“Brings the man to life and shows his questions, ideas, and solutions to be every bit as relevant as they were in the 16th century.” —New York Journal of Books Michel de Montaigne embodies the humanist ideal—curious, measured, contemplative yet not unworldly, witty, free of prejudice, and urbane. But what does this French Renaissance philosopher have to tell us about how to think and live today? In forty short, erudite, and lively chapters written over a single summer, Antoine Compagnon seeks answers to that question. In A Summer with Montaigne, Compagnon invites his readers to join him as he strolls through Montaigne’s key contributions to our understanding of what is good and worthwhile in life. This engaging book, then, serves as both an introduction to Montaigne for readers unfamiliar with his work and a refresher for those who are already acquainted with his unique brilliance, vitality, and timeliness. Montaigne’s Essays deal with themes that remain relevant today, from the problems posed by religion, war, power, and friendship to the absurdity of our fixations and peccadillos. Accompanying readers through the Essays, Compagnon never pontificates and is never austere. Rather, he approaches Montaigne with a sense of humor, admiration, and joy. “Agreeably useful reading in any season.” —Library Journal
This book explores the formative period when Scotland acquired the characteristics that enabled it to enter fully into the comity of medieval Christendom. These included a monarchy of a recognizably continental type, a feudal organisation of aristocratic landholding and military service, national boundaries, and a body of settled law and custom.
For a long time, France and its culture have been one and the same. However, of this past glory, all that is left today is navel-gazing, nostalgia and timidity. Covering art, fashion, philosophy, literature and cinema, Donald Morrison argues that French culture no longer has the kind of international standing it once did.
In this elegant, highly readable book, Compagnon confronts the postmodern's co-optation of the modern by tracing paradoxical elements in the aesthetic of the new - particularly the aesthetic and moral contradictions built into the enthusiasm for the new - in the "five paradoxes of modernity": the superstition of the new, the religion of the future, the mania for theory, the appeal to mass culture, and the passion for repudiation.
Marcel Proust once wrote, “There is no longer anybody, not even myself, since I cannot leave my bed, who will go along the Rue du Repos to visit the little Jewish cemetery where my grandfather, following a custom that he never understood, went for so many years to lay a stone on his parents’ grave.” Investigating the origin and significance of this statement, Antoine Compagnon offers new insight into the great author’s underappreciated Jewish side. Compagnon traces Proust’s ties to the French Jewish community, examining his relations with his mother’s successful and assimilated family, the Weils. He explores how French Jews read and responded to Proust’s masterpiece In Search of Lost Time in the 1920s and 1930s. Challenging contemporary critics who perceive self-hatred or even antisemitism in Proust’s work, Compagnon shows that many Jewish intellectuals and young Zionists admired and vigorously debated the novel, some seeing it as a source for pride in their Jewish identity. He also considers Proust’s portrayal of homosexuality and how it relates to notions of Jewishness. A work of remarkable erudition and deep research, Proust, a Jewish Way brings to light the vanished world of Proust’s first Jewish readers and shows how it can illuminate our reading of the great novelist today.
Along with the theoretical or traditionally historical question “What is literature?”, the critical and political question “What can literature do?” begs an answer. What value do contemporary society and culture ascribe to literature? What utility? What role? “My confidence in the future of literature”, wrote Italo Calvino, consists in the knowledge that there are things that only literature can give us, by means specific to it”. Is this still relevant to us today?
An engaging introduction to contemporary debates in literary theory In the late twentieth century, the common sense approach to literature was deemed naïve. Roland Barthes proclaimed the death of the author, and Hillis Miller declared that all interpretation is theoretical. In many a literature department, graduate students spent far more time on Derrida and Foucault than on Shakespeare and Milton. Despite this, common sense approaches to literature—including the belief that literature represents reality and authorial intentions matter—have resisted theory with tenacity. As a result, argues Antoine Compagnon, theorists have gone to extremes, boxed themselves into paradoxes, and distanced others from their ideas. Eloquently assessing the accomplishments and failings of literary theory, Compagnon ultimately defends the methods and goals of a theoretical commitment tempered by the wisdom of common sense. The book is organized not by school of thought but around seven central questions: literariness, the author, the world, the reader, style, history, and value. What makes a work literature? Does fiction imitate reality? Is the reader present in the text? What constitutes style? Is the context in which a work is written important to its apprehension? Are literary values universal? As he examines how theory has wrestled these themes, Compagnon establishes not a simple middle-ground but a state of productive tension between high theory and common sense. The result is a book that will be met with both controversy and sighs of relief.
As a haven for open discussion and investigation, the Collège de France has a special place in the academic world, both in France and abroad. Always in step with the evolution of knowledge, the institution has nonetheless remained true to the spirit of freedom and independence that has characterized it since it was founded in 1530. Over the years, its professors have brought this monument of knowledge into being ; today, three of them have tackled the task of recounting its past and recording its present. Antoine Compagnon, Pierre Corvol and John Scheid provide a behind-the-scenes view of a unique institution that continues to combine tradition and modernity.
