French Lessons : A Memoir

Resumen del libro

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. Kaplan begins with a distinctly American quest for an imaginary France of the intelligence.

But soon her infatuation with all things French comes up against the dark, unimagined recesses of French political and cultural life. The daughter of a Jewish lawyer who prosecuted Nazi war criminals at Nuremburg, Kaplan grew up in the 1960s in the Midwest. After her father's death when she was seven, French became her way of "leaving home" and finding herself in another language and culture.

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.

Biografía del autor

Alice Kaplan (Minneapolis, 1954) es una crítica literaria, traductora, historiadora y educadora estadounidense. Es profesora de francés y ex directora del Centro de Humanidades Whitney de la Universidad de Yale. Sus áreas de investigación incluyen la autobiografía y la memoria, la traducción en teoría y práctica, la literatura y el derecho, la literatura francesa del siglo XX, los estudios culturales franceses y la cultura francesa de posguerra. Actualmente forma parte del consejo editorial de South Atlantic Quarterly y es miembro de la Academia Estadounidense de las Artes y las Ciencias. Es autora de Reproductions of Banality: Fascism, Literature, and French Intellectual Life (1986); French Lessons: A Memoir (1993); The Collaborator: The Trial and Execution of Robert Brasillach (2000) finalista de los prestigiosos premios estadounidenses National Book Award y National Book Critics Circle Award , y ganador del Los Angeles Times Book Award (2001) ; The Interpreter (2005), sobre la injusticia racial en el ejército estadounidense; y Dreaming in French (2012), sobre los años parisinos de Jacqueline Bouvier, Susan Sontag y Angela Davis traducida al francés como Trois Américaines à Paris: Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy, Susan Sontag, Angela Davis .