French Literary Fascism

French Literary Fascism PDF Author: David Carroll
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 0691223033
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 309

Get Book Here

Book Description
This is the first book to provide a sustained critical analysis of the literary-aesthetic dimension of French fascism--the peculiarly French form of what Walter Benjamin called the fascist "aestheticizing of politics." Focusing first on three important extremist nationalist writers at the turn of the century and then on five of the most visible fascist intellectuals in France in the 1930s, David Carroll shows how both traditional and modern concepts of art figure in the elaboration of fascist ideology--and in the presentation of fascism as an art of the political. Carroll is concerned with the internal relations of fascism and literature--how literary fascists conceived of politics as a technique for fashioning a unified people and transforming the disparate elements of society into an organic, totalized work of art. He explores the logic of such aestheticizing, as well as the assumptions about art, literature, and culture at the basis of both the aesthetics and politics of French literary fascists. His book reveals how not only classical humanism but also modern aesthetics that defend the autonomy and integrity of literature became models for xenophobic forms of nationalism and extreme "cultural" forms of anti-Semitism. A cogent analysis of the ideological function of literature and culture in fascism, this work helps us see the ramifications of thinking of literature or art as the truth or essence of politics.

French Literary Fascism

French Literary Fascism PDF Author: David Carroll
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 0691223033
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 309

Get Book Here

Book Description
This is the first book to provide a sustained critical analysis of the literary-aesthetic dimension of French fascism--the peculiarly French form of what Walter Benjamin called the fascist "aestheticizing of politics." Focusing first on three important extremist nationalist writers at the turn of the century and then on five of the most visible fascist intellectuals in France in the 1930s, David Carroll shows how both traditional and modern concepts of art figure in the elaboration of fascist ideology--and in the presentation of fascism as an art of the political. Carroll is concerned with the internal relations of fascism and literature--how literary fascists conceived of politics as a technique for fashioning a unified people and transforming the disparate elements of society into an organic, totalized work of art. He explores the logic of such aestheticizing, as well as the assumptions about art, literature, and culture at the basis of both the aesthetics and politics of French literary fascists. His book reveals how not only classical humanism but also modern aesthetics that defend the autonomy and integrity of literature became models for xenophobic forms of nationalism and extreme "cultural" forms of anti-Semitism. A cogent analysis of the ideological function of literature and culture in fascism, this work helps us see the ramifications of thinking of literature or art as the truth or essence of politics.

French Peasant Fascism

French Peasant Fascism PDF Author: Robert O. Paxton
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
ISBN: 0195111893
Category : Fascism
Languages : en
Pages : 257

Get Book Here

Book Description
In 1920s France the far-right peasantry wanted an authoritarian and agrarian society. This study examines their singular lack of success and the enduring French perception of themselves as a peasant nation.

The Collaborator

The Collaborator PDF Author: Alice Kaplan
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 9780226424149
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 340

Get Book Here

Book Description
Relates the story of the only French writer to be executed for treason during World War II, from his rise during the 1930s to his trial and death in front of a firing squad.

The French Right Between the Wars

The French Right Between the Wars PDF Author: Samuel Kalman
Publisher: Berghahn Books
ISBN: 1782382410
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 274

Get Book Here

Book Description
During the interwar years France experienced severe political polarization. At the time many observers, particularly on the left, feared that the French right had embraced fascism, generating a fierce debate that has engaged scholars for decades, but has also obscured critical changes in French society and culture during the 1920s and 1930s. This collection of essays shifts the focus away from long-standing controversies in order to examine various elements of the French right, from writers to politicians, social workers to street fighters, in their broader social, cultural, and political contexts. It offers a wide-ranging reassessment of the structures, mentalities, and significance of various conservative and extremist organizations, deepening our understanding of French and European history in a troubled yet fascinating era.

French Lessons

French Lessons PDF Author: Alice Kaplan
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 022656648X
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 239

Get Book Here

Book Description
“[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.

Otto Abetz and His Paris Acolytes

Otto Abetz and His Paris Acolytes PDF Author: Martin Mauthner
Publisher: Liverpool University Press
ISBN: 9781845197841
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 0

Get Book Here

Book Description
Before Hitler came to power, Otto Abetz was a left-wing Francophile teacher in provincial Germany, mobilising young French and German idealists to work together for peace through Franco-German reconciliation and a united Europe. Abetz married a French girl but, after 1933, succumbed to the Nazi sirens. Ribbentrop recruited him as his expert on France, tasking him with soothing the nervous French as Hitler turned Germany into a war machine. Abetz built up a network of opinion-moulding French men and women who admired the Nazis and detested the Bolsheviks, and he encouraged them to use their pens to highlight Hitler's triumphs. In 1939, France expelled Abetz as a Nazi agent but the following year he returned in triumph with the German army as an ambassador in Paris, appointed by Hitler. During the war, Abetz (apart from 'securing' works of art and playing a role in the deportation of Jews) manoeuvred three of his French publicist friends-Jean Luchaire, Fernand de Brinon, Drieu la Rochelle-into key positions from where they could laud Nazi achievements and denigrate the Resistance. A prime question the author addresses is why these writers and two others, Jules Romains and Bertrand de Jouvenel (all of whom had close Jewish family connections)supported the Nazi ideology. At the war's end, Drieu commited suicide, while Luchaire and Brinon were tried and executed as traitors. Abetz, charged with war crimes, pleaded that he saved France from being 'Polonized, ' but a French court found him guilty and imprisoned him. He was released early but died in a mysterious car crash-a saboteur being suspected of having tampered with the steering. Subject: Literature, Politics, Fascism