For a long time, France and its culture have been one and the same. However, of this past glory, all that is left today is navel-gazing, nostalgia and timidity. Covering art, fashion, philosophy, literature and cinema, Donald Morrison argues that French culture no longer has the kind of international standing it once did.
An engaging introduction to contemporary debates in literary theory In the late twentieth century, the common sense approach to literature was deemed naïve. Roland Barthes proclaimed the death of the author, and Hillis Miller declared that all interpretation is theoretical. In many a literature department, graduate students spent far more time on Derrida and Foucault than on Shakespeare and Milton. Despite this, common sense approaches to literature—including the belief that literature represents reality and authorial intentions matter—have resisted theory with tenacity. As a result, argues Antoine Compagnon, theorists have gone to extremes, boxed themselves into paradoxes, and distanced others from their ideas. Eloquently assessing the accomplishments and failings of literary theory, Compagnon ultimately defends the methods and goals of a theoretical commitment tempered by the wisdom of common sense. The book is organized not by school of thought but around seven central questions: literariness, the author, the world, the reader, style, history, and value. What makes a work literature? Does fiction imitate reality? Is the reader present in the text? What constitutes style? Is the context in which a work is written important to its apprehension? Are literary values universal? As he examines how theory has wrestled these themes, Compagnon establishes not a simple middle-ground but a state of productive tension between high theory and common sense. The result is a book that will be met with both controversy and sighs of relief.
“Brings the man to life and shows his questions, ideas, and solutions to be every bit as relevant as they were in the 16th century.” —New York Journal of Books Michel de Montaigne embodies the humanist ideal—curious, measured, contemplative yet not unworldly, witty, free of prejudice, and urbane. But what does this French Renaissance philosopher have to tell us about how to think and live today? In forty short, erudite, and lively chapters written over a single summer, Antoine Compagnon seeks answers to that question. In A Summer with Montaigne, Compagnon invites his readers to join him as he strolls through Montaigne’s key contributions to our understanding of what is good and worthwhile in life. This engaging book, then, serves as both an introduction to Montaigne for readers unfamiliar with his work and a refresher for those who are already acquainted with his unique brilliance, vitality, and timeliness. Montaigne’s Essays deal with themes that remain relevant today, from the problems posed by religion, war, power, and friendship to the absurdity of our fixations and peccadillos. Accompanying readers through the Essays, Compagnon never pontificates and is never austere. Rather, he approaches Montaigne with a sense of humor, admiration, and joy. “Agreeably useful reading in any season.” —Library Journal
Marcel Proust once wrote, “There is no longer anybody, not even myself, since I cannot leave my bed, who will go along the Rue du Repos to visit the little Jewish cemetery where my grandfather, following a custom that he never understood, went for so many years to lay a stone on his parents’ grave.” Investigating the origin and significance of this statement, Antoine Compagnon offers new insight into the great author’s underappreciated Jewish side. Compagnon traces Proust’s ties to the French Jewish community, examining his relations with his mother’s successful and assimilated family, the Weils. He explores how French Jews read and responded to Proust’s masterpiece In Search of Lost Time in the 1920s and 1930s. Challenging contemporary critics who perceive self-hatred or even antisemitism in Proust’s work, Compagnon shows that many Jewish intellectuals and young Zionists admired and vigorously debated the novel, some seeing it as a source for pride in their Jewish identity. He also considers Proust’s portrayal of homosexuality and how it relates to notions of Jewishness. A work of remarkable erudition and deep research, Proust, a Jewish Way brings to light the vanished world of Proust’s first Jewish readers and shows how it can illuminate our reading of the great novelist today.
In this elegant, highly readable book, Compagnon confronts the postmodern's co-optation of the modern by tracing paradoxical elements in the aesthetic of the new - particularly the aesthetic and moral contradictions built into the enthusiasm for the new - in the "five paradoxes of modernity": the superstition of the new, the religion of the future, the mania for theory, the appeal to mass culture, and the passion for repudiation.
Cet ouvrage entend démontrer qu’une solide culture de l’écriture de l’histoire existait dans la Syrie du 2e/8e siècle, et propose de nouvelles approches méthodologiques afin d’offrir un accès vers cette historiographie perdue, tiraillée entre mémoire et oubli. En étudiant la fabrique des héros omeyyades ou des mythes d’origines abbassides, cette étude s’efforce de mettre au jour les significations successives données à l’histoire syrienne, et d’identifier les différentes strates d’écritures et de réécritures de l’histoire au cours des premiers siècles de l’islam. L’ensemble de ces éléments conduit à proposer une histoire du sens de l’espace syrien, articulée autour de la thématique du pouvoir, qui donne une profonde cohérence à la période, par-delà la césure dynastique de 132/750. This book intends to demonstrate that a robust culture of historical writing existed in 2nd/8th century Syria, and to offer new methodological approaches to access this now lost history, torn between memory and oblivion. By studying the making of Umayyad heroes or Abbasid origins-myths, this study aims to reveal the successive meanings granted to Syrian history, and to identify the various layers of historical writing and rewriting during the first centuries of Islam. Taken together, these elements make possible a history of the meaning of the very space of Syria, articulated around power and its expression, which grants a clear coherence to the period, extending well beyond the dynastic caesura of 132/750.
