case for how unified and well-governed Anglo-Saxon England was, and how numerous and wealthy its inhabitants were.
Religion, Supernaturalism, the Paranormal and Pseudoscience
Title | Religion, Supernaturalism, the Paranormal and Pseudoscience PDF eBook |
Author | Homayun Sidky |
Publisher | Anthem Press |
Pages | 520 |
Release | 2019-11-30 |
Genre | Social Science |
ISBN | 1785271636 |
"Religion, Supernaturalism, the Paranormal, and Pseudoscience" provides a comprehensive rejoinder to the challenges posed to science, scientific anthropology, evolutionary theory and rationality by the advocates of supernatural, paranormal, and pseudoscientific perspectives and modes of thought associated with the current rise of irrationalism, antiintellectualism, and emboldened religious fundamentalism and violence. Drawing upon H. Sidky’s scientific anthropological background and ethnographic field research of supernatural and paranormal beliefs and practices in several cultures over three decades, the book answers several important questions: Why do humans have a proclivity for the supernatural and paranormal thinking? Why has humanity remained shackled to sets of ideas inherited from a violent past that have no basis in reality and which bestow an illusionary solace, promote bloodshed, endless cruelties and fervent hatreds, and have come at a high cost? Why have ancient superstitions been held as sacred, inviolate truths while other aspects of the archaic belief systems of which they were a part have long been discarded? Why have not humans outgrown religion and paranormal beliefs?
Memoirs from the Women's Prison
Title | Memoirs from the Women's Prison PDF eBook |
Author | Nawāl Saʻdāwī |
Publisher | Univ of California Press |
Pages | 220 |
Release | 1994-11-18 |
Genre | Biography & Autobiography |
ISBN | 9780520088887 |
"If Kafka had been a feminist, his prisoner might have had Nawal el Sa'adawi's feistiness, maybe, like her, he would have hoed a prison garden, led veiled and unveiled cellmates in rebellious calisthenics, strategized with a murderess to foil state illogic. This book gives me hope, even makes me laugh."—Cynthia Enloe, author of The Morning After