Avant-Garde Fascism

Avant-Garde Fascism PDF Author: Mark Antliff
Publisher: Duke University Press
ISBN: 9780822340348
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 380

Get Book Here

Book Description
An investigation of the central role that theories of the visual arts and creativity played in the development of fascism in France between 1909 and 1939.

Nationalism, Anti-semitism, and Fascism in France

Nationalism, Anti-semitism, and Fascism in France PDF Author: Michel Winock
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780804732871
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 351

Get Book Here

Book Description
In a wide-ranging set of essays on political, literary, and cultural figures, this book traces the history of nationalism in France in all its permutations?its myths, obsessions, possibilities, and dangers.

French Writers and the Politics of Complicity

French Writers and the Politics of Complicity PDF Author: Richard J. Golsan
Publisher: JHU Press
ISBN: 9780801882586
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 222

Get Book Here

Book Description
Focusing on the political commitments of three French writers who collaborated with the Vichy Regime and Nazi Germany during World War II, and on those of three leading French intellectuals of the 1990s whose misplaced political idealism led them to support xenophobic, authoritarian regimes and dangerous historical revisionisms, Richard J. Golsan reexamines the notion of political commitment or engagement in two difficult periods in modern French history. Discussing the fiction, essays, and journalism of Henry de Montherlant, Jean Giono, and Alphonse de Châteaubriant, Golsan explores the complexity of artistic and intellectual collaboration during the German Occupation. He demonstrates that, in this context, complicity with political evil often derived from "nonpolitical" motives including sexual orientation, antimodern aesthetics, and dangerously skewed religious beliefs. Turning to the post–cold war era of the 1990s, Golsan examines the philosopher Alain Finkielkraut's support for Croatian independence, the "mediologist" Régis Debray's pro-Serb stance during the bombing of Kosovo, and the historian Stéphane Courtois's revisionist comparison of Nazi and Communist crimes during the 1997 debate surrounding the publication of The Black Book of Communism. In these three cases, laudable motives—and misguided historical comparisons with Vichy, Nazism, and the Occupation period that marked the political and intellectual discourses of France in the 1990s—resulted, paradoxically, in antidemocratic engagements profoundly at odds with the original motivations behind these intellectuals' commitments. In each of these case studies, political complicity derives from a combination of passions and ideals—whether positive or negative, emotional or intellectual—as well as a desire to make the present conform to a particular and generally skewed vision of the past. The full implications of these involvements are neither fully grasped nor understood by their authors, either through lack of objectivity, rationality, or imagination or through willful ignorance. The results are always unfortunate and often disastrous. Considered together, these six intellectuals serve as sobering reminders that political commitments are never as simple or straightforward as they seem and that admirable motives for political involvement can have dangerous and destructive consequences in historical practice.

Albert Camus the Algerian

Albert Camus the Algerian PDF Author: David Carroll
Publisher: Columbia University Press
ISBN: 0231511760
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 257

Get Book Here

Book Description
In these original readings of Albert Camus' novels, short stories, and political essays, David Carroll concentrates on Camus' conflicted relationship with his Algerian background and finds important critical insights into questions of justice, the effects of colonial oppression, and the deadly cycle of terrorism and counterterrorism that characterized the Algerian War and continues to surface in the devastation of postcolonial wars today. During France's "dirty war" in Algeria, Camus called for an end to the violence perpetrated against civilians by both France and the Algerian National Liberation Front (FLN) and supported the creation of a postcolonial, multicultural, and democratic Algeria. His position was rejected by most of his contemporaries on the Left and has, ironically, earned him the title of colonialist sympathizer as well as the scorn of important postcolonial critics. Carroll rescues Camus' work from such criticism by emphasizing the Algerian dimensions of his literary and philosophical texts and by highlighting in his novels and short stories his understanding of both the injustice of colonialism and the tragic nature of Algeria's struggle for independence. By refusing to accept that the sacrifice of innocent human lives can ever be justified, even in the pursuit of noble political goals, and by rejecting simple, ideological binaries (West vs. East, Christian vs. Muslim, "us" vs. "them," good vs. evil), Camus' work offers an alternative to the stark choices that characterized his troubled times and continue to define our own. "What they didn't like, was the Algerian, in him," Camus wrote of his fictional double in The First Man. Not only should "the Algerian" in Camus be "liked," Carroll argues, but the Algerian dimensions of his literary and political texts constitute a crucial part of their continuing interest. Carroll's reading also shows why Camus' critical perspective has much to contribute to contemporary debates stemming from the global "war on terror."