French Lessons: A Memoir“[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. |
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accent Alice Kaplan American André anti-Semitic asked Audio-Lingual Method Bardèche Bardèche's Bordeaux bouillabaisse Brandeis Brasillach brother cafés called Capretz Céline deconstruction desk dinner door dress Edna English eyes face fascist father feel felt fish France French class French department French in Action French language French Lessons friends Gatsby girls going guage hair heard Hindus Hindus's intellectual Italked Jewish Jews knew lake Lake Minnetonka laughed learn French letter listening literary literature live looked Louise Madame Maurice Bardèche meaning metonymy Micheline mother Mouchard Nanny Nazi never night painting Paris person Pola Negri professor Rachael Robert Brasillach sentence sister sleeping porch sound speaking story Stranger talk teacher tell thought told took trying understand verb voice walked wanted watch words writing wrote Yale Yiddish