The Word From Paris: Essays on Modern French Thinkers and Writers

by John Sturrock

Overview

An elegant guide to twentieth-century French literature and thought. The Word from Paris is a lucid and accessible guide to the literature and thought of twentieth-century France. John Sturrock ranges over the broad landscape of French writing, clarifying the various intellectual movements that have marked its recent history. In a series of definitive essays, John Sturrock discusses writers such as Proust, Celine, Sarraute and Perec; thinkers such as Foucault, Althusser, Lacan and Derrida; and that peculiarly French figure, the writer/thinker: Sartre, Camus and Barthes. He analyses such developments as Existentialism, the New Novel, Structuralism and the OuLiPo. This elegant and illuminating journey through both celebrated and sometimes relatively neglected texts is an invaluable initiation into French intellectual and literary culture this century.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781859841631
Publisher:	Verso Books
Publication date:	12/17/1999
Edition description:	Revised ed.
Pages:	224
Product dimensions:	5.25(w) x 7.38(h) x (d)

Editorial Reviews

As a bringer of the word from Paris, Sturrock modestly describes himself as a mediator. The essays gathered here amount to far more. They bridge not only twoi cultures but also two critical styles, the journalistic and the academic, in a manner that illuminates their subjects, both literary and theoretical, with a uniquely fresh and lively intelligence.”—Christopher Prendergast, Kings College, Cambridge

“For thirty years, Sturrock’s journalism has had a special role in the English-speaking world. He has brought us word of an extraordinary sequence of intellectual and artistic development taking place in Paris, and he has done so with unfailing lucidity, empathy and nuance. This collection, however, is more than an array of Sturrock’s think-pieces: it is a portrait of a metropolitan culture in bloom, a brilliantly stage-managed Parisian think-fest.”—Malcolm Bowie, Marshal Foch Professor of French Literature, Oxford

From the Publisher