« PION DES LOCHES (Antoine-Augustin), 1770-1819. Mes campagnes (1792-1815). Notes et correspondance du colonel d'artillerie Pion des Loches, mises en ordre et publiées par Maurice Chipon et Léonce Pingaud. Paris, Firmin-Didot, 1889, in-16, XXVIII-520 p., portr., index. Vingt-neuf cahiers de notes et une correspondance avec une épouse forment la trame de ces souvenirs de Pion des Loches. Attachants mémoires, surtout sur la campagne de Russie (ch. V) qui présentent un type d'officier écartelé entre l'attrait de la gloire militaire et les plaisirs de la vie conjugale. Bonne édition critique. » p 135 - Professeur Jean Tulard, Bibliographie Critique Des Mémoires Sur Le Consulat Et L'Empire, Droz, Genève, 1971
Through the life of one extraordinary man, this biography reveals what the term human rights meant to the men and women who endured two world wars, and how this major political and intellectual movement ultimately inspired and enshrined the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. René Cassin was a man of his generation, committed to moving from war to peace through international law, and whose work won him the Nobel Peace Prize in 1968. His life crossed all the major events of the first seventy years of the twentieth century, and illustrates the hopes, aspirations, failures and achievements of an entire generation. It shows how today's human rights regimes emerged from the First World War as a pacifist response to that catastrophe and how, after 1945, human rights became a way to go beyond the dangers of absolute state sovereignty, helping to create today's European project.
Metallic quantum clusters belonging to intermediate size regime between two and few hundred of atoms, represent unique building blocks of new materials. Nonlinear optical (NLO) characteristics of liganded silver and gold quantum clusters reveal remarkable features which can be tuned by size, structure and composition. The two-photon absorption cross sections of liganded noble metal quantum clusters are several orders of magnitude larger than that of commercially-available dyes. Therefore, the fundamental photophysical understanding of those two-photon processes in liganded clusters with few metal atoms deserve special attention, in particularly in context of finding the mechanisms responsible for these properties. A broad range of state-of-the-art experimental methods to determine nonlinear optical properties (i.e. two-photon absorption, two-photon excited fluorescence and second harmonic generation) of quantum clusters are presented. The experimental setup and underlying physical concepts are described. Furthermore, the theoretical models and corresponding approaches are used allowing to explain the experimental observations and simultaneously offering the possibility to deduce the key factors necessary to design new classes of nanoclusters with large NLO properties. Additionally, selected studied cases of liganded silver and gold quantum clusters with focus on their NLO properties will be presented as promising candidates for applications in imaging techniques such as fluorescence microscopy or Second-Harmonic Generation microscopy.
The French entered the Pacific in the late 17th century, but the ocean remained largely a Spanish preserve until British navigators began to cross its vast expanse in the mid 1760s. France's concerns that Britain might establish its superiority in the area, meant they welcomed Louis de Bougainville's voyage of exploration undertaken in 1766-9. After handing over the colony he had established in the Falkland Islands to Spain, he sailed through the still relatively unknown Straits of Magellan into the poorly charted South Pacific. He made a number of discoveries in the south west, but was too late to discover Tahiti, where Samuel Wallis had preceded him by less than a year. Reports on Bougainville's reception there and on life in the island were to create wide interest and controversy in Europe. He then sailed to the Samoan Islands and on to Vanuatu, as far as the Great Barrier Reef, and north towards New Guinea and the Samoan Islands making a number of discoveries and all the while leaving his name to a number of features, the best known of which are the island of Bougainville and the Bougainvillea flower. He returned home by way of the Dutch East Indies and the Indian Ocean. Although Bougainville published an account of his voyage in 1771, his original journal was published only in 1977; the present volume makes the latter text available for the first time in English translation.
From 1973 to 1987, Volkswagen's (VW) 140,000 hectare 'pioneer' cattle ranch on the Amazon frontier laid bare the limits of capitalist development. These limits were not only economic, with the core management of a multinational company engaged in the 'integration' of an extreme world periphery, but they were also legal and ethical, with the involvement of indentured labor and massive forest burning. Its physical limits were exposed by an unpredictable ecosystem refusing to submit to VW's technological arsenal. Antoine Acker reveals how the VW ranch, a major project supported by the Brazilian military dictatorship, was planned, negotiated, and eventually undone by the intervention of internationally connected actors and events.
This impressive tome offers more than 700 illustrations to document the comprehensive restoration campaign, (the first of its kind) of this magnificant interior.